Confederate Sharpshooter

I have been looking forward to sharing this story with everyone, as it is one of my all time favorites to tell. The reason it is one of my favorites is that it tells how things were in my South growing up, without all of the distortions brought on by special interest groups and political correctness. I give you my word as a Southerner that these events really happened, and I am setting them forth as closely as I can recall the details from so long ago.

Mr. Ralph had worked in my father’s machine shop since long before I was born. My earliest memories of him were in the old shop, a tiny, wood framed building with a hard concrete floor, stained permanently black from decades of grease and oil drippings from the massive WWI and WWII surplus lathes and milling machines that filled every inch of space. Mr. Ralph started out as a more or less janitor, as he could neither read nor write, and had no machine shop skills. But we lucked out and got a contract with a local company (the same one we moved punch presses for in http://confederatesharpshooter.blogspot.com/2009/01/lessons-from-my-dad.html ) that involved heat treating small parts for production. It involved more heavy lifting than skill, and Mr. Ralph had a new job title: Case Hardening Technician. He was ecstatic. I don’t ever remember going into the back room where the gas-fired furnaces were blazing the ceramic and boiler iron pots into cherry red glory without seeing Mr. Ralph with a face-splitting grin on his face. When he saw me, that grin would get even bigger, and show the missing and worn teeth, as he’d spit tobacco juice into a paper cup and greet me with an enthusiastic “ChaLEE boy, we’s gettin’ it done TO-day.” I didn’t know it at the time, but elsewhere in my state, about this time, students in a nearby city were doing something called a ‘sit in’ to protest a whites only policy at a lunch counter at a major drugstore chain. I wouldn’t have understood it if I had known, I didn’t understand racism, for the simple reason that no one in our place practiced it. Mr. Ralph was Mr. Ralph, no more, no less. Later on, he was my boss for an all too brief period of time, as I learned how to do the work he had took such pride in for so long, but was finally getting a bit too old to continue in. Not to worry, we still had Mr. Ralph around for many good years after that- dad promoted him into the machine shop itself, where he became very skilled at any machine you’d care to name, provided it didn’t involve a great deal of math or reading.

I’ve introduced you to this excellent character from my youth in order to share this story, which even now brings a smile to the face of anyone who was there when it happened. Mr. Ralph was a good, honest, employee. Besides the ever-present chaw of Red Man Chewing Tobacco, he had only one vice in the world: he absolutely hated to see anything useful wasted or thrown away. Anything in danger of being tossed out before completely useless would find itself on the bed of Mr. Ralph’s pride and joy, a 1965 Ford F-150 pickup, powder blue and meticulously clean and polished. Remember that, please.

In addition to working in the shop, when ever school was out I’d help my grandfather on the farm. From baling hay, cutting silage, repairing equipment, there was always something to do. This particular year, dad decided it was time to clean up some of the bigger equipment, including a huge corn picker that hadn’t been moved since last season. To this end he had filled 2 empty gallon jugs with some very strong, concentrated soap. Amway degreasing concentrate, it said on the 55 gallon drum in the corner of the shop, and it warned that you needed to cut it no less than 100/1 with water just to use as a degreaser. I’m talking good stuff here. Strangely, the stuff looked dark green, much like antifreeze, and since the jugs we were using were in fact old Texaco antifreeze containers, dad put a huge paper tag on each jug with a string, marked in bold letters, “SOAP.” He then sat the jugs by the back door, so we wouldn’t forget them when we left for the day. But forget them we did, and when we looked the next day, they were not by the door, or anywhere else we looked. They were gone, vanished. We ended up filling up some new jugs and forgot about finding the old ones.

The next week, as was the custom around mid afternoon, everyone had gathered around the coke machine for a break. A couple of the hands were ‘traveling’ with the bottling plant names on the bottom of the bottles, when Mr. Ralph came in from the back door, more agitated and upset than I’d ever seen him before. He wanted to speak to me, and it was plain he didn’t really want to talk in front of the others, but he had no choice. “Cha-Lee boy, what would cause a car to foam” he asked, wringing his hands and looking quite worried. “Foam? What kind of foam?” I inquired.
“They’s foam comin’ out of de radiator of my fo’d” he explained.
“Oh, that’s nothing to worry about. It usually means you don’t have enough water in the system, and the water pump is just making bubbles. Keep adding water and it’ll quit.” End of discussion.

Mr. Ralph was back minutes later, even more agitated and upset than before. He was nearly apoplectic. “Cha-lee boy, you GOTS to come help me, my cah is FOAMING.”
“Did you keep adding water?”
“Yes, yes, you gots to come out right now, I don’t know what to do.”
“Ok” I replied, swallowed the last bit of the afternoon coke, and everyone on break followed us to the back door.

I will never forget the sight as long as I live. The parking lot, which we shared with a knitting mill next door, was big enough to park several dozen cars. Luckily, it was mostly empty. The entire lower half of the entire lot was covered- and I mean COVERED- with thick, white, glorious foam. It looked like an airport runway preparing for a crash landing. Near the pickup- which was engulfed with the suds- it was nearly two feet deep, and smoothly tapered down to flat near the corner of the lot. Instantly, I knew where our highly concentrated detergent had ended up. RALPH! YOU STOLE OUR DEGREASER!

“No, no, no Cha-lee boy, I didn’t steal nothin’. I thought ya’ll was goin’ to toss it away.”“Oh, man, wait till daddy sees this!” I laughed. Seriously, dad would have thought it pretty funny. Dad has a sense of humor about such things.
“Please, please, don’t tell Mister Don, cha-lee boy, he’d fire me for sure.” Ralph was really taking this hard.
“no, I won’t tell daddy. But it is pretty funny, you have to admit.” Ralph failed to see any humor at all in this, especially as his pride and joy was by this time being engulfed by even more foam.

As it turned out, the story had a happy ending for all concerned. We all hosed off the parking lot with water hoses, drained the radiator on the pickup, and by the time paychecks were brought downstairs from the office no evidence remained. Ralph had what had to be the cleanest pickup- inside and out- of any person in the history of automotive cleaning, and for weeks after the entire crew of the machine shop got free cokes every day during afternoon break, as soon as anyone would look over at Ralph and ask the eternal question, “what would cause a car to foam?”

Dad, of course, knew what happened. But he never let on. He thought it was as funny as the rest of us.