“The din was so terrific that the boys’ ears ached from it, but they
were too busy gawking to mind. The plant was one great seemingly
unbounded room, with steel rafters from which traveling cranes were
suspended. At one end of the room, the end which they were passing,
were the embryos of more than a dozen different types of farm
implements—the bare unpainted chasis of threshers, combines, mowers,
balers, and so on—drawn up in the manner of animals beginning a race.
(And indeed the men who worked upon them were racing.) Perhaps fifty
feet away was a parallel line, and here the embryos were a little
easier to identify for what they were, or would be. And beyond that was
a third line, and a fourth, and a tenth, each advancing the growth of
the implement by a step or two until it was finished.
     The last line was so far away that the men
were mere specks—bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be
a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues.
    Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained,
and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not
explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after
a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years.”

—Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder, 1946.