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Health & Fitness

What We Called 'The Man Killer'

A straight bar can be a best friend on the job. But it can take it out of you, too!

There was device on the farm that was as fearsome as the bucksaw that I told you about last time. It was known on the farm as, “The Man-Killer.”

It really was just a heavy, straight wrecking bar about five feet long that weighed about 20 pounds. It differed from “The Boy-Killer” only in that it was larger and heavier. If something needed to be torn apart, or if there was a hole that needed to be dug through sandstone, there was nothing like it to get the job done. But lifting it repeatedly … well, that’s how it got its name.

A wrecking bar is also commonly used as a lever over a fulcrum block. The principle of a fulcrum is fascinating. Someone once told me, “Give me a long enough bar and I can move the world.” Well, almost.

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The fulcrum is one of the best friends of the farmer or construction worker if he understands it adequately. The use of a lever over a pivot block enables you to lift or move a mass proportional to the length of the lever and the position of the pivot. There are virtually no limits if the correct proportions are used.

A lever is not a tool of ignorance. As a matter of fact, I think “unskilled or “skilled” labor should be defined by the noodle applied, not by the task performed. By thinking out a move, many farmers and construction workers have lifted beams or stones of thousands of pounds into place without the aid of a helper other than a lever and a pivot block. There is also great satisfaction in overcoming the effects of gravity on mass by using your head.

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One Pitman farm alumnus tells the story that several years after leaving the farm, when he was working on a construction site, the foreman came up to him one day and said, “I like to hire people like you—people too lazy to work hard. You have to make a living just like everybody else, but you’re too lazy to work like everybody else, so you’ll always come up with a faster, easier way to do things.” After he got over the shock of the foreman’s bluntness, he took it as a compliment. The ability to do that, he said, he owes to the old farmer. And to the Man-Killer.

This article was condensed from the new local history book, The Last of the Prune Pickers: A Pre-Silicon Valley Story, by Tim Stanley. It is available on line at www.2timothypublishing.com

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