Everything That Happened

to me and sometimes to other people

Category: Working

Bridge shoes

By

On October 5, 2019

In Family, Working

“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, ironworking is the 7th most dangerous job there is. Exposing individuals to unique workplace hazards and dangers, working as an ironworker requires special protection and gear to guarantee an injury-free shift. So, whether you’re just starting out on your new ironworking job or if you’ve been navigating those steep steel structures for a while now, an optimal work outfit is something you shouldn’t take for granted.” – advice verbatim, courtesy of purposefulfootwear.com

Thorogood 6″ Steel Safety Toe boot, courtesy theunionbootpro.com

“Some folks calls it a sling blade, I call it a kaiser blade.” Some folks call them ironworker boots, my family calls them bridge shoes. They are a must to get work as an apprentice in the Ironworkers Union. Similar to the way my brother got a foothold as an apprentice in the Operating Engineers Union, then over the years advanced to tower crane operator, my mother has asked a favor from one of her business connections at the Newark Athletic Club, and now I have my foot in the door.

Ironworkers looking for work come to the union hiring hall to “shape up”, that is, register as available to go to work. Once the union sends them out on a job, they usually stay on that job until the project is done. Depending on experience and skill, an ironworker might install a fence around a parking lot, or link the steel framework of a bridge or high-rise.

My brother tells me that as a would-be apprentice it’s a good idea to show up at the hall at 6:30 to register, hang around and be seen. He also says, “If they ask you if you’re okay with heights, tell them the truth.” I nod, but later I wonder, What is the truth? I think I’m okay with heights, but do I really know? I climbed that rope in school and wrote my name on the gymnasium ceiling, does that count? I’ve climbed a few ladders and trees, and tarred the railing-free roof of a four-story apartment house, what about those?

At the hall, I hand over a piece of paper introducing me, if that’s the correct word, as a candidate for apprenticeship, and I sign the job register. Seeing that many guys are here already, most looking like they’re settled in for a long wait with coffee and newspapers, I hope there are enough jobs to go around. It turns out there are not; only two guys get sent out today, to a short-term job installing fencing.

I go to the hall every morning for two weeks, but nothing happens for me, or for most of the other guys there. “The nation is in an economic lull”, somebody says, so bad timing on my part. I put my bridge shoes away in case I get a shot at another semi-dangerous, high-paying  job one day. Still not knowing for sure if I’m okay with heights, I turn to the classifieds. Here’s one, “Lunch Truck”.

At the office/assembly line/factory of the lunch truck company, I am given a short tour. On site, they brew gallons of coffee, make and wrap tasty sandwiches, and package Danish pastry and other single-serving sweets. Everything is scrupulously clean, and the ladies wear hairnets to keep it that way. It’s about one o’clock in the afternoon, and there’s just enough time to ride along on one truck’s last circuit of the day. It’s a standard sort of truck, with two swing-out back doors to serve customers when they walk up. Ten-gallon coffee jugs are attached to the inside walls, along with racks of edibles.

Our first stop is a small electronics-assembly plant in Short Hills. The ladies here also sport hairnets, but most of these ladies are young, in their twenties or not much beyond. They’ve apparently been looking for a distraction, they seem very excited about the lunch truck’s arrival. Some of them tuck their hairnets into a pocket before coming outside. They are all smiles and giggles, and a bit flirty when buying their coffee. When we get back to the office I am told if I want the job it’s mine, and to come in at six in the morning tomorrow.

For the next morning’s training run I go out on a different truck with a different driver. This is not the suburban, Short Hills lunch truck route; it’s an industrial area of Newark. Our first stop is at a loading dock on McCarter Highway. We arrive, the customers line up, and we’re in business.

The plastic coffee lids are thin and shallow; they require careful fitting to the cardboard cup. I’m a bit nervous, and after serving a few customers, when I push the lid down over one cup to get a tight seal, I press too hard. The lid gives way, and my thumb goes into the coffee. My customer asks, “Hey, motherfucker, you washing your hands in my coffee?” I don’t know what to do except say I’m sorry and that it’s my first day on the job, and I pick up a new lid and close the cup properly. Of course the right thing to do would have been to start all over with a fresh, unthumbed cup of coffee, but that doesn’t occur to me. It doesn’t occur to my customer either – apparently satisfied by the apology and explanation, he takes his coffee, pays and leaves. This is the only specific event I remember from my first day on the lunch truck. The rest of the day goes better, but food service  is not for me.

The next morning the phone rings at about 6:15 and my mother answers. She wakes me up and tells me the lunch truck outfit is on the phone, they are wondering where I am. Here I pull a dirty trick; instead of coming to the phone, I tell her to tell them I’m not coming in any more. She does, but she is not happy. Remember, this is the woman who made me write a letter of resignation when I quit a job delivering newspapers.

Still trying to avoid going back into the supermarkets, I take a clerk job at a small liquor store near the Lido Theater in Orange. It pays above minimum wage, so that’s something. I get to carry cases of wine, soda and beer upstairs from the cellar, which smells of breakage that happened before I was born. Part of the job is making deliveries using the owner’s personal car, a new and peppy Oldsmobile. There’s more or less a test; he goes out with me on the first few deliveries to make sure I’m a safe and responsible driver. He doesn’t seem to worry about the car after that. I make sure to give it some exercise whenever I can.

Not the same store, but similar. Note cellar door in sidewalk. Courtesy James and Karla Murray Photography, jamesandkarlamurray.blogspot.com

My boss is impressed – I can pull four soda bottles out of the shipping case and put them on the cooler shelf in one motion. Who said setting up bowling pins was not a transferable skill?

I sometimes get tips, but that benefit is more theoretical than real – I deliver mostly to sad drunks in rundown apartment buildings; my clientele need that tip money for their next bottle.

Between the dank cellar and the sad apartments, I decide I don’t want this job anymore, and give my notice. I need some fresh air. What about the army? I hear you can retire with a pension after twenty years.

