Corn Cob Caper
“These are just ground-up corn cobs,” I thought to myself on my first day on the job as the animal caretaker for the Department of Psychology at Old Dominion University. Part of the job was to change the litter under rat cages using what was called Sani Cell which was just really very expensive ground corn cobs.
The animal lab was an absolute mess when I took over the job. The department had not been able to find anyone capable of taking decent care of the rats. There were so many flies in the lab that the researchers had taken to competing for who could kill the most flies, keeping tally in pencil on a wall. Many water bottles on the cages had turned green, and the smell from the lab permeated the entire building. It was a problem. My farm experience made me the right man for the job. I knew it took three days for fly larva to turn into flies, so I would rotate changing the litter trays, a third of them every day. In no time I had a system that worked pretty well. After changing the litter, I would go through the animal room with a cart carrying full, clean water bottles, and a bucket of Purina Rat Chow. When a rat was low on water, I replaced its bottle with a full one. When a rat was low on food, I gave it another hand full. Soon, there were no more flies, smell, or green water bottles. The job was a work-study job that paid minimum wage for 20hrs/week but this was like doing chores and only took about an hour a day, so it paid pretty well. The real benefit was that everyone in the lab was delighted with the job I was doing, and I got a lot of mileage out of that.
In those days I usually went home to visit once a year, and before leaving one summer I asked my department chair if he would be interested in saving a bunch of money on those ground-up corn cobs. He jumped at saving 70% and said he would buy four tons. We were in business! Guy had the Remsen Bell print invoices with Guy Pick Farm Products Supply at the top so he could be paid for the cobs by the state of Virginia. When I got home, Rich had the brakes and lights fixed on our 1958 Chevy farm truck, and we extended the sides up four feet in order to hold all those cobs. We ground the cobs in the grinder mixer and Grandpa Gib Wagner brought over 320 new, empty paper feed bags and a chain stitcher from the Farmer’s Co-Op in Remsen and we filled them with 25 lbs of ground corn cobs and Gib sewed them shut.
Rich, Guy, and I have an old friend in Virginia Beach who asked if we would sell him a butchered hog, so we took one to town to Dick Hatz and brought it back in labeled packages, including hot dogs made with Uncle Sylvester’s recipe. I wanted to bring back some Well’s Blue Bunny Ice Cream too. We got a couple of flats of specialty round pints and Gary gave us a block of dried ice from the old ice cream plant in LeMars. Right before Guy and I left for Norfolk, we buried the meat and ice cream in coolers in the middle of the bagged cobs. We guessed that the dry ice would last about 72 hours. We left at midnight with every intention of driving straight through. I took the first turn at the wheel.
We must have been quite a sight going down the interstate. The color of the truck was a little hard to determine. I think it was painted red the last time, but it had faded, and a lighter previous color was showing through. My VW beetle, with a tent on the roof rack was in tow. The roof of the truck was all dented in from people standing on it to level grain. When you rolled up the windows they were all cracked, and chaff flew out the defroster when you turned on the heat. During our first few hours of daylight, we must have been in Indiana, a Cadillac slowly passed us going just barely over the speed limit. When they were coming alongside, I could not help but notice the front seat passenger, a patrician looking woman, glaring at me like I was covered with feces. I did have long hair. But just as they were passing, I saw a very cute young lady in the back seat giving us the peace sign with a smile on her face. That did much more to elevate our spirits than the glare did to bring us down.
That same afternoon the generator died when we were outside of Indianapolis. We pulled off at the next exit, and as our luck would have it, there was an auto parts store a block away. They actually had a rebuilt generator that would fit. We paid the core charge and borrowed their tools to change it. In no time we had the old generator on the counter. The parts guy picked it up and said, “It’s still hot!” We got our core charge back and we were on the road again.
I went to sleep when Guy took his turn at the wheel, only to awaken to a huge bang. “What did you hit?” I yelled at Guy. He didn’t hit anything. A rim on a back dual had blown out leaving only one tire of the pair to hold the load on that side. It was dark and we were on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. We pulled off at the next exit and stopped at the first service station we came to. It was a Gulf station owned by a deputy sheriff who employed high school kids to pump gas. There was no mechanic. The kid working that evening said we could pitch the tent beside the station and spend the night. He had a VW with a bad carburetor, and he knew where the salvage yards were where we could get a new rim. The next morning, he came back and left with Guy and the bad rim on the roof rack of my VW to find a new rim. I stayed at the station, rebuilt his carburetor, and pumped gas. I always wanted to work in a gas station. That afternoon Guy came back with a new rim. We filled up the truck, the VW, and a five-gallon gas can all for less than a dollar after the kids working there cranked back the price on the pump as low as it would go. We were on the road again.
In the wee hours of the following morning, I was driving on Pennsylvania Turnpike through the mountains mostly downhill when a bunch of new yellow school buses passed us going like a bat out of hell. This was pretty weird we thought. But then, the last one tried to run us off the road! We could not believe it. What was up with this guy? This went on for what seemed like forever with us speeding up, flying down the mountain in that old farm truck piled high with corn cobs towing a VW bug, trying to get away from him, and him trying to cut us off. It was a nightmare, but finally he just went on. God knows what that was all about.
We headed into Maryland out of the mountains into Virginia and were running low on gas. This was one of those summers with an energy crisis and a shortage of gas with many stations open only for limited hours. It was getting dark again and we had already emptied the 5-gallon gas can and siphoned all the gas out of the bug and put it into the truck when we approached Washington, DC. It was way past dark when we finally saw a station with its lights on. We were on empty. Just as we pulled in Guy saw someone with a stocking pulled over his head running out and around the station. The station had just been robbed! The attendant was very rattled and couldn’t pump any gas until the police left anyway. After about an hour with full tanks and gas can, we were on the road again
We were both awake as the sun started to come up somewhere around Hampton, Virginia when Guy asked me how much money I had. After adding up what we had between us, we concluded that we had not paid the attendant back in DC for all that gas. We turned around, drove back to that station where the same guy was still on duty and paid him. It had to be done, if for no other reason than to try to balance his view of humanity. It is an understatement to say he was surprised to see us again.
The remainder of the trip was uneventful. We got to my place in the afternoon, unloaded the packaged ham, bacon, pork chops, hot dogs, and ice cream, and got Guy a room at the dorm. The next day we unloaded the cobs at the lab, turned in the invoice, and delivered the hog and ice cream to Virginia Beach. It was time to relax a bit. Guy was on vacation after all.
Guy didn’t sit still for long, however. Soon he was working as a bouncer at the 4400 Club across the street from the university. I don’t think they really needed a bouncer, but Guy’s size would help to prevent trouble in any case. He did that for a couple of weeks while helping me out in the lab and in my VW shop which was then located between my apartment and the dorms.
One thing that I did to save money in the lab was to breed our own rats. It’s not hard. Reproduction is something that comes naturally to rats too. I had purchased some maternity cages which were fine until it was time to wean the pups. I had to put on a thick leather glove, reach into the cage to grab the mother and wrestle her out of the cage. As often as not she’d hold onto the floor which would slide out scattering pups and litter all over the place. Guy saw me do this and said, “Don’t do that, just open the door, tilt the cage up and she will come running to the top where you can grab her.” Big as life, that is what would happen every time from then on. All that corn shelling taught him something about rat behavior that is not in any textbook.
Guy seemed to be having a very good time in Norfolk. He got another job working security for a Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young concert at Forman Field on campus. It seemed like Guy had found a new home when Dad called and asked me to tell Guy that they needed the truck. It was time to go home. We loaded it with all kinds of goodies from Norfolk, and Guy was on the road again.
