Nostalgia

I'm a sucker for the movie, Dazed and Confused. I have to watch it every time it comes on. I knew every one of those people in high school. I was probably a cross between Slater, the stoner, and Tony, the nerd character but with a big belt buckle, cowboy boots, and a western shirt (hey, it was rural Utah, after all).

The mood and feel of the film captures my high school experience, perfectly. The soundtrack was certainly my soundtrack at that time, although I would have thrown in a bit more Black Sabbath and BTO.

Is there a film that takes you back like this?

And as long as I'm being nostalgic, Bill's mention of sugar beets at Kos the other day sent chills down my spine. I hate the sugar beet. I despise it with a passion that is as intense as it is irrational.

Sugar beets were the bane of my childhood. They played as big a role in my life as Mormonism. Every day of my summers was spent either thinning them, weeding them, or irrigating them. Even today, 30 years later, Bill's mention of them churned my stomach.

It was worse for my parents' generation. They thinned beets with a short handled hoe. Migrant workers called it El Cortito, "the short one," and Ceasar Chavez eventually got it banned because of the way it destroyed those who used it. My parents generation also had to harvest the beets by hand, using a beet knife, a machete type tool with a spike on the end. The spike was used to pull the beet out of the mud, and the machete to top the beet, cutting the greens from the tuber. The high school shut down for two weeks this time of year so the students could help with the harvest.

I spent the summer, fall, and winter of my senior year working the graveyard shift at the Mormon-church-owned U and I Sugar plant in Garland, Ut. It was dangerous work. In the summer, I cleaned the bins, by undermining huge columns of hardened sugar with a pickaxe in 100+ degree heat. Once I undermined the columns enough that the sugar began to fall, I had to scramble out of a tiny hatchway to avoid being buried and crushed. I'm not exaggerating the danger involved. Two people were killed doing that job in the decade I did it.

My job was safer during the sugar campaign in the fall and winter. I stacked bags of sugar in the warehouse and loades them onto train cars. I also cleaned up contaminated sugar that leaked from torn bags or was used to clean up the oil leaking from company's ancient fleet of forklifts and trucks. I'd haul it back to the front of the process, 500 lbs at a time in a wheelburrow. There, I'd melt it down with a steam hose and it'd be reprocessed. One night, a pallet I was standing on, broke, I fell and the steam hosed nailed me, giving me first and second degree burns over half of my body. It was a good thing I was stoned.

Still that job was safer that the one a couple of my friends had. They were spinners. They reached into centrifuges with stainless steel paddles ensuring that the sugar was spun correctly. A lot of people lost their hands, fingers, or thumbs doing it, but at $4/hour it paid better than any other job at the plant. It was so hot and draining, they were only allowed to work a half hour at a time. It was a half hour on and a half hour off. The heat and danger drove them a little nuts. They got their kicks spitting chew and peeing into the centrifuges. Their tales put me off sugar for quite awhile.

The plant is closed now and sugar beets are no longer grown in the Bear River Valley. I think that's a good thing.



This looks like the same bagging machinery we used in the Seventies. It also looks like the same room. I bet the picture was taken at the Garland plant.