Conservation

By

On September 9, 2019

In Family, Health, Working

Courtesy filtercorp

When I worked at the Foodland in Elizabeth, there was a Greek lunch counter across the street; I was there at least once a day. I don’t normally pay that much attention to how things are cooked, but the tub, or container, or whatever you call it, of hot oil for French fries was right in front of me, and I noticed the oil got a little darker each day, then started over fresh on Fridays.

They used that fresh Friday oil all week, that’s why it kept getting darker. After a week, they used it to cook their Friday fish special. When I told my wife about this, she said “That’s disgusting.” I couldn’t say, I never ordered the fish special.

6,350,400 cans of beer on the wall…

By

On September 3, 2019

In Family, History, NYC, NYPD, School, Working

My mother had connections with New Jersey politicians and businessmen through her position at the Newark Athletic Club. Among them were the officers of People’s Express Trucking, and she got me a summer job with People’s the year I turned 17. Once, she had thought she might get me an appointment to West Point through the same connections, but that dream disappeared when I started screwing up in high school.

As background, problems at Schlitz’s Milwaukee brewery have impacted production, and the company is shipping, by rail, a few million empty beer cans for filling. The role of People’s Express is to get the cans off the freight cars, onto trailer trucks, and then to the local brewery. My role, and that of several other youths, is to do the actual work.

International Harvester, Cars-from-UK.com

The first day, we meet with our crew chief at the People’s Express offices on Raymond Boulevard. Three of us will drive an International Harvester pickup truck daily to the railroad yards in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the others will drive in with the crew chief in his car. I volunteer to drive the truck,  I’ve had my license for almost three months now, I like driving and have lots of confidence. (I was unaware that by law one must be 18 to drive in New York City, the issue never came up.)

The Williamsburg rail yards are about 15 miles away: across the Jersey swamplands, through the Holland Tunnel, across lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg Bridge, then on through Brooklyn to the yards.

Red and green together mean yellow

Traffic lights in Manhattan come in two colors , red and green. If the red comes on during a green, that’s the same as a yellow, act accordingly. The system worked fine; I don’t know why they changed it.

The Williamsburg bridge is old and narrow, it was built for horse-and-buggy traffic. It’s difficult to drive through the tighter spots without scraping a running-board; I do that about once a week.

On the return trip to Newark, the traffic is generally worse.

Canal Street across Manhattan is always stop and go;, when it’s bad we seem to tie for speed with the pedestrians. One day we are neck-and-neck with a gorgeous woman walking with a man, they get ahead, we get ahead, as we breathe teenage sighs and make comments among ourselves about her ass. Uh-oh, he’s heard us! He walks up to the passenger window. What if he has a knife?!  He speaks… “Would you boys like to fock her?” Relieved, we explain that no, we have to get back to Newark.

One day we are stuck inside the Holland tunnel for so long that we unzip and piss into the vents along the curb.

In the rail yards, freight cars are jockeyed around to align their center doors with our work platform. There are 48 empty 12-ounce Schlitz cans in each cardboard case. After we build a pallet of 35 cases (seven tiers, five cases per tier, 3 x 2 then 2 x 3, alternating), we use a pallet jack to get it into a trailer, 28 pallets per trailer; lather, rinse, repeat, it isn’t rocket science. I think we filled about three trailers a day.

Not beer, but you get the idea

We fall into a routine; on our morning break we have grape soda and pastries or pie. At lunch, we buy sandwiches and more grape soda, or beer, then sit on the end of an East River dock to look over at the Manhattan skyline or watch what floats by. A visitor from England once said about the East River, “All you Americans seem to do is defecate, fornicate, and eat oranges.” I would have said bananas.

We are sometimes drunk. The college guy has a ‘bit’ he does, I guess it’s a fraternity thing. He stands in the middle of Kent Avenue, drops his pants, and shouts “I KNOW ABOUT THAT, LADY, BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS?” Near the end of the summer he falls out of a freight car and breaks his arm.

Our truck has an on-the-floor gear shift, nothing new to me, but I’ve been using it wrong. Believing it’s a standard H pattern, I think I am shifting 1-2-3, 1-2-3 like normal people do, when actually I’ve been shifting 2-3-4, 2-3-4 for two weeks. So far, I’ve never needed reverse. One day they send me to get something at the hardware store. I park behind someone, and when I try to back up to leave, what is reverse for normal H people is actually low-low for me, and I keep creeping up on the car ahead. I finally go back inside and ask for help. The guy behind the counter comes out to show me, and I learn that I also have to push the stick down at the same time to get over and down to R. Ohh, I say, thanks! When I get back to the yards no one is the wiser.

We work six days a week and when the loadings seem to get behind, we are asked to come in on a Sunday. People’s Express manager Mr. Bruno drives up in his top-of-the-line baby-blue Cadillac to help us, parking  next to our platform. He’s wearing sandals and some sort of crotchless wrap-around terry loincloth, and that is all. Every time he bends over,  his nuts hang out. Two NYPD officers arrive, they see Mr. Bruno’s outfit and look at one another. They are here on a blue-law complaint, non-emergency labor is not allowed on Sunday. Mr. Bruno tries to talk them out of it, but oddly enough gets no respect; we pick up and go home.

We finally run out of empty cans, but there is still some summer left. People’s is nice enough to transfer the crew to the Continental Can Company, which I guess is some sort of sister company that shares directors with People’s. Continental Can, whose logo of three nested C’s can be found everywhere, is located in Paterson, New Jersey. Here, we are introduced to the Steam Jenny.

Part 2: My summer of Jenny

Modern pressure cleaner, used. Courtesy Auctions International

 

A 1950s-era steam jenny burns kerosene to boil water to make steam to clean dirty trucks and whatever else. It’s dangerous, and if you don’t get burned by steam, or knocked off your ladder by the nozzle kickback, it might blow up because you neglected some element of its care and feeding. Attention, attention must be paid to such a machine; this is drummed into our heads over and over by a wizened yard worker who seems genuinely afraid of the thing. Jeez, we get it, enough! Maybe he’s seen some steam-jenny carnage in his day.

