Someone referred to canning factory hijinks, which made me remember (this is not QUITE on thread, but sort of) the summer between freshman and sophomore years at the U. of Minnesota, the first year I worked in the canning factory. We worked LONG hours during the season, so much so that we joked that if we didn't work twelve hours on a given day, it wasn't worth coming to work. Sixteen hours was far from unheard of. In the late season, the factory, which was not heated, got pretty durn cold come midnight or so. (Have faith; I'll get to the point presently!)

Two matters:

The "filling and closing machine" operators were considered highly privileged. They sat in a relatively good temperature spot--not too close to the steam cauldrons that cooked the filled cans, and not too far away, either, so that they didn't freeze in the chilly late-summer nights. They seemed to us to do nothing, except occasionally open a tube of can caps and insert them in the machine, and otherwise sit and watch a continuous line of open-topped cans, just filled with peas or corn, stream by them at a rate of perhaps eight cans per second and disappear into the capping machine. (I'll get to it! I promise!)

Smoking was prohibited in the plant, of course. The young bucks often couldn't wait until a break, so they would light up, and keep looking around lest the foreman come up unobserved. If (and when) they saw the foreman approaching--you guessed it!--"psshht!" and the cigarette would be in a rapidly moving can and capped up and gone, and on its way to the cooking cauldrons!

I just wonder how many consumers later identified what that strange inclusion was in their creamed corn. (See, I did get to the point on that one!)

Second memory from the canning factory that year:

That year was a TERRIBLE year for corn borers and a black growth called "smut". The foremen kidnapped every person they possibly could from other jobs around the factory to sit on one of the two block-long moving rubber-belt inspection tables with a big knife to grab ears from the inspection, cut out bad spots, throw them back on the table, grab another, and so on. This is lousy, wet work (because the corn had just been washed, the cold water was always running off the belt in your lap. I should say, "my lap", because I was one of the kidnappees. After you'd been doing this for say twelve to fourteen hours a day for four or five days, we trimmers got weary, slowed down, and not surprisingly, a larger proportion of the smutty or borer-infested ears got by the dozens and dozens of chilled hands and weary eyes.

In a better season, about half of the newly washed, inspected, and trimmed corn would have gone to the whole-kernel corn cutters, and half to the cream-style cutters, which cut just the tips of the kernels off and scrapers would scrape the whole length of the cob to get all the insides loose, all of which dropped down into augers under the cutters for transport to the blenders and filler machines.

The corn was so bad that season that ALL the corn was too bad for whole kernel corn, so all of the corn was destined for creamed corn, where the consumer wouldn't find any identifiable remaining borers or smut.

Now I'm getting to the second point. Remember, this was in 1950. You'll see how that's relevant in a moment.

At lunch time I talked to a girl I knew who worked feeding ears of corn into the cream-style cutters. We talked about the terrible condition of the corn, full of corn borers even after inspection and trimming, and she told me:

"I'm a Catholic, and I'll never be able to eat cream-style corn on Fridays any more!

Dave Oesterreich