Salt of the Earth
One of my relatives had a small farm where he and his wife raised a few cows and pigs. He was so selfish and tight that he squeaked when he walked. He would make a penny stretch beyond what was legal. I was told that he often wore a heavy coat when he went shopping, coming home with more than he paid for. Supposedly he didn’t purchase the salt and sugar necessary to process the hams when it came time to butcher the hogs.
Tricksters at Frick Hospital in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania would play the old switcheroo with salt and sugar on the night shift. In the cafeteria they would unscrew the tops of the salt and sugar containers, so that when another person would to use it, most of the contents were dumped onto their meal or into their coffee. Another trick was to exchange the contents so the salt was sugar and vice-versa. It became so bad that the cafeteria employees had to collect and store the salt and sugar containers in the evening. The night shift had to deal with the consequences of having no salt or sugar.
The story that actually started me down the salt trail occurred when television advertisers used a disclaimer saying that shredded wheat was salt free. It was a time that physicians said that too much salt wasn’t good for people with high blood pressure. My dad Carl Beck thought that the shredded wheat company REMOVED the salt from their cereal. He stubbornly claimed it didn’t taste the same and would add salt to his shredded wheat before eating it for breakfast. Even though we tried to explain that salt was never in the cereal’s recipe, he was adamant about the taste and determined to add the salt for flavor.
The final link in my salty story is that I was a corpsman in the United States Navy during the Vietnam Era. Although I was never “in country,” I took care of many of the injured men when they returned to the States. My “sea duty” was Iceland. In the four years that I served, I was never on a ship. I did often go fishing on an eighteen foot fishing boat and Navy sailors are called “old salts,” so technically I could be called an old salt even though I was never at sea until I actually rode a ship from Newfoundland along the coast of Labrador much later in life.