We train by using the jenny to blast steam up and down the sides of a particularly dirty trailer; we use a housepainter’s ladder to get on top and clean there too. The company finds enough jenny work for us to last out the summer; we are careful, and somehow we survive.

From Google, top answer to steam jenny safety tips

People also ask

Can a pressure washer cut your finger off?

Because he received near immediate treatment at the emergency room he was able to keep his index finger, although some of its function was lost. It doesn’t matter if the fluid is water, grease or paint – all can cause permanent damage and even amputation when injected at high pressure.

Through the summer, we have been paid as grown men; we even get  time-and-a-half for overtime. Those paychecks spoil me for going back to school: why return to pointless boredom when I can be earning money instead? I don’t attend school very much during my senior year, and I drop out towards the end. I do stop in to pick up my yearbook, though, and years later I have an observant visitor who wonders why no one ever signed it. That’s a long story, I say.

The One Where I Get Fired

By

On August 31, 2019

In Theft, Working

But first let me tell you about some other things that happened at the first Foodland I worked at.

The three chain owners and their wives, sometimes just the wives, stop by occasionally on a Sunday to watch the money roll in. Perhaps one of the wives has read tips on “how to reach your customers” in a business magazine, for she has decided the store needs a suggestion box, and it should be where the checkout lines form. After the box is installed for a week, the wives are eager to learn what their customers think would make for a better Foodland. When the instigating wife opens the box, there’s not much inside, but the first thing she pulls out is a torn-out page of notebook paper upon which is scrawled “THIS STORE SUCKS”. The woman has probably lived a life free of criticism or adversity, she is genuinely hurt . She worries aloud, “What’s wronggg with our stoooore? What’s wronggg with our stoooore?”, and seems ready to start a witch hunt among the employees until her husband settles her down. Shortly thereafter, the box is gone.

As bookkeeper, I’m in charge when the regular management is off. I have an arrangement with the manager of the movie house across the street. I let him place a placard for his latest movie in the store window; he gives me free movie passes. He talks me into loosely putting a bumper sticker for the latest movie on my car. He takes a photo so his management can know he’s on the ball, then unsticks it. The process feels oddly demeaning, and I don’t let it happen again.

One week, perhaps due to cashflow problems, the employees don’t get paychecks, instead we get vouchers that can only be cashed in the store. This is not well-explained to the butchers, who usually cash their checks at Marino’s bar across the street. Mr. Marino cashes the vouchers as though they were checks, and they all bounce. He comes into the store  waving the dishonored vouchers; he’s in a rage, he thinks Foodland is broke and he’s just been burned for several hundred dollars. When I see what’s happened, I explain and he calms down. I tally up the vouchers and give him the cash; he is a happy man.

(That part about Foodland being broke may not have been too farfetched. One day I try to call home and the store phone has been disconnected. The telephone company tells me the bill hasn’t been paid for several months. I call the main office and they say there’s been some sort of a mix-up, and they take care of it.)

There is a liquor store next door. A man who’s been waiting out front for his wife beats her up because she doesn’t have enough money left over after buying the groceries.

A few days before Thanksgiving, the store is crowded with customers I have never seen before. They look needy. Each family has a $25 or $50 check from the Salvation Army. I open a checkout lane and ring some of them up. Maybe they have just come from church; I hear “God bless you” several times. They seem so sweet and grateful to be well treated and shopping in a “nice” store for a change. If you’re able to, giving to “The Sallies” is a good way to help some struggling people stay afloat.

A cashier has her brother call the office with a medical report. Me: “Hello,   Foodland.” Caller: “This is Trudy’s brother. Trudy’s on the rag, she won’t be in today.”

One spring day, two cashiers on their lunch hour decide to get some sun and perch on the top rail of the parking lot fence. Some leg is shown, and one passing car runs up the back of another. Embarrassed but flattered, they jump off and scurry back inside.

After a couple of years here, the company sends me to manage the store in West New York for two weeks, while the regular manager takes vacation. The employees are nice; the town is working-class so most of the customers are nice too. When I walk into a barber shop for a haircut, the owner is jumpy; he thinks the stranger in his chair wearing a suit and tie might be a cop. As we talk, I mention why I’m in town and he relaxes. Several men enter and leave; my barber is the local bookie.

When my stint in West New York ends, the company sends me to what I’ll call Foodland II, it’s near the first one, but bigger.

The manager of Foodland II, Gabe, is old for the supermarket business; he wears nubby sweaters and looks like a turtle. He has a scam as old as cash registers: he unlocks the door for occasional shoppers who arrive before the cashiers, then tallies their order old-style, #2 pencil on a brown paper bag, making change out of his own pocket. I think he suspects I’m on to him.

On Friday nights the store stays open until ten o’clock. I can’t leave until the store closes, and the store can’t close until all the carts are collected from the parking lot. During the evening, Gabe has the clerks doing things that can be held over until the next day. I suggest that perhaps some of them could be rounding up carts instead, so we’re not here all night. He says “No, we bring in the carts after the store closes.” I say “That’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense” and he fires me. He may have engineered the confrontation because I am on to his paper-bag scam, but I am not terribly upset; I’m tired of working here. Maybe it’s time to try something different.

Children of science

By

On August 28, 2019

In Family, Working

“When you quit school in ninth grade and you’re smart, you spend your life in some small or large way proving yourself” – George Carlin

I interviewed for a lead programmer position at IBM Research, based mainly on some helpful improvements I had made to IBM’s CP-67 operating system when I worked for Continental Insurance. Unlike Carlin, I waited until my high school senior year to drop out.

From Wikipedia, edited for length: The Yorktown Heights building, housing the headquarters of IBM Research, is a large crescent-shaped structure consisting of three levels with 40 aisles each, radiating out from the center of the crescent. Due to this construction, none of the offices have windows. The lowest level is partially underground in some areas toward the shorter side of the crescent, which also leads to the employee parking lots. A large overhang protrudes from the front entryway of the building, and faces the visitor parking lot.

