JOBS

I awakened thinking about jobs I have had during my life. I have not actually been working now for several weeks due to my illness so I have created a new job that I am now doing. I am monitoring old TV series now shown on TV Land network. One show in particular is the Andy Griffith show. As many of you did I grew up watching this show weekly. I have watched thirty or more of the old reruns and discovered something I must have missed while watching this show growing up. There was evidently a time when Andy did not have a deputy? It must have happened after Barney left the show and the new deputy came on board. I have watched several shows lately with no deputy and they have used Goober, Floyd, Howard and other characters more to take up the slack. I have noted several other interesting points about the show that I will try to share later. One thing I will share with you is the target audience for these shows. It seems to be immobile senior adults. The scooter store is the main sponsor along with life alert. Not sure I am ready for this group but it's all a part of my new job.

Now to talk about jobs I have held in my lifetime. I believe that God puts us in situations or jobs that help build us into the people we become as we grow older. The experience of each job contributes to our ability to do the job that is really the one we are called to do. So I count each experience or job as a great benefit to my skills and ability. I will list the jobs as best I can in the order they occurred.

1. Landscape worker: When I was about nine years old I began mowing yards. My dad furnished a lawn boy mower and I entered this business with my uncle. My uncle Duane was the foreman or director of our business. I think because he was older (he was 10) and he had a yazoo mower. Many of you may not even know what a yazoo mower is but it was a heavy duty all steel red lawn mower. Sometimes the mowers were trimmed in yellow. They were manufactured in Yazoo City, Mississippi. They were purchased by those who were serious about mowing and a homeowner would feel very confident if the lawn mowing service had a yazoo. My little lawn boy was more of a finesse mower but did hold up well. Duane as the boss would go to the door to inquire about mowing the yard. I would stay hidden until the transaction was done. We did pretty well as we probably were paid $5 to $10 per yard. We had to push our mower from job to job or maybe ride our bike and pull it by hand. We had no weed eaters, edgers, etc. It was all handwork, no riding equipment, no self propelled etc. The biggest thrill about this job was the cold Mountain Dew you could buy for 5 cents after completing your work. Duane was a good boss and we both worked hard and earned a lot of money for nine or ten year olds.

2. Miscellaneous jobs: All boys my age worked at one time or another hauling hay and that type of summer work. One of the more interesting jobs I had was cleaning bricks. A local man bought an old brick building and wanted to use the old bricks to build a new house. The bricks were caked with mortar that had to be cleaned off. The method used was nails driven through a 2 x 12 board and each cleaner was given a board. We would scrape the bricks across the bed of nails (horrible sound and felt like scratching a blackboard) in order to clean the bricks. We were paid by the brick (about one penny each) so you had to really work to make 50 cents an hour. This job helped after school and Saturdays to earn some extra money.

3. Turkey Catcher: In my teen years, many farms grew turkeys outdoors on the range. We were hired to catch two big Tom Turkeys at a time and hold them by their wing joints and present the breast area to the technicians who blood tested, vaccinated and gave each bird a pill for Cholera. These birds weighed twenty to twenty five pounds each. We also did the same for hens (much smaller) at a later time. This job was a lot of fun after a heavy rain when you had to tromp through mud and manure all day in the heat to do this job. Don't remember what we were paid but it was not enough.

4. One Hour Martinizing: I did janitorial work for a dry cleaner along with waiting on customers after school and even closing the store each evening. I was only around thirteen or fourteen when I received this job. One of the highlights is that a few evenings a week I got to work with older teenage girls. About this time my hormones were in high gear and I did everything possible to steal a kiss from these girls. They finally got tired of my antics and allowed me an occasional kiss, for which I am ever grateful. I think I made 70 cents per hour and worked there for a couple of years.

5. Farm laborer: I began working for Tyson Foods the summer of my sixteenth year. The first day was pretty cool in that we (my good friend Jim Shepherd) and I were allowed to ride horses and round of cattle for vaccination and other medical procedures. I thought we were in heaven. Reality set in a few days later though when we had to haul hay in the daytime. We were paid $1.10 an your as I recall with no overtime, so you really earned your money. Later our real job we were hired for began. We shoveled manure from research houses and worked for a colorful pair of guys. Our foreman was named Glen and his asst. Junior. These guys liked to drive to Tontitown every afternoon and buy some really cheap beer and wine. They would drink all afternoon while Jim and I worked. We shoveled all types of manure including liquid manure from caged layers (really great experience). We also did some fun jobs such as bush hogging various Tyson farms, drove trucks and had a variety of jobs that taught us both how to do many different types of farm work that helped us later in life as we both ended up working in the poultry business.

