A modern scrapyard in action. Who wants a chance to operate the crane, pick up a few junked cars, and toss them into the car crusher? I do.
In this post on my other blog, I wrote about how my dad got me a go-kart for free, back in about 1978. It started when my dad bought some junk in a corner of the factory floor at work. It was a factory in Plymouth, Ohio, called Plymouth locomotive works, and they made... you guessed it... locomotives. But they didn't make the huge locomotives you see pulling freight trains, or Amtrak trains. Plymouth made custom locomotives, for special purposes. They made locomotives to work in mines, like this one. They made locomotives for narrow gauge tracks, or switching at switch yards, like this one. My dad, Tom Emig, was a design engineer there from 1976 to 1980, and designed parts of and occasionally whole locomotives.
One day the owners walked through the factory, and got pissed off at the random parts, scrap metal, and junk lying around the shop floor. So a memo was typed up, and people who worked there could buy the unused stuff, and do what they wanted with it. My dad offered the shop foreman $15 for a small pile of junk in one, little offset corner. It was a few boxes and some scrap metal, so the foreman, told my dad, "Deal, get it out of here in a couple of days."
My dad brought the junk home, and unloaded it in our basement, with my help. I was about 12 at the time. We first sorted out the scrap metal. There was maybe 250 or 300 pounds of steel pieces, and some pieces of copper and aluminum. The next weekend, I helped my dad load it up in the trunk of his car, and went with him to a junkyard/scrapyard near Mansfield, Ohio. I'd never been to the scrapyard side of the place before. We had to drive the car over a big truck scale on the way in. My dad got a paper, with the car's loaded weight, from a guy standing just past the scale. He asked my dad what kind of metal we had, and my dad told him. The guy said, "Take the copper over there," pointing to a small building, across the piles of scrap metal, broken cars, and other metal junk. "then take the aluminum over there, and the steel over there." The guy pointed to the other places.
So my dad drove down the dirt trail to the first little building, pulled the copper out, and a guy weighed it. Then we drove to the aluminum building. I helped my dad pull the aluminum pieces out, put them in a container, and another guy weighed those. He wrote down the weight of the aluminum, and wrote it on my dad's paper. Then we drove to the steel unloading spot, and my dad and the guy pulled the big steel sheets out, and tossed them on the pile.
Then we drove slowly back up towards the office, and the truck scale. There were a couple of pickup trucks ahead of us as we got to the scale. My dad got a weird smile, and reached into his pocket. He pulled some change out of a rubber coin purse, and said, "Go get yourself a Coke." That was in a day long before Big Gulps, and we didn't get Cokes, or any pop, as we called soda in Ohio, very often. So I grabbed the change, and walked up to the office. There was a real scary, junkyard dog just inside the office door, and it growled a little as I walked in. The dog scared me, but somebody told it to shut up, and it put it's head back down on the dog bed it was laying on.
I went to the Coke machine, it was the old kind where there was a tall, skinny door on one side. I put 35 cents into the machine, then opened the door, and pulled a 16 ounce glass bottle out of the machine, by grabbing the cap end and pulling. There was a bottle opener on the front of the machine, and I popped the cap off of the bottle, and started drinking my Coke, keeping a close eye on the mean dog.
A couple minutes later, dad walked into the office. He handed the lady behind the counter his piece of paper. On it was the weight of the copper we unloaded, the weight of the aluminum, and the beginning and ending car weight. The lady figured out how much total weight we unloaded, then subtracted the weight of the copper and aluminum. The remaining weight was the weight of the steel we unloaded. The woman figured it out, told my dad the rates they paid for each metal, and his total payment for the metal. I looked around the cluttered, dingy office, and the evil junkyard dog caught my eye, and growled again.
My dad got a little over $45 for the scrap metal, more than three times for the junk from the corner at work. He was happy, he still had a bunch of bolts, nuts, and machine parts he could sell for more money. Ultimately, he got me a go kart in trade, as well. He took the cash from the lady, and some change. Dad walked over to the Coke machine, and bought himself a Coke. He sat down in an old, battered, wooden chair, right next to the mean dog. The dog looked up suspiciously at dad. He looked down at the dog, and said, "Oh, what's the matter?" and started scratching the mean junkyard dog behind the ears. The dog loved it. Dad took a sip of his Coke, and I sat down beside him, away from the dog.
Dad scratched the mean dog, and joked with a couple people in the office for a few minutes. Then he stood up, "OK, let's go," he told me. The damn dog growled at me again as I walked by it. We got in the car outside, and headed out the main gate, and he got that funny smile again. "How much to you weigh?" he asked me. "About 110 pounds," I replied, "Why?" Dad smiled, "I just sold you for scrap steel." I was confused. He said, "think about it."
I realized that by having me get out of the car before the car was weighed the second time, my 110 pounds was subtracted from the total weight, which meant he got paid my weight, for another 110 pounds of scrap steel. I told dad how he did it, and we both laughed. Suddenly I was his accomplice in getting one over on the scrapyard, so we both were smiling. "How much did you get paid for me?" Dad said, "11 cents a 100 pounds." "So about 12 cents," I figured. "Dad laughed, "You're worth 12 cents... as scrap steel." We got another good laugh out of it.
Then it dawned on me, "You gave me 35 cents for the Coke, so you lost money selling me." Dad said, "Hmmm... I would have bought you a Coke anyway, you helped me out today." And we drove home. When we got in the house, my mom was in the kitchen, as usual. "Dad sold me for scrap steel!" I said with a big smile. Mom didn't get it, and dad had to explain the whole thing to her.
"Now we know, Steve's worth... about 12 cents." She wasn't happy. Dad came out in the living room, where I was, and we wondered if there was any other way to sell me, and what I might be worth.
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