I was going to start off by saying “everybody here is a self-serving jerk”. Well, of  course that’s an exaggeration, but there are very few team players in Yorktown. Most people are more interested in advancing their own career.

Thomas J. Watson Research Center

To give you an idea of the attitude at Yorktown, a local doctor visits the site twice a week to do pre-employment physicals. Arriving mid-morning, he always has difficulty finding a spot in the visitor parking lot, and as a courtesy the company installs a “DOCTOR PARKING” sign in the spot closest to the front door. The sign doesn’t improve things for the doctor; the space is always taken when he arrives. One parker, a PhD of course, when questioned responds that he is a doctor, so what’s the problem? In my imagination I see  dozens of proud PhD’s setting their alarms for four o’clock in the morning to get to that spot of honor first. The sign is removed, and a week later replaced by one that says “MEDICAL DOCTOR PARKING”.

Thomas J Watson Sr

Company rules are more relaxed here. At most IBM sites, drinking at lunch would be unthinkable.  Founder T.J. Watson had a strict no-alcohol policy, and that included drinking at home. When our small department first goes out to lunch and the waiter asks “What will you have to drink?”, all eyes go to our manager, we expect him to take the lead, we will follow. He replies “Bottle of Sam Adams, please” and now we are free to have a beer too.

The four of us on our project team usually have lunch together in one of the local restaurants. The other three are various degrees of beer snob; they drink the latest trendy or exotic brews. I usually order a Budweiser just on general principle. When the snobbiest of them mocks my choice, I say “Just because Bud is the most popular beer in the world doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.” He also sneers at the idea of playing the lottery. On my mental list of things to do when I win The Big One is send him a case of Budweiser longnecks. He’s fun to troll.

When I go to the Poughkeepsie site for a week of classes, I am steered to a nearby restaurant frequented by IBMers. I sit alone in a booth wearing my IBM badge, the wearing of which comes as naturally as wearing a wristwatch. I surprise the waitress by ordering a bottle of beer; she smiles as though she’s just seen the cutest puppy ever running around her feet. While I have my lunch, people seem to walk by just to look at me, they see an IBMer daring to have a beer during the working day. They glance at my badge, not to take down my name but to learn what site this rara avis comes from.

If you visit Yorktown, you may hear one or the other of two fictional characters being paged over the PA system, Captain Strang and Mr. Sassoon. Yorktown is more than a computer lab, it’s a wet lab that uses hazardous substances, and accidents happen. An announcement “Captain Strang, aisle 24, level one” means there is a FIRE! in aisle 24, level one, and an internal firefighting squad, or squads, respond. The words “Captain Strang” have an attention-getting bite designed to cut through any absent-minded reverie; say it out loud when you are alone. (Say it out loud three times in front of a mirror and who knows what will happen.)

A page for “Misssster Sassssoooon” mimics the hiss of a gas leak, another site hazard, summoning a squad in protective gear. There are dozens of compressed-gas tanks, large and small, behind the building. One cool thing to watch is a delivery of liquid nitrogen, which creates a stagecraft-like London fog on the parking lot.

In the auditorium there are occasional “brown bag lunches” that anyone can attend. Similar to a TED talk, they feature a presenter knowledgeable in computing or some other science. Today, the presenter is Linus Pauling, who in 1955 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The doctor is briefing us on research he’s doing in his new area of interest, the structure of the human brain. His experiments require large numbers of cat cortexes, that is, cat brains. A concerned woman questions Pauling closely about how the cats are obtained, how they are treated in life, and how they are put to death.

Mandelbrot pattern

The only famous scientist I ever met personally here is Benoit Mandelbrot, IBM Fellow and father of fractal geometry. One day he steps up to the urinal next to mine and nods in greeting; I nod back.

In many cases a project is  pure research, there is no product and there never will be a product. A newly-minted manager has the temerity to caution a research staff member about stretching his lunch break into two hours on the tennis courts every day. The response is “Yes, but while I’m playing, I’m still thinking.”

There is a basic impracticality to some of what we do here The idea behind  the project I am part of is to prove that eight $200,000 midrange computers can cleverly share a workload and take the place of one $3,000,000 mainframe computer. Once it started becoming clear that yes, yes we can, someone in authority did the basic arithmetic in light of the reality that we are here to make money for IBM, not to save money for the customer. The project was killed. In today’s world I would be sent home with my personal belongings in a cardboard box, but in 1986 I am encouraged to check the internal job listings for another position inside the company.

I find a listing  in Boca Raton that might be a match. I arrange an interview and fly out of LaGuardia on a miserable, slushy January day. When we land in Florida, and I get my first look at the pure lushness of it, I know how Ponce de León must have felt. I admit to myself “I’m probably going to take this job no matter what.”

IBM Boca Raton

People hold high opinions of Yorktown. When my wife and I start looking for a house in Boca, our real-estate agent happens to mention that her husband holds some sort of senior position here in Boca. Later, when she’s alone with my wife, the quiz begins. She tries to guess, where in New York had I worked? Poughkeepsie? Fishkill? She guesses other sites in the Hudson Valley but comes up dry. She finally gives up, and asks the question straight out. When my wife (always my biggest fan) says “Yorktown”, the agent is surprised and dispirited. One-upped, she improvidently volunteers that her husband had always wanted to work there, but couldn’t get an interview.

People in Boca think it odd that anyone would ever leave fabled Yorktown Research. My new friend Rafael asks what it was like working there. He knows I was not happy. I think for a while, then ask if he remembers the smartest kid in his school, and what that person was like? He nods, and I go on. “Okay, imagine there are 2000 people in this room and they went to 2000 different schools. Now imagine that the smartest kid from each of those schools all went to work at the same place.” He understands.

