“So I says to him, buy a gross of the JPL300’s. They’re blowin’ up and no one knows why. Well, you can bet that when they started to go we were the only shop within 100 miles that had a stock of those.” With a few well placed huh’s and no-kidding’s and oh-man’s, Ron Phillips, the 79-year old owner of the farm that had been in his family for 3 generations and who used to be a door-to-door TV repairman in the 60’s could have continued with his stories for hours.
We were staying on his property for a night in Pattersonville, NY. He had a pull-off for us near the road. As we stood in between our car and the camper, and as the sun slanted low in the sky igniting his crops – soy, corn, rye – with that golden hour light, he continued on about TV tubes and scopes.
“I says to him ‘Where’s the box?’, ‘What box?’ he says, I says, ‘The box the scope came in.’ ‘Oh, right here’ he says and plops the box down. I grab the scope, put it in the box, run back to the Mohawk Valley, grab a new scope and back to his shop and lickety-split he’s back in business. And what does he have as I’m leaving, but a nice big order for me.”
‘Huh,’ I say.
I started him off and running by asking him if he had a grease gun I could use for the trailer hitch. It had been creaking and banging for a couple days. Loudly. He helped me out and we pumped a boat load of grease into the pin block of my hitch. To pay him back I felt obliged to let him rattle on about his glory days as a traveling salesman. He could have gone on until the cows came home. AND, in fact, he did! Erma, his wife, came out at 9pm to give us a tour of the milking operation in the barn. They are a working dairy farm (Dellavale Farms) and sell milk to Cabot. We had, actually, a very enlightening education and first hand view of how to milk 46 cows almost simultaneously. One daughter and one grand-daughter were moving quickly amongst the beasts. Holsteins are huge! They make 100 lbs of milk A DAY! Plumbing and air hoses were everywhere, huge vats for pasteurizing the warm milk, buckets, and cobwebs and flies and low ceilings. And a slightly funky smell…just slightly (look closely at the picture below).
After the tour we laughed with Erma about how we knew all about her daughter’s wedding and her own 70th surprise birthday party…thanks to her husband.
We pulled out the next morning pleased with the idea that we had a deeper understanding of working class America, and that we could put a face – actually a whole family – to a jug of milk or a block of cheese now. So easy to just throw stuff in the cart and care less about who makes it, where it comes from or how it’s produced and created.
We balled the jack through the Susquehanna Valley, into Albany, and hit the Mass Pike in the early afternoon. I felt proud crossing into Massachusetts! What a road trip.
