The people that passed through the City Club were always interesting. A particular “roomer” for a year or two was named Victor Toniello. With a name like that, he had to be Italian. He was built like your local pizza shop owner. Short. Rotund. Happy.
There were nights that we would open our apartment to him and he would cook up a spagetti entree with some special sauce. His offerings were spectacular and without calories.
Victor wasn’t exactly surrounded by good looking “chicks” but he had some Greek friends in Sheboygan. They had a cousin, Maria, living in Greece that wanted to get to the United States. Victor married her sight unseen. Maria was also a little rotund and happy. They did have one child Tony that became good friends with brother Jerry Lee.
Now to my story. Maria would work at the local Stokely Canning Company in the summer. She would operate the machines that placed peas into a can from a hopper and then capped the can off. Her job was to make sure that peas maintained a constant flow into the cans. Since peas were always flowing into the hopper, the job was mostly visual checks to make sure peas were dropping properly. It got a little more tricky as a batch of peas would be ending. She would climb to the top of the hopper and push peas down that “were hanging” up on the sides of the hopper. At the bottom of the hopper was a slicer gate that was extremely sharp. You guessed it. Maria got her index finger down too low in the hopper and the finger got sliced off at the second knuckle.
Because it was a noisy environment, it took a minute or two before anybody could hear Maria scream. By the time people realized what happened, several thousand cans of peas had been processed. One of those cans contained a finger.
Stokely as a matter of normal procedure immediately cooked the peas in pressure cookers after canning. By the time they analyzed the accident, Stokely decided that even the potential cans that held the severed finger would be cooked. So at least the consumer that purchased the can containing the finger couldn’t be harmed by bacteria. Then they opened thousands of cans of peas and never found the finger.
My story is that some poor, unsuspecting domestic Goddess like Debs would open the can and freak out (or breakout into an uncontrollable laughter). If Stokely had been responsible, they would have isolated all production from that day and disposed of it. I really don’t know what they did.
This was the 50’s. McDonalds and Wendy’s didn’t exist. Litigation was not a prevalant as it is today. Concern was about health, not money.
Maria was a sweet lady. She recovered. She had trouble pointing out directions after that (I couldn’t resist that).
Somebody literally might have had “finger food” for dinner.
I keep trying to make this blog a “teaching”. I guess my teaching here is “keep your fingers out of places they shouldn’t be”.
Love,
Dad