While my family is getting relocated to Boca, our rental apartment and groceries are paid for by the company. After I turn in my first expense voucher, with all supporting documentation, I get a call from a person in accounting, who informs me “We’ll pay for your groceries, but you have to pay for your Heineken yourself.”

 

The One Where I Get a Job in the City

By

On August 24, 2019

In Family, NYC, NYPD, Working

I still have my night job at the A&P warehouse so there’s no rush. My resume is pretty good for someone who hasn’t actually worked in computing yet – the 725-hour programming course at Automation Institute gets respect, but it’s not enough to hire me on. Everyone wants experience. I don’t have much luck getting interviews in New Jersey, so I decide to bite the bullet and look for a job in New York City. After a few interviews in run-down offices with computer illiterates who act like they’d be doing me a favor to send me to a potential employer, I strike pay dirt.

It’s April Fool’s Day, 1968 and I am at the classy Robert Half employment agency in midtown Manhattan. In honor of the day, WQXR plays Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks in the background. I have a good interview, and next day get a call that Condé Nast Publishers would like to interview me next week. They, too, are a classy outfit, so classy (I later learn) that they have a special print chain on their printer just to produce that fancy é with an accent in their name.

Graybar Building, 420 Lexington Avenue

My interview with HR (“Personnel” then) goes well; I am all tweeded up in my good suit and overcoat, looking British and carrying a rolled black brolly. Optics out of the way, I next interview with Mr. Harrison, the manager of “the IBM Department”. He sees that I have mad 1401 computer skills, and we hit it off otherwise. He introduces me to Ben, the other programmer, and we three go to lunch.

I am hired. Condé Nast publishes Vogue and Glamour magazines, so there are models and other alluring creatures running loose through the building, but our floor, the 4th, is 100% business. The fashion magic all happens upstairs.

Going home from my first day at work, after I get off the crosstown  shuttle I am confused, and I get directions to the 7th Avenue line from an NYPD police officer. The next day, at the same spot, I am confused again and ask an officer for directions. He answers “Same way I told you yesterday”, and walks away annoyed.

Similar Maruse Padfolio, $135 at Amazon

After a week riding the subway, I retire my bulky attaché case, which tends to get tangled up in other people’s legs, in favor of a $4 generic zippered black leather portfolio I see in a drugstore window. I normally carry it at my side,  but in a really tight subway car I clutch it against my chest like a frightened girl.

If I get close enough to my office window to get the right angle, I can see the the Chrysler Building, with its crowd of Vietnam War protesters.

I design and write programs in Autocoder assembler language, lots of them. I must be good at it, because I get a raise. I am particularly proud of this latest one because it works almost immediately, and the output is perfect. It’s an analysis of reader responses to a survey in one of the magazines. I bring the printout to Mr. Harrison, who studies it and says something like “Hey, that’s really good”. Then he adds “Uh, you spelled questionnaire wrong” and chuckles. I laugh too, but it stings a little.

Ben and I and our boss generally stick together. We seldom leave the 4th floor except to get lunch downstairs in the Back Bay restaurant, which is cheaper than it sounds. Every other Friday is payday, when we go up to the 11th floor to pick up our checks.

One payday we start for the 11th floor, just us three in the elevator, when it stops at the 6th. In steps one of the models, not at all self-conscious despite wearing the latest in fashion, a see-through blouse, no bra. The fabric is sheer and her breasts are lovely. Following some instinctive sense of decency, the three of us avert our eyes, and now with heads tilted back we stare at the ceiling in silence until she reaches her destination. She exits and the doors close. As the car begins to move again, we gleefully exclaim in unison “DID YOU SEE THAT?”

Sometimes at lunchtime we walk around midtown, trying not to look like tourists. It’s best not to look up, or stare at anyone. There’s a blind guy who usually stands near our building selling pencils; people drop money into his cup but  don’t take a pencil.

One day Mr. Harrison, Ben and I have lunch with Diane, our IBM Sales Engineer, who is dressed for the times in short skirt and white over-the-knee  boots. The subject turns to commuting and I say I’d love to live in the city, but there’s no way all my family’s stuff would fit in an apartment. Diane says I’d be surprised how much stuff can fit in an apartment, and would I like to see hers? I say something like “Thanks, but I don’t think so” in the politest possible business-neutral way. After lunch, Ben turns to me and says “You’re crazy, man!” Yes, I probably am.

Even the company’s benefits are classy. For the one-year anniversary of their start date, women receive flowers, men receive a boutonniere. These are delivered by flower-shop courier. Each December, everyone gets a half-day off to go Christmas shopping.

“Like walking into an old western saloon”

This December brings a disappointment: the company Christmas party is cancelled due to the Hong Kong flu. Mr. Harrison still wants to have a department Christmas party, and one day around noon we head for the Cattleman steakhouse. We are Mr. Harrison, Ben and I, computer operators Ginny and George, six or eight keypunch girls (‘operators’, sorry) and their leader Marie. We fill a long table in a private room. We will pay for our own drinks and split the rest of the bill. Most of us opt for the prime rib, which is excellent.

The keypunch girls are delightful – we don’t usually see them because they work in their own, noisy room. I know two of them, Susan the long-haired girl from across the river who seems to have a thing going on with the IBM repairman who refuses to wear a white shirt; and Marika, fresh off the boat from Poland, not much English yet, but not much is required to punch names and addresses into cards.

On the way back to the office we break into loose groups and I get separated. I’m a little drunk. The city is beautiful at Christmastime. As I walk by the Pan Am building, I hear music and enter the lobby. A choir is singing Christmas  carols.

Everybody at Condé is nice, the work is rewarding and I love my job, but the commute is getting me down.

Would rather be somewhere else

From my house to work it’s only eight miles as the crow flies, but it’s a 4-seat commute with a lot of walking; even on a good day it takes 50 minutes. Coming in, I take the Newark subway to Newark Penn Station, then the PRR train under the river to New York Penn Station, then the 7th Avenue subway to 42nd Street, then the shuttle over to Grand Central. I get tired  again just typing that in. At each connection there’s a significant walk and sometimes a bit of jostling to get from one conveyance to the next. I start thinking about another hot summer underground.

