The Egg Cracker.
There was a small town near where I lived as a kid. About five times as large as the village we lived in, the town had things like a fulltime cop, a bakery and even a taxi cab or two. Believe it or not, they still had grocery delivery too!
It was a factory town, full of factory workers and the small outlets that serviced them. On a warm, humid day the smell of the starch in the air was overwhelming. I could even smell it from our front yard, fifteen miles away.
Inside a large factory there are lots of little jobs that must be performed. In the production of mayonnaise someone has to crack the eggs, for instance. Now they probably use machines of some sort but back in the sixties people did it. One of them, a friend of a girlfriend, could manage four at a time, two in each hand, cracking them with a rocking motion, boing, boing, perfected over many hours. She was a large woman, facial hair and big boned, but she was nonetheless very nice, pleasant and friendly. In the cruel world of the factory town, though, she was made to feel like an outsider.
Her sister, much larger without the hair, sewed pockets on shirts in a nearby town. Sewing pockets on shirts was piecework and she did very well at it. The actual figures per day, as in how many pockets she sewed on, escape me but I remember at the time of hearing them I was astounded. Although she was a very large woman, her hands were nimble and quick. She was also an extremely wonderful person, if you took the time to speak to her.
Their main vice, as far as I could tell, was fudge. They had all these different types, Divinity was one I remember, simply because I always forgot and called it virginity fudge. We would make batches of fudge and talk, a small number of people made very large by two of the group. The laughter and fun hasn't been forgotten by me.
The town had other different people in it also. One man was called the mustard man as he had the recipe for the mustard that was mixed in the factory. His position was not unlike the elephant keeper in the circus, as the smell of the mustard he mixed seemed to have seeped into his skin. They didn't call him the mustard man because he made mustard, but because he smelled like mustard all the time.
A company town or a factory town, has lots of schedules and lots of time for meetings and visits when shifts do or don't coincide. The mustard man's shift ended early one day before his wife's and her visitor's shift began. The mustard man's world ended with a gun on his front door step when he discovered the world inside his home had already ended in his own bed. His wife and her visitor were not harmed. I suppose someone else makes the mustard now.