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My second real job where they took out taxes and social security was at the Cattleman Auction Company, which today is closed, and is across the road from the largest weed factory in Missouri.
Lionel Lear paid me on the books, and fifty cents more than the two dollar minimum.
It was a brand new sale barn, where buyers walked above us boys below in the manure and sweat and the occasional danger of a rodeo bull being auctioned off to the Hormel Meat Company as a cutter and canner.
Those old men up there on that skywalk would declare how lazy kids were today, they couldn’t hire help, and with all the long hair those days you couldn’t tell a boy from a girl, anyhow.
The auctioneer’s wife was a glamorous ornament , keeping the tallies and issuing tickets to the front office, and she had a daughter who worked the cafe.
She’d come out on the skywalk and ask if I was hungry and thirsty and I’d say Yes Ma’am and before long her long legged brunette daughter would brush past those old men with hungry eyes, to deliver me a double cheeseburger, fries and big Pepsi, which cost $1.25, in her high heels and short skirt, right across that cow shit and noise and stink.
I’d hand her two dollars and say keep the change, and she’d smile and wait for me, until the last load left the barn.
I’d look up at those old men and tip my Stetson, and wait for the next time the back door opened, doing things they only could dimly, barely remember.
Sometimes the auctioneers wife would key the microphone and say
Fire in the hole, boys, fire in the hole.
Get the buyers behind the rails.
And I’d grip my stick and wait for some old rodeo bull to come out the back door looking for trouble.
Up there on the rails above the auctioneer’s wife, was always watching.
I never forgot, the thrill of being young.
The kids today are doing the same.
Not all of them, but most of them.
Old men have been wrong about the kids for thousands of years, and counting.
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