Beyond the commute, two events help me make up my mind.

      • As I stop-start walk up the crowded stairs from one subway level to another, an aggressive old lady behind me keeps stepping on the back of my shoe; she seems to be trying to actually stand in my footprint. I am carrying a rolled umbrella with a metal tip, and I let it hang down far enough at my side that she runs her instep up under it and backs off.
      • [spacer height=”14px”]A newsstand vendor trying to sell out an earlier edition of the Post puts the late edition with closing stock prices underneath the earlier one. When I ask for a copy of the edition underneath, a reasonable request, he refuses. Not in anger but in a matter-of-fact way, I say “Well, fuck you then.” He replies in the same unemotional tone, “Fuck you too.”

So, I have soft-stabbed an old lady and said “fuck you” to a total stranger. It’s time to get myself out of New York, and also an opportune time to get my family out of Newark. I call an employment agency and ask them to find me a job as far south in Jersey as they can.

About four years later, I am in the city and stop by for a visit. By chance, the operators are running one of my programs. Whenever I see a night view of Manhattan with its million lights and offices, I absurdly tell myself “I made a difference.”

Midtown Manhattan

So far away

By

On August 20, 2019

In Family, History, Working

Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore
It would be so fine to see your face at my door
++++++++++++++++++++ -– Carole King

In a moment of nostalgia, I look on Google Earth for the Continental Insurance data center in Neptune where I worked 35 years ago. The once starkly modern three-story building appears abandoned, its parking lots empty and overgrown. Trying to find a earlier view with any signs of life, I have to go back in the timeline more than twelve years.

I drive past the building to get a closer look, and arrive right after giant demolition machines have begun to chew away at it. Already one corner of the building has been torn away – the third-floor executive offices are gone, now just a ragged hole and a pile of concrete and bent steel. Gone too is my up-and-comer, double-size cubicle location in the corner of the floor below. I think of my lost friends and moving myself and my family around the country chasing the next, better job.

All lost in the moves, me, all, all lost in the moves.

Even moving to another town, let alone another state, we lose something. It’s too bad we can’t all stay and live and love where we were born and not have all this loss.

I’ve seen some things

By

On August 14, 2019

In History, Religion, Working

“You’re not gonna believe this”

Three  unrelated things I’ve seen that people seem reluctant to believe when I tell about them. Your mileage may vary.

  • As a child, I saw two or maybe three Civil War veterans riding in the backseat of a convertible in a patriotic parade in Bloomfield, probably on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) 1943. I remember because I came down with measles that same day and threw up across my mother’s chenille bedspread.
  • I have always enjoyed watching faith healers such as Jimmy Swaggart and other noisy, lovable fakes. In the 1960s, at nine o’clock on Sunday nights on one of the local channels in   Newark, there was a black preacher who practiced Faith Dentistry, although not by that name. He did the standard laying-on-of-hands, fall-backward-into-the-catchers, send-me-the-money show, but he also had testimony from those who had been cured of dental afflictions.

“…and when I woke up the next morning, my cavities were filled!”
“What were thy filled with?”
“They were filled with… SILVER!”

Google is no help tracking down this preacher or his show, so good luck to you and keep me posted.

  • One winter day in the early 1960s at about seven o’clock in the morning I was sitting in a bar in Dover (the Dover in Morris County) New Jersey. Don’t judge me, I was trying to stay warm until the store next door opened, and you can’t just walk into a business and not buy anything. Anyway, the TV news came on, and one of the first stories was about a huge explosion in Russia, much damage, thought to be a meteor hit. (I was guessing nuke accident.) Nothing about it in any of the newspapers next day, no follow-up on TV, nothing on Google now. Mysteries abound.

Valhalla

By

On August 11, 2019

In History, Working

On one of the patriotic holidays, I decide to visit the grave of Gordon Gilchrest, my senior vice president when I worked at the Continental Insurance/Insco data center in Neptune, New Jersey. The Find-A-Grave website has lied to me; when I arrive at the advertised cemetery, he’s not there. I learn that he was cremated there, but his ashes were relocated by his family to Valhalla, New York. A helpful woman at the Kensico Cemetery there sends me scrupulous directions, along with a plot map. Maybe I’ll take a ride up to Westchester County this fall.

Rather than a “father figure”, Gordon always seemed to me more like a grandfather figure. Whenever I was called to his office to discuss some company business, we generally spent an extra 20 minutes covering his latest round of golf. He knew that I had been a caddy as a youth, but not for how long, and assumed incorrectly I had something beyond the most rudimentary knowledge of the game,

I learned very little about golf as a caddy, faking my way around the course carrying bags for leathery old ladies, and had never played a round myself.  With Gordon, mostly I just listened to his play-by-play (“The 13th there is a dogleg left…”) and nodded as he broke open his second pack of Luckies that day.

Gordon had been in the Marines, fighting in the Pacific as a young second lieutenant. He and his company had fought their way through the Japanese defenses of several “stepping-stone” islands, taking bloody losses. He hated the Japanese, and years later if we had visitors from Continental’s Tokyo office or from a Japanese company trying to sell us some hardware, he made sure to be out of the office that day.

One day there was a mix-up, and a delegation from the Tokyo office  arrived without anyone having warned Gordon. During the introductions and pleasantries, one young visitor asked “Have you ever been to Japan, Gordon?” Gordon simply answered “Yes”, and after a few minutes excused himself and left the building.

The invisible fist of Picatinny

By

On August 7, 2019

In Family, Working

Imagine one day you’re just walking along minding your own business, not a care in the world, when someone runs up silently behind you and shoves you so hard that you start falling forward and have to break into a run so you don’t land on your face.

