Trapped in a freezer!

Back in the '60's--- 1963, I think, I worked one summer at an un-named (you'll see why later) dairy in Dallas, TX., in Oak Cliff. It wasn't a wonderful job, but it gave me a little spending money. I didn't own a car, so my Mom took me to work and brought me home at night, when my shift ended. I worked in the 'quick freeze' room, which was an auditorium-sized room where ice cream and popsicles entered the room on steel rollers through tiny holes in walls that were, to my the best of my memory, something like four feet thick. Ice cream, in cartons wrapped with brown paper, came in from the plant where it was frozen rock hard in a very short period of time. The turbine-forced wind whipped through the freezer like a Arctic gale, and the temperature was kept way, way below zero. I don't want to exaggerate this part, and my memory may be faulty, but if memory serves me correctly, the temperature was somewhere between 25 and 40 below zero. We had to wear special suits and masks and goggles, along with huge, thick gloves. We could only work for about 40 minutes at a time until we had to leave the freezer to warm up outside. When inside the freezer, our eyelashes iced up from the condensation due to breathing. The hair in our nostrils (I know..this is GROSS!) were like little ice picks and tore at the insides of our noses. All in all it was miserable work.

I worked with some pretty 'raw-around-the-edges' men, and it was not uncommon to see men standing on top of a 15-ft. high mountain of stacked packages of frozen ice cream, relieving themselves rather than taking the time to go outside in the summer heat, while cocooned in the heavy insulated suits, to take care of 'business'. It was disgusting to see urine, frozen solid in mid-air, fall to the floor and break like glass icicles all over the floor, and on the brown paper wrappers that enclosed the cartons of ice cream.

It was bitter cold in the freezer, with the wind howling ferociously, and snow falling from the moisture emanating from the multiple steel rollers laden with hot ice cream entering the quick-freeze room. The very hot ice cream gave off moisture due to the pasteurizing process in the plant. The moisture made large quantities of blinding snow. The effect, I imagine, was rather like being at the North Pole in the winter! Our job was that of stacking the packages of ice cream that, only minutes before, had entered the room at a very hot temperature and was now frozen solid in this 'quick-freeze' room. We stacked the ice cream, in these brown paper packages, about 15 feet high and four feet wide, making 'stairs' as we worked our way up to the top of each row. We would leave enough room from one stack to the next, to allow a man to walk between the rows to shovel snow and pick up the occasional broken packages of ice cream containers. We scooped it all up-- snow, broken packages of ice cream, popsicles, fudgesicles, dixie cups--and, yes, even the 'yellow ice' and unceremoniously tossed all of it into 55 gallon drums, for disposal.

One night, near the end of my shift, I lost track of time and failed to leave with the other men. I headed to the door, to leave for the evening, and found it locked...from the outside. I began pounding on the door, but the doors were massively thick. No one could hear me! The thought occurred to me that I could die right there among the frozen treats! Realizing that no one was coming for me and that one could not live long in the freezer, I did the only thing that made sense to me. I climbed up on the steel rollers at the other end of the freezer -- (the steel rollers that continued out the other side of the huge freezer--- rollers that were used to run the packaged ice cream through the four-foot thick walls and into the 18-wheelers docked there for the loading of the ice cream for distribution to stores in the area). As I tried to enter the small opening into the wall with my heavy clothing and parka, I realized that I could not fit into the opening in the wall. (For the smart alecks among you, you need to know that I only weighed 145 pounds back then! I know what you're thinking). I decided to do something that I thought was the only thing I could do. I took off the heavy suit and parka--my protection against unbelievable cold and wind-- and scooted face down up the steel rollers toward the tiny door in the wall. I knew that this door was only about one foot in thickness, but that it was likely also locked. I looked around for something to use to pound on the door when I scooted up the steel rollers through the four feet to the tiny door. There was nothing. You can't pound very hard with popsicles and ice cream cartons! I then planned to pound on the door with my hands, hoping that someone would be outside and would hear me and get help. I pounded for a long time, and could tell that I was rapidly succumbing to hypothermia. I had never been so cold in my life and my skin was sticking to the steel rollers. Thinking that I had made a mistake, I tried to back down the steel rollers but could not --- I was stuck inside the narrow chamber! Great! Now I was in a real pickle! I couldn't go forward and couldn't back down into the main part of the freezer. I couldn't move to try to keep warm, and with my heavy clothing and parka left behind, I knew I would die quickly.

I began pounding on the tiny door again, knowing that if I could not get someone to hear me, that I would be dead in minutes. Finally, after having almost given up on the idea of a rescue, I heard noises around the little door in front of my face. My Mom, sitting in the parking lot in her 1962 Biscayne Chevrolet, had been asking people in the parking lots if they had seen me. No one had. Mom paced back and forth outside the exit door from the freezer and as she walked by the area where the little doors were located, she heard a faint sound. She heard me pounding on the door. Mom got someone from inside the plant to come out and open the locked door and when the little door was unlocked and opened, there I was, my frozen face staring up at them!

Men opened up the freezer room and pulled me back down the steel rollers and I was saved! The same Mom who had given me life in 1944, gave me life again when I was 19!

A few more minutes of that cold, with the incredible gale-force of forced air sucking the heat out of me would have killed me in a few more minutes. When the men rescued me from the freezer, I was so cold I could barely move. I fully expected parts to start falling off of my body! I recovered from the places where my skin had frozen to the steel rollers, and did not care for ice cream and other frozen treats for a long, long time.

Even today, when I see someone enjoying a frozen treat, I will think back to that hot summer, when I almost became a blond-headed popsicle! My ordeal gave a whole new meaning to the term "freezer burn". Words and phrases such as giving someone a 'cold shoulder' or an 'icy stare',...or 'frozen in time'...or, the overused 'freeze, mister!'...all have a different meaning for me now...and those, my friends, are just the cold, hard facts!

Be cool! ---Gene :)