6. Newspaper proof boy: I began working at the local newspaper running proofs of ads out to all the advertisers to check for errors prior to publication. After the ad ran I would deliver tear sheets (copies of the ads) to the stores to post on windows etc. This was a great job as I got to drive my car (paid me mileage) and run around all over town. This was a lot of freedom and paid me pretty good for a Junior in high school. I kept this job until I graduated from high school.

7. Newspaper Ad Sales: After high school I began calling on customers for the newspapers and was paid a salary plus commission. I was pretty good at this and made some good money at the same time. I was making such good money at an early age that I really did not see any value in attending college. This of course was a mistake but it was my choice. I continued in the newspaper work for several years.

8. Director of Advertising/Sales Promotion for Sears Roebuck: I was hired by the big Sears store in the new Northwest Arkansas Mall to manage all the advertising/marketing for the store. This was a pretty good position. My boss was a guy named Ken Perkin and I owe him a debt of gratitude for teaching me all he did. I worked at this job for about five years when Sears started down sizing and doing away with our positions.

9. Farm Manager: I was hired with no experience to manage a primary breeder farm for Tyson. I owe this job to the fact that I had worked summers in high school for Tyson on the research farms and that my dad worked for Tyson. Dad was in charge of all hatcheries for Tyson, so this opened the door for my. I was twenty-five years old and suddenly managing a fourteen hundred acre farm with sixty chicken houses, a hatchery and about fifty hard nosed mountain folks. Most of the folks were related so when you made one made you had all of them mad at you. My boss was a guy named Ed Rice. Ed was probably the greatest boss I ever had. He would spend hours teaching me about poultry science, husbandry, genetics, how to manage people, etc. I actually became pretty good at this job after a year or so. After seven years I had peaked in this position and Leland Tollett the president of Tyson called with a new challenge.

10. Director of rendering: What in the world is rendering I wondered? I had never heard of this type of plant but Leland had a need for someone to manage this business for Tyson. Rendering is basically taking all the inedible parts of the chicken and cooking (removing water) and producing from this a pet food ingredient. Also we made a liquid fat for livestock feed and feather meal. The job really came down to this: You eat the best and we handled the rest. It was a dirty, stinking job but a highly profitable, capital intense business. It was the most challenging business I had ever been a part of. We had six small plants attached to processing plants. Over the next few years we closed the little plants and build one monster plant, located in Clarksville, Arkansas. I spent the next few years hiring managers, developing new managers and getting this plant built and operational. It is still operating today.

11. Director Tyson Animal Goods Group: This included the rendering business, fresh and frozen pet food ingredients, ingredients for hot dogs/specialty meat products, etc. Anything not a first line poultry product fell into our department. This job included a sales staff, operations, engineering, R&D. It was an integral part of the business at Tyson and I worked in this area until about 1996.

12. Owner/operator of True Value Hardware, Holiday Island, Arkansas: This was a job I always wanted to try. I wanted to work for myself and operate a going business. We build this new store from the ground up and started from scratch. We were doing pretty well the first few years but then 9/11 occurred and our business went into the tank. We lost all our savings in this business and it was a test that Sharon and I lived through but truly challenged us in our faith, etc. We came out with no assets but a much stronger marriage and and stronger faith and belief in God. We had many great experiences during this time that we will never forget.

13. Director of Business Development: I started over in the rendering business in 2003 with American Proteins. We located in Alabama where we stayed about sixteen months and transferred to our current home in Cumming, Georgia. I am in charge of all contracts with poultry companies for rendering services. It really is the job I was created for. I currently am unable to work due to my illness but it has been a great seven years I have spent with the folks at API. I was truly taken in and they have taken care of us. I have learned more about our business than at any time in my career.

I thank God for all the experiences I had in my lifetime. For the great people I came to know I will be forever grateful. Our work is important as it provides for our families but it also brings us into contact with many great people who help us to become who we are. We should value the jobs we have and the people we work with. Hope this was not too boring to the readers today.

Doug