One day in the fall of 1961 I’m driving down the main road in Mount Freedom, minding my own business, not a care in the world as set down above, when I feel a giant shove and my truck lurches forward. There’s no sound of a crash, nobody ran into me. I slow down, check my mirrors, there’s no one near me. It seems that the Picatinny Arsenal munitions plant, eight miles away, has blown up yet again; this time the blast is moderate, killing only one and injuring sixteen. I never thought driving a bakery truck could be so dangerous.

Best job ever

By

On August 7, 2019

In Family, Religion, Working

I got into the wholesale bakery business by answering a newspaper ad after I was fired from Foodland for telling the manager it was stupid to wait until closing time to collect the carts from the parking lot. In my supermarket days I had watched different bakery route guys operate, and it seemed like a job I might like. I applied, and although I was only 21, they liked my supermarket experience and I was in. I trained by going out on an existing route with a supervisor. An unspoken part of the first day on the job, for him, was observing whether the new hire could shift gears and steer a bakery truck without crashing or falling out the always-open door.

That day it was raining and still dark when we left the garage. After a few blocks, we approached a red light where there was stopped a mobile construction crane, no lights on, its long boom lowered to windshield height and taking up 40 feet of road behind it. When I came to a gentle stop behind the boom, the supervisor sighed, as if to say “Why is this guy stopping way back here?” Then he realized I hadn’t smeared us both against the unseen boom of the unlit crane, sighed a different kind of sigh and settled down on his wire-basket seat.

As the most-recently-hired driver/salesman, I had the least seniority, and thus ended up with the least desirable route. Its sales volume was low, meaning low commissions, and it was the longest, at about 120 miles through Morris County and parts of Essex. Some guys made little jokes about how long it was, but I had always loved driving and to me that was  a plus. The route  was also green and scenic; one ride-along boss came back claiming to have seen a bear chasing an Indian.

Drivers were required to be members of the Teamster’s Union, so after paying an initiation fee I became a dues-paying, union-book-carrying Teamster.

Local 37, baby

Back at the garage one afternoon, I was surprised to see  Pete,  the crook and my friend from Kingsway Markets. He has had a sales route here for a while. We shake hands and he says in a low voice “Tips are good here, Paulie, tips are good.” Seeing us talking, the bosses are surprised and probably a little disappointed in me that I know Pete, about whom they have their suspicions. Later, one casually asks how I know Pete, and seems reassured when I say simply that we both worked at the Kingsway supermarket  in East Orange.

Morris County was just then entering a boom phase, with new housing developments, apartments and supermarkets springing up all over. No thanks to me, my route became one of the best in the garage. The company even gave me a bigger truck.

During the Cold War, Nike anti-aircraft missile bases were sprinkled about the U.S. to defend against Russian attack. The Nike base in Livingston NJ became one of my stops, with a not-very-profitable standing order of 12 loaves of bread every other day. The base was surrounded by cyclone fence and razor wire, with a guardhouse at the gate. The procedure to enter was: halt, greet the guard,  wait for the gate to open, drive through.

One morning the gate was standing open and I could see that the guard was asleep. It was  still dark. I tapped the horn lightly, then again, with no response. I waited for a while, then drove slowly up the hill to the mess hall. As soon as I got there, the mess sergeant came up  to me in his chef’s whites and said “If you ever come through that gate again without permission you will be shot.” I didn’t see any point in making trouble for anyone by explaining why I had done that, so I remained silent. Later that day, I calculated the sales commission on 12 loaves of bread three times a week, not much. The base was a bit away from the rest of the route, eating up my valuable time  and the company’s gasoline. I decided not to go there anymore.

A customer in Rockaway wants a loaf of fancy, rich butter bread, which I don’t normally carry, once a month, on the Friday before the first Sunday of the next month. It will be cut into neat cubes and used for Holy Communion in his (likely Baptist) church. I need to order my stuff one day in advance, and it’s hard to remember to check whether tomorrow will be the Friday before the first Sunday of the next month. I am a monthly disappointment to my customer; each Friday before the first Sunday of the next month, he shakes his head in sad resignation and I say I am sorry, which I genuinely am.

Sometimes I disappoint my bosses instead of the customers. One supervisor hears of a store in Mendham, according to him “just a turn of the wheel” off my route, that would like to sell Dugan products. At home I check a map and see it’s about eight miles off my route, let’s see, 8 miles  times 2  at 30 mph, that’s 32 minutes –  how am I supposed to add this store of unknown sales potential to my route and still get home at three o’clock in the afternoon? I am a creature of habit, and for the next few days I forget to go to my theoretical new stop and the bosses stop bringing it up.

People sometimes order specially-made cakes but change  their mind. Then the driver has to bring it back to the garage. There’s a raffle; anyone interested can buy a chance for a dollar. I win this time, and proudly bring home  a sheet cake inscribed “Happy Birthday Jazzelle”.

One day I finish my route early and decide to stop home for lunch before going back to the garage. After my truck has been parked in front of the house for an hour, a nosy neighbor begins to suspect the house-to-house, retail Dugan man has something going on with my wife. She sends her child to our door to snoop, saying her mother’s been waiting to pay her bill. My truck is way bigger than his, so the whole notion is absurd.

All good things must come to an end, and in 1966, Dugan Brothers, “Bakers for the Home Since 1878”, is raped  taken advantage of in a leveraged-buyout scheme, and soon thereafter files for bankruptcy and shuts down. My kids are sad – I won’t be home at three in the afternoon any more.

Once I took my older guy out on the route with me. It was a few days before Christmas and my customers treated him like  a king. He still remembers that day, and calls that job the best job ever.

Transaction

By

On August 7, 2019

In History, Religion, Working

In the 1960s, the Morris County resort town of Mount Freedom was booming. The town catered to Jewish clientele from New York and Brooklyn, many of them post-war refugees from Europe.  The town competed with the Catskills’ “Borscht Belt”, with a half-dozen hotels and more than 40 bungalow colonies.

I had a wholesale route for Dugan’s Bakery. One of my customers was Hesh Steinberg, who owned a grocery store convenient to the bungalows.

