It was summertime in the mid 1960s, and I was standing on the loading chute with Dad. He had a small trucking business and brokered livestock for delivery to Hormel and Rath. We were watching pigs being loaded onto a truck for the trip to Waterloo. As we watched the pigs scramble up the chute and into the truck, I asked Dad how much Rath paid for a truckload of hogs.

He wouldn’t tell me. He told me I had no business asking what a load of pigs paid until I understood what a load of pigs cost. The response stung. I remember it kind of pissed me off.

The day passed, and another. Dad was a busy guy. He had seven kids, a truck line, the stockyards, a small farm, and several hired men. I often woke up at 4:30 or 5:00 to the sound of the morning markets on the radio. Dad always woke up that way. There was a chalkboard grid in Dad’s office in the stockyards. It showed price quotes for hogs from every packer within shipping distance of Hampton, Iowa. Back then there were a bunch of them. It was updated every morning before Dad started buying hogs.

I figured Dad had forgotten my question, but I had not forgotten his answer. It kind of stuck in my craw.

Several days later, I was in the stockyards, and Dad asked me to help him with the chalkboard. It didn’t save him any time. He had to tell me what to do, but it became kind of an intermittent thing. Slowly, I started learning about the differences in pricing: live weight, dressed, grade and yield. He talked a bit about the decisions he made regarding how he paid for a given lot of hogs, whether he turned them over immediately or held them to, “Finish them up,” and the basis on which they were eventually sold.

I got sent out to feed trucks filling bunkers with instructions to bring their tickets back to the office. I started seeing the lists. The lists seemed endless. Dad didn’t do double-entry accounting. He had forgone high school when his family needed him on the farm in the late 1930s. There were no net present value equations or formal return on investment calculations, but the journal lists were immense: dates, time, receipts, expenditures, notes on details to remember.

In the absence of computers and a formal accounting system all of these transactions needed to be compiled and categorized periodically. I became scribe. Dad read off dates, categories, and numbers. I recorded them all on a pad of neatly ruled columns.

This went on over the course of two or three years. It was only in hindsight that I realized I was doing more than chores.

You know something? Dad never did tell me what a load of pigs paid. When it was all said and done, I no longer cared. I had gotten something much more valuable. I understood what a load of pigs cost.