To the last drop
Mar 31, 2009 2:19 PM, By Jeff Ryan
Cresco came awfully close to declaring martial law this winter. At least, some residents felt that wouldn't have been the worst course of action under the circumstances.
Turns out there was a serious water problem. Both water towers went dry. You know what no water in my community means? It means there wasn’t a key component of the life-sustaining beverage that fuels a certain executive within my organization.
No water means no coffee at the coffee shop! The usual gathering spot for the retiree crowd shut down for one day, because they couldn't make food and they couldn’t wash dishes.
If you think old guys are crotchety WITH coffee, you oughta see ’em without it! Not pretty. Not pretty at all. They were jonesing so bad that they ended up going to a tea house for their gathering. A tea house. Retired farmers all sitting around sipping from dainty cups with their pinkies held out (except for those who had ’em whacked off in an auger, or a circular saw, or a fan belt, or some other farm accident. In this case, no pinky gets you an automatic waver waiver.)
The Chairman has been going to town for coffee for about as long as I’ve been out of college, maybe even longer. It has gotten to the point where he will hit three different towns for coffee in a single day sometimes. Each one has a certain schedule and a certain crowd that shows up at a given time. When I asked one time if he ever ran into a certain guy at coffee, the response was, “No, he’s second shift.” The implication was that anyone who shows up late is less of a person — beyond lazy.
And what do all of these old guys do when they gather each day? Gossip like a bunch of church women! Guy No. 1 and I always get a kick out of how much information The Chairman comes home with, and how inaccurate it eventually turns out to be. When the guys behind the Power Platform came to Cresco a few years ago to look at the Ranch Hand, they wanted to meet me in town for breakfast. We ended up going to The Chairman's hangout. That’s when I saw firsthand how loud it is and roughly how old the average attendee actually is. Out of the 10 to 20 guys who were there, there may have been three good sets of ears. Those three sets were spread across at least five individuals. There was so much squealing from hearing aids being adjusted that dogs had to be barking for miles.
So what do they cover in their discussions? Everything. You will hear how much someone paid per acre to rent a farm; how much someone else paid to buy a farm; who has their corn planted/sprayed/combined/sold so far and who doesn’t; what the weather is going to be like the next three days; which businesses want to come to town and build a building; who's building a new house; whose kid got into trouble over the weekend; who’s driving a new car and what kind of deal they got on it; and most importantly, who’s either really sick or dead and why.
Wouldn’t most of those things be considered personal information? Of course they would. But in rural America, if it’s known, it’s out there.
My all-time favorite description of this phenomenon came from a local businessman. He had a farm and fed cattle. He also owned a car dealership. He owned a bank at one time. He also sold livestock trailers for one of Cresco’s major trailer manufacturers. He was diverse.
Arnie was feeding a lot of cattle in the 1970s. So were we, but not nearly on the same scale as he was. I’d see him in the sale barn when I was there with our order buyer getting some more cattle for the feedlot. Keep in mind, I was about 9 or 10 years old at the time. Even so, Arnie always treated me with tremendous respect and talked to me like an adult. He was sitting not far away when one group of steers came into the ring in Decorah one day and LeRoy, our buyer, didn’t bid on them. The guy in the sale ring asked why and LeRoy said, pointing at me, “I’m working for him and he didn’t want ’em.”
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