When I was in college I worked summers in a steel mill (at one time it was called Continental Steel, later became Penn-Dixie Steel, then reverted to the original name before going out of business) to pay for my tuition (Mom and Dad paid for the room and board--much appreciated--as I stayed at home and went to a local campus of Indiana Univesity in Kokomo, IN). It taught me many lessons--and left me with a few permanent bodily scars--but none quite like the lesson in humility I was taught by an illiterate co-worker.
About halfway through my first summer I drove to work one Friday afternoon to pick up my paycheck. Back in the day (would have been the summer of '77), they didn't have direct deposit like we do now. You had to pick up a paper copy of your check and take it to the bank to either cash or desposit it. We went into a somewhat small office where there were several lines--once you got to the front, you would sign for your check and they'd hand it over to you. As you might imagine in an organization that employed a couple thousand people, the lines were long, though it didn't take more than about ten minutes or so to get to the front. As I waited the gentleman in front of me was giving and taking some good natured banter--God only knows what I was thinking about in those days, but I was half paying attention and half daydreaming if memory serves. When I finally reached the front, I noticed that the gentleman before me had placed an "X" on his signature line. It struck me as odd, me being in college and all, that in a nation as far advanced as America, we still had people who could not even write their own name.
I worked in the day pool, where we went from department to department doing usually exceptionally menial jobs (picking up scraps of wire, cleaning toilets, tying wire around metal rods), and as fate would have it, I ended up one week in the Rod Mill doing the extremely thrilling job of sweeping (which was Sisyphean task--once you got to one end of the mill, you could look back and see as big of a mess on the floor as when you started). As I was sweeping I noticed one of the men watching over one of the machines just happened to be the gentleman I noted above who was unable to write his own name. He'd wave or nod as I pushed my broom past him, and seemed as I noticed in the pay office, a decent fellow. After my first few hours of tedium, he approached me and asked if I'd like to take a break and play some checkers with him. I was dying to take a break to do anything to take me away from my boredom, but playing checkers with an illiterate didn't sound much more enticing--how hard could it be to defeat a man at checkers who couldn't even write his own name? I reluctantly agreed.
And found I could not possibly have been more wrong. Turns out the guy was like the Bobby Fischer of checkers. At the end of the first game, I had two of his checkers, and he had all of mine with a board full of his kinged men. The next several games were no better--he was doing quadruple and quintuple jumps and I was wondering just what the hell good a college degree was going to do for a man who was getting schooled in checkers by Lenny from Of Mice and Men. As the break wore on I got slightly better--which he encouragingly pointed out when I had four (a whole four!) of his men at the end of one game. We finally and mercifully went back to work--he wanted to play later in the shift but I begged off because I had to finish sweeping. I ended up somewhere else in the department for the rest of the week, and never did see him again over the next couple of summers.
He still sticks with me, though--as a reminder that playing checkers with him was the first, though certainly not the last, time I would curse God for teaching me humility the hard way.
The End
