Frankly Speaking: Caravans of workers begin days early, end late

They start lining up at the pumps at the local highwayside gas 'n' grocery just after sunup.

They're in their vehicles pickups, vans, Suburbans, Jeeps, dump trucks, winch trucks, crane trucks, trucks with ladders, trucks with flatbed trailers laden with tools, and extra-long flatbeds loaded with giant rolls of hay or bulldozers, backhoes and other ponderous machinery.

It's almost a caravan, there are so many of them.

They're farmers, stockmen, roofers, framers, mechanics, masons, carpenters, plumbers, excavators, laborers and you name it. They do all kinds of things, to earn their daily bread. They're the men who were once called in this country "workingmen."

The workingmen are lean from lots of hard work, most of them. Many have a permanent outdoor squint, the one that Clint Eastwood parlayed into millions, but theirs are real. And in the summers they're sun-reddened and brown and even leaner. Of course, they're not all lean; you can tell the ones who REALLY like their beer at the end of the day.

They pump their gas or diesel fuel and come inside to pay and pour steaming coffee into styrofoam cups, pick up a doughnut or two or a roll or a few or ask for an order of biscuits and gravy. The gravy is Tennessee Pride, I believe, and pretty good, with chunks of real sausage. I mean, it's tasty. They might pick up some Red Man to chew or some smokeless tobacco it comes in flavors now, you know and some buy sandwiches and snacks for lunch, along with a bottle or two of pop.

They like hats, these men straw hats, cowboy hats, and ball caps of all kinds with insignias and logos attesting to the things they love or just find interesting.

The owner knows so many of them so well he can tease them about just about anything, even their wives and girlfriends. "Donna let you out of the house today?" he'll say, ringing up the sale. (He's the fastest man alive on the cash register.)

They laugh. It's not the worst way to start the day.

He can be irascible, too, the owner, like the day a dozen or so roofers walked into the store and tracked tar across his brand new tile floor. He turned scarlet and yelled, "Would you do that in your mother's house? Never mind. Obviously you would. Get out and don't come back until you learn some manners."

We have to cut him some slack there. Did you ever try removing tar from a tile floor?

Back in the days when I was eking out a semblance of a living writing freelance, I liked to go up to the highwayside gas 'n' grocery to do a little writing. I'd try to buy enough coffee to justify my presence and write, think, and observe.

It's a place where, because of the people who come and go you can't help feeling grounded in reality, which is a good place to be when trying to write truth. The curse of being a writer, you know, is the brain's tendency to sail off on flights of fancy, or, at worst, pure baloney.

Naturally, I got to know some of the workingmen. They're a friendly sort, and almost to a man blessed with what I think of as a Midwestern sense of humor. Ozarkers, I find, have a real healthy skepticism that gives them a deliciously dry wit. One of my favorite examples is when a friend years back was discussing with a local the fact that hill girls in the Ozarks used to marry as young as 13, and the Ozarker said, "Yes, but that was before malls."

The men who work with their hands, who earn their bread with hard physical labor, often get a bad rap. They get called "rednecks" or "goat ropers" or other pejoratives, and along with it go assumptions of bigotry and ignorance. It's plain old stereotyping.

For that matter, men period have taken a bad rap for quite a while in this country.

We had a couple of decades of real male-bashing in the popular press, film, and television. It's eased off now, I think. Well, I hope.

There is of course this thing about stereotyping. Just as folks in this part of the country were all once thought by the urban "enlightened" to be barefoot indolent hillbilly ignoramuses, and that was never true, so it's never been true that the workingmen were the worst of us.

And all the time this great social change has been taking place, with the accession of women into fields of endeavor they were unfairly denied in the first place, the crops have had to be grown, the foundations set, the bricks laid, the walls raised, and the roof placed.

And all the while it wasn't fashionable to be male in America, the workingmen, well ... they just kept on doing the job.

(Frank Shipe is the Inside Business editor.)