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A Bent Fork

FROM
Break Out: Finding Freedom
When You Don't Quite Fit The Mold
James R. Hasse

"Comform and be dull."
J. Frank Dobie

I didn't appreciate its significance at the time. I thought it was hokey, so I threw it into the dump one day with yellowed notebooks, old TIME magazines and broken pencils as I cleaned my home office in a fit of tidiness. It was old, crude and falling apart - a relic of the past. But, now - several months later - I wish I had kept it.

It was a four-by-eight wooden plaque which had been on my office wall at Wisconsin Dairies for 13 years. A cheap dinner fork, flattened at the tip of the handle and attached to the plaque by a single rivet, rested horizontally across the piece of wood without a pin for its tine end.

The handle, on the other hand, was bent into a bow-like configuration and abruptly popped out of the plaque. Below the fork, a golden rectangular plate, glued crooked onto the wood, read, "Dunn's Supper Club, Clayton, Wis, October, 1981."

Eight of us sat around the table that night, emotionally drained from long days of preparation but excited about the merger plans we were going to present to the employees and members of the Clayton plant the next day.

I had ordered steak and immediately began to carve the meat into small pieces so I could chew and swallow them without choking - a fear I always had in the back of my mind.

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