The Machinist His Crew Would Not Leave

I am sixty-four years old, and until the second Tuesday of last month, I had never once been told I couldn’t walk onto my own shop floor.

My name is Wilbert Grothe. My wife Wilma and I built Grothe Machine and Tool out past Kettle Bend, Wisconsin, on eleven acres my father used to farm before his knees gave out and he turned the old machine shed into a repair garage. I have poured concrete, wired panels, hired and buried and hired again, and for thirty-nine years I never doubted for one hour who that shop belonged to.

Then my son stood in the middle of it and told eleven men I couldn’t come back until I apologized to his wife.

This is the whole story, not the part I can fit in a caption. It ends the way I never expected, and it isn’t a lawyer or a filing cabinet that settled it. It was the crew.

What Wilma and I Built

My father ran a one-bay garage that fixed hay balers and manure spreaders for half the township. When his knees finally quit in 1979, he handed me a wrench, a leaking roof, and a stack of unpaid invoices, and told me I was smarter than he’d ever given me credit for and now I’d have to prove it.

Wilma was nineteen when I married her, working the counter at the feed store in town, the kind of woman who could add a column of numbers in her head faster than I could find the calculator. She quit the feed store the week we married and started keeping my books at the kitchen table, by lamplight, because we couldn’t afford to run the shop lights past six.

We turned that one-bay garage into a real machine shop by saying yes to every job nobody else in the county wanted. Custom shafts for the co-op creamery when their supplier in the Cities couldn’t turn one around in under six weeks. Precision brackets for an implement dealer two counties over. A run of parts for a canning line that kept half of Kettle Bend employed through three bad winters.

We were the shop that stayed open through the ice storm of 1991, running a generator off a borrowed tractor so a canning line forty miles away wouldn’t lose a week of production. We were the shop that opened on a Sunday afternoon once, without charging a dime extra, because a dairy farmer’s manure spreader seized up the day before his vet was due and he had forty head depending on it. Word travels slow in a county like ours and it travels for a long time. Twenty years later, men were still bringing us work because their fathers had told them about the Sunday the machine shop opened its doors for nothing.