Navy vessels on the Mississippi & Ohio Rivers

[Master Oil Racing Team]

When I transferred from Texas A&I University to Southwest Texas Teacher's University in 1968, my roommate and pit man,Bud Turcotte was a freshman. By the rules he was required to live in a dorm. I went to the dean of whatever department we had to go to and presented him with our "dilemma". I told him I raced boats in the Pro division and as such, we had to leave early on Friday's to get to the races, and we may be heading home Sunday evening from races 200-300 miles away. We also had to go home testing on weekends. That meant we would be getting back to the dorm at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Monday mornings. We would disturb the students as well as the Mom of the dorm. Back in those days there was no such thing as co-ed dorms and there were strict curfews...at least on the girls dorms. So the Dean Dude let Bud live with me off campus. All of our friends at first were incoming freshmen, except for Joe Rome, that had to live in the dorm.

After the racing season was over, our apartment was the hangout for the weekends. We ate out at the hamburger and pizza places, but Bud and I were both used to home cooked food. So we did a lot of home cooking at our apartment. But you know how it is with college kids. Sometimes we just wanted to get something cooked up and head out, or on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you just want something simple, quick, and easy to clean up. SPAM fit the bill for many of those meals. After one SPAM meal the conversation went to what SPAM was made of. There was a lot of discussion about it. Everyone knew that it was a conglomeration of leftover, or otherwise meat parts that couldn't be sold individually for size wise, or whatever reason. I told them I knew someone that worked at a SPAM plant and told me what it was made of and how they came up with the name.
I told them the the primary ingredients were Shin bone meat, Pig's ears, A$$holes (ends of the intestines), and Mammary glands. That made up the basic ingredients, but it also included such things as chicken lips. They knew I was full of it, but then....they weren't sure how far from the truth I was.

[Bill Van Steenwyk]

Hi Wayne:

Looks like the only thing missing from your "survival kit" is an RC Cola and a Moon Pie.

Reminds me of a friend of mine who used to travel Western Nebraska back in the late 60's. Nothing but sand hills out there, and it really gets cold in the winter. He had to travel that area that towns were 50-60 or more miles apart and absolutely no other human beings to be seen. He always carried food, sterno, blankets, extra couple gallons of gas, etc., when traveling out there in the winter, just in case of some problem, as others had frozen to death when stranded and they ran out of gas or something to eat. Guess Heat Stroke would be the problem in the area you are talking about though.

P.S. If you know the rest of the sentence (missing words) in the song by the same name in the first sentence, I'll buy the first beer next time I see you.

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

Nebraska has the same description of things here pretty much but then it is the great plains of North America so that stands to reason. Even use the same emergency kits in winter and face the same blistering heat in summer. In all this some one forgot to mention the benefits of "Everclear"!

[kws]

[QUOTE=David Weaver;67807]

The thing that spoiled that thought forever though, was I SAW WHAT THEY WERE SQUIRTING IN THE CAN RIGHT BEFORE SEALING THE LID ON. It was that awful "stuff" again, that is found in the can along with the SPAM. and it really ruined any thought I may have had of making a small contribution to the economic recovery that we are being told is so neccessary at this time. QUOTE]

Do you remeber the old saying "parts is parts"??? Your discussion reminds me of the CBS 60 Minutes piece on the Perdue Chicken Franks. By the time you got from input thru processing to finished product you would never, ever eat another "frank".

Several years ago I worked as temp help at a soybean proccessing plant during the harvest rush. We temps did a variety of jobs from unloading simis to cleaning in the plant. one of the cleaning jobs was to go down in the tunnels under the plant and scoop beans back on to the conveyers. well scoop beans and what used to be beans. soy beans rot unbelievably fast.
within a few days wet beans have turned into .... stuff that smells and looks like crap. very nasty crap. it makes hog manure smell as fresh as spring air in a pine forest in comparison. A coworker and I wanted to get out of the tunnels as fast as we could. we were afraid we would barf if we stayed down there very long. so we had worked up a pretty good sweat while shoveling this mucky CRAP onto the conveyer. a white hat came down to check on us. and gave us a lecture we might end up getting sweat on the beans and that would be unsanitary. we laughed pretty hard at that... he was serious.
I knew all along I didn't like fake food made from soybeans after that job I knew WHY I didn't like it

[John (Taylor) Gabrowski]

My sister worked as an office manager for many years at a local large beef packing and processing plant and her boyfriend was a federal meat and meat products inspector. Similarly a friend of my wife's her boyfriend was a federal inspector at another large plant that processed pork. Both men just early on in their careers suffered major weight loss. Both became near vegetarians. Neither of them would go into any store meat and meat products sections to shop and both would tell your stories that would make you hair stand on end as to what was going on in their places of inspection including the horrible sights, smells, paractices and the many implied threads of bodily harm! One lasted 10 years and the other 13 and they just had to get out of what they were doing.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

I have smelled rotting beans before too KWS, but not in that type of quantity. And you are right about the smell. You're lucky you didn't both pass out.

I don't know how many of you have ever eaten a "real" chicken fried steak, but in the days before chain restaurants, you could get a real chicken fried steak or steak fingers in just about every cafe in Texas. Then along came the chain restaurants and food service companies that stocked all cafes and restaurants with quickly cooked processed foods. That's when chicken fried steak became a preformed frozen, breaded patty made out of soybean and topped with a gruesome white chicken a$$ cream gravy. The real chicken fried steaks are starting to make a comeback now. The way a Texan will tell you if a restaurant is good usually comes in two ways. Either "They make the best hamburgers.", or "Their chicken fried steak is real."

So with that in mind, I remember a trip to the nationals at DePue. The year I think was in 1972 and the soybean fake "ground beef" boom was in full bloom. We were passing through Iowa farmland when we came upon the path of a small tornado that had passed through only recently. On the right was a trail of scoured soybeans about 50 yards wide and as far back as the field went. The tornado then crossed the road and cut a swath through very tall stalks of corn as it took the soybeans and corn ears with it off to the distance. My Dad just said "Hmmm! That was a lot of chicken fried steaks."