The “old days”: Good, bad or just old?

by David Benjamin

“Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Mayer./ That is what I’d truly like to be,/ ’Cause if I was an Oscar Mayer wiener,/ Everyone would be in love with me.” 

―The Oscar Mayer Wiener Song

MADISON, Wis. — Every paycheck I got during my employment at the Waunakee Canning Company identified the payer of my wages as “Teeny Weeny Peas.” This was incongruous but even then, at age16, I valued incongruity. I spent two summers in Waunakee. among a cast that included some of my high school friends, a crew of Mexican farmworkers, and kids from other schools whose names we never sought but to whom we attached aliases like “Love Eyes,” “Paul Revere” “Nutsy” and “Shithead.”

Among the cannery gang was my wingman Dick, beside whom I fielded six-pound ten-ounce cans of “teeny weeny peas,” stacking them twelve feet high onto forklift pallets. In my last Waunakee summer, Dick forsook me for a better gig at the Gardner Baking Co. Instead of wrangling cans of peas, succotash and creamed corn, he bathed all day in the fluffy fragrance of warm bread and fresh brown buns. 

One year, Schuster and Keener, two of my other sidekicks, scored Madison’s plum summer job, at the immense Oscar Mayer meatpackery on the north side, where the going rate was double the minimum wage and you ended an eight-hour shift with $6.40 more than you could take home from Waunakee. They both made big bucks at Oscar’s but their wealth came with drawbacks…

Schuster, a high-school wrestler with flagrant muscles, got platooned to the “bone car.” For eight hours a day, he heaved the denuded skeletons of butchered steers—skulls and ribs, bloody shoulders, slimy shanks and slippery vertebrae—into icy boxcars. Meanwhile, Keener, at Oscar’s, almost lost a thumb while operating a bologna slicer. He spent weeks with his hand sutured to his tummy, while skin grafted from a thigh bonded to his thumb. 

In rare free hours between shifts at Gardner’s, Waunakee or Oscar’s, we oft regrouped at Paisan’s, a pizzeria that had divined the secret for keeping the middle of the crust from going soupy from sauce. It’s also one of the few locations in the Midwest that will put shrimp on your pizza (teamed ideally with green olives). 

I bring all this up because the City of Madison just ordered Paisan’s to close through no fault of its pizza, sauce or hygiene. Paisan’s nowadays is unluckily housed in a shaky building on East Wilson that’s been condemned, uncondemned and then, this week, recondemned. The structure is doomed and Paisan’s future is once more tenuous. And I’m worried. Among all those institutions that helped to landmark my adolescence, only Paisan’s remains. 

The cannery years ago succumbed to suburban subdivision. Gardner’s no longer perfumes a stretch of East Washington Avenue with the ambience of bread, rolls and muffins hot from huge ovens. Oscar’s, whose own smell—of blood, gore, offal and manure—once suffused its neighborhood like a pall of depressed property values, is shuttered, hollowed and odorless, its sole remnant a benignly priapic “wienermobile” occasionally visible at local festivals and Fourth of July parades. 

The lost haunts of a bygone youth, like Gardner’s, Oscar’s and Teeny Weeny Peas all harken to what conservatives revere as”simpler times” and “good old days.” But how good were they and how much better than current days? I earned at the cannery a meager $1.40 an hour, piling two, three or four shifts together—without overtime pay—working sometimes in an exhausted daze, because this was the money that had to get me through school in the fall and winter. These were not the lazy, hazy, crazy days of beachboy summer. They were a grinding ordeal, three months of tedious gruntwork in a sweltering sweatshop. 

And those days? They weren’t noticeably simple.

From kindergarten on, Dick and I, Schuster and Keener, and all our peers, lived with the Cold War certainty of dying before we reached thirty years old beneath a rain of hydrogen bombs, or—before we reached twenty—in Vietnam. 

Yes, there was “good” in those days, much of it of our own making—the drive to the cannery and back home, full of fellowship, conversation and laughter, and hopes for a rainstorm that would shut down “the line.” There was Paisan’s. There were school dances. There were, if we had the nerve, girls.

Other things changed. Treaties were signed, the nuclear threat abated. We dated girls. Even the war in Vietnam finally petered out. We were all still alive—although 60,000 other boys had been fed through the meatgrinder, their names etched on a black wall in D.C.

I got to thinking about good-old-days mythology while reading Andrew Hussey’s Paris: A Secret History, which recounts the squalor and misery, fire and bloodshed, pogroms, plagues and plunder that are the legacy of the “City of Light,” beneath which the bones of six million nameless paupers are stacked like firewood, and from which Nazis, with the help of French patriots, shipped 70,000 children off to slaughter. 

I thought about men I knew who had come home from war. An old man in my hometown, Tomah, afflicted all his life by what we now call PTSD, who hid in a hovel, shuffled mute and ragged once weekly to buy groceries, alone and ungreeted, a figure so frightening that kids crossed the street when we saw him coming. There was Al, who’d lost an arm but exuded an infectious gratitude for life because he had only lost an arm. I knew Bob, a World War II GI who had one day marched into a death camp, breathed the stench from stacked corpses and serried ovens, who would not—could not—speak of that place, who dreaded to close his eyes at night lest he behold again what he had seen that day, forty years before.

Things have changed. Those camps today are fields. Some are museums. Some are grassy suburbs, where the residents don’t want to be reminded. 

For certain Germans, those were good old days. For whites in the South, the time of lynch mobs and “strange fruit”—hey, good times! It was a good old day when Emmitt Till was murdered for smiling at a white woman, and just as good when Medgar Evers, shot in his driveway, died in front of his children. 

In Tomah, where I was a kid, there’s a stream called Council Creek. In my boyhood, it ran past the creamery, which spewed all its waste into the water. A mile downstream, the town dump straddled Council Creek, discoloring it with flotsam that clogged its course and seepages that made the surface belch and fart. The creamery closed decades ago, taking away the good old days of ultra-fresh butter and the milkman’s daily rounds, but rescuing the creek from its regular ingestion of dairy dreck. The dump has disappeared. Council Creek now flows through the green banks of a city park, its transparent water glinting in the sunlight. 

Things change. Paisan’s moves. Wars end. New wars start. Old days thought good were also days when—as Michael Lesy recounts in his startling history, Wisconsin Death Trip—whole families died over the winter from diphtheria, madwomen prowled villages and typhus was everyone’s co-pilot. There were old days, not discernibly good, when America had ten years of Depression followed by five years of unspeakable carnage from North Africa to Normandy to Saipan. 

And then there was Korea, whose only vestige of nostalgia is Radar O’Reilly. 

The “good” in the good old days is the saving grace that—if they didn’t kill us—we made the best of them, got through in one piece and faced the future with a resolve to make better the days we have left. 

There are no good old days, no simpler times, not for everyone, not long for anyone, because a lucky kid gets hired at Oscar’s but ends up in the bone car. There are no good old days because things change. They’re just days. There are more to come, we hope. Any good that comes of these yet-to-come days will be our doing.