One day as I walked into Hesh’s  to get his order, I saw that he was concluding a sale to a dark-haired woman. Because Orthodox Jews may not have physical contact with the opposite sex unless they are married, Hesh will deliver any change by dropping it into her palm.

Wearing my company’s gray uniform, I step next to her to wait my turn.

As I do, she sees that I see the numbers on her outstretched arm and  snatches her hand back. The coins bounce on the counter.

Camerawork

By

On August 5, 2019

In Theft, Working

Back in the 1960’s when I worked as a bookkeeper at Foodland Supermarkets, cashiers gave out Blue Chip trading stamps with each grocery order, one stamp per ten cents spent. After a shopper accumulated enough loose stamps to be an annoyance, they pasted them into a small book with space for 1,200 stamps.  Once shoppers had enough full books to exchange for an item in the premium catalog, they brought them to a redemption center.

The Blue Chip premium catalog included such useful items such as a Swank key ring with nail clipper attachment, 1 book; a Health-O-Meter bathroom scale, 4 ¼ books; and at the high end my personal favorite, the Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera, price many, many books. About this camera, I will just say that it took excellent photographs.

The pads of stamps provided to cashiers had 50 pages, 100 stamps per page,  5,000 stamps in all, equivalent to just over four full books.

Our store had two small rest rooms for employees – the men’s was always dirty and in a state of disrepair, the ladies’ much nicer. When closing the store at night, after all female employees had left, any remaining men would often use the ladies’ to wash up. In the morning, whichever man (back then it was always a man) opened the store would use the ladies’ to straighten his tie and otherwise get ready for the day.

On Sundays we usually had a single female employee, a cashier named Barbara.

One Monday when I arrived at work, assistant manager Eddie, second-in-command to manager Neil, was waiting for me. Waving a pad of Blue Stamps, he said “I have to fire Barbara, I found these in the ladies’ room.”

“Errrm, those are mine.”

“Oh.”

A few months later, I transferred to another store in the chain. Eddie told me they weren’t planning to change the safe combination after I left, and added “If it was Neil leaving it would be a different story.”

Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera

After dark at the A&P warehouse

By

On July 22, 2019

In Working

While going to Automation Institute during the day to learn computer programming, I worked nights at the A&P produce warehouse in Newark. Pre-employment testing showed I was too smart to be jockeying crates of lettuce and celery around, so I got to be a (non-union) desk jockey instead, at a rate of quite a bit less per hour.

Our general duties were to create the paperwork needed to ship produce to A&P stores in north and central New Jersey. The forms  included E-1 order sheets listing non-perishable special items. Each had to be copied in an ancient pre-Xerox copier. The sheets were supposed to be submitted only on Tuesdays or Thursdays, but needy stores could get special dispensation by phoning the daytime warehouse manager. There were five or six of these special cases every week, and Johnny Byrne treated each as a personal insult, loudly announcing each one as he rose from his chair and trudged the ten feet to the copier, usually with the words “Cocksucker! Fucking E-1 sheets, every night of the week!”

Johnny was also what might be called the “window man”. As tractor drivers arrived to hook up to loaded trailers, Johnny made the call of who went where. Favored drivers knew he could be bribed with a few packs of cigarettes to assign a “good” route, that is, one with easier traffic or better chances of earning overtime. These deals were made surreptitiously, when no other drivers were in sight. Particularly favored was the route to Store 37 in Toms River, way down in South Jersey.

Steve, the warehouse-floor foreman, occasionally visited the office to rant about some problem or indignity on the floor. Steve had been to prep school in his youth, as he would often remind us, saying “I don’t have to work here, you know. I went to fucking Saint Benedict’s!” Steve also had a favorite compound-word curse that was so vile and improbable that I won’t repeat it.

Steve II was the day foreman. The Vietnam war was grinding on, and Steve II was angry and disappointed with anyone who believed the war might be a bad idea. He had a son in the army.

My buddy Louis had an annoying catch phrase he used whenever he wanted to borrow an eraser, which was often, sidling up and asking “Got a rubber on ya Dick?”

Walt and I were the rookies, still learning how the world worked.

Across the street were some low buildings and an all-night diner, and beyond them apartments with a clear view into the pool of light that was our office. Many times the guy at the desk might be alone.

One night I came back from break to find Walt almost in tears. In one of the overlooking apartments was a lewd and perverse individual who had our phone number. The next few times he called, we simply hung up as soon as his obscene suggestions started. Once I handed the phone to Walt and said “It’s for you”, but that was a prank I felt guilty about later.

After a few nights of calls, Walt and I were both in the office when our admirer called for what would be the last time. I knew he could see us, and after listening for a while to his elaborate plans for me, I made a show of looking around to be sure I was alone. I was not, he could see that, and in my best might-be-interested voice I said ”I’m very busy right now, but give me your number and I’ll call you back as soon as I get a chance.” I guess he was so surprised he didn’t really think it through, because he gave me his number. I read it back to him as he watched me write it into the company logbook. When Walt left on break later that night, I knew our caller was watching for me to pick up the phone, but wondering whether I’d call him or the police. We had a laugh about keeping him in suspense, and he never bothered us again.

Our paperwork required some old-school multiplying, tedious and error prone since pocket computers didn’t exist yet. I discovered the way to do this on our Comptometer model WM mechanical calculator, which was only being used as an adding machine. Wanna multiply 24 times 1.69? It’s similar to  multiplication on paper: push down the 1-6-9 keys simultaneously 4 times, shift left one column, push down the 1-6-9 keys simultaneously 2  times . Easy-peasy, and always right.

Comptometer model WM mechanical calculator, Ezrdr

When I finished computer school, I put on my tweed suit and started looking for jobs. The warehouse manager, Mr. DeBow, sent me to the real A&P office in downtown Newark to interview for a job as an auditor, and they made me an offer. “Auditor” is a good and respected job in the supermarket business, but there’s not much money in it.

 

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