The Mega Foods in Glen Ridge is where I met Mimi, my wife-to-be. She was bookkeeper there. Mega stayed open until ten o’clock on Friday nights, and one Friday I offered her a ride home to Newark so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. My girlfriend at the time also worked at Mega, and I took her home every night. She came along on our trip to Newark, riding shotgun. She lived in Montclair, a lot closer to Mega, so for her the trip was wasted time.
As taking Mimi home on Friday night became a regular thing, my girlfriend continued to ride along, picking fights with me on the other nights. I guess she must have had some money saved up, because one morning she came to work driving a brand new Plymouth Fury and told me she wouldn’t need a ride home any more. After that, we only saw each other at work, and only by accident.
1957 Plymouth Fury
Store manager Carl always had an eye out for shoplifters. One day he saw a customer take two eggs out of the carton and slip them into his jacket pocket. He called me over and said “Watch this.” Pushing a shopping cart, he strolled over toward the customer, who was pretending to look at something in the dairy case. Carl let the cart run into the man’s right side, just slightly harder than a tap, and apologized. The customer said “That’s quite all right” and left the store immediately
For more serious shoplifting, the Mega Foods policy was that when a shoplifter was apprehended, they were invited to the back room for an interview with the manager, with an employee also present as a witness. They were encouraged to sign a “Confession” (actual word at the top of the form), and promise not to come back to the store. Interviewing a female shoplifter required a female witness. Mimi got pulled in to witness an interview once where the alleged shoplifter kept telling Carl “If you let me go, I’ll do anything you want. Do you understand? Anything.” Mimi said it was very uncomfortable. I asked if she thought Carl might have wanted her to go for a walk, but she said no.
In the Boca Raton newspaper one Sunday I saw an ad I thought was both amazing and disgusting: a local jeweler was renting Rolex watches by the month. A rented Rolex would provide a big status boost to an upward-striver of the “fake it till you make it” crowd. The store would even rent you one by the day. I guess that makes sense if the con game you’re working is one of short duration.
`Rolex Submariner watch, courtesy time4diamonds.comThe Rolex Submariner, second-least expensive watch in the Rolex line and retailing at $8100 to $9150, rents for $299 to $500 a month. You’ll need to post a four-figure security deposit.
An article in GQ magazine asks “You Rent Your Apartment. Why Not Your Watch?” One site advertises a rented watch as “An essential tool in every man’s wardrobe … express your personal style and ensure you always have the perfect watch for every occasion.”. Another says “Rent a luxury watch and stand out at any black-tie event.”
Boca was all about luxury. One day we saw two Rolls-Royces parked side-by-side at an upscale mall, one with a designer dog in the driver’s lap, drooling into a tea towel draped over the window sill. A local supermarket, Harris Teeter, had a cocktail bar and a jewelry counter you had to walk past on your way out.
At that time my manager at IBM was a gentleman of first name Lawton, who believed in having the best of everything. He wore expensive suits that always looked fresh from the cleaners, and a woody cologne I assume also was expensive. When you took a business trip with Lawton, you could always spot his Louis Vuitton luggage.
Louis Vuitton Horizon 55, $3400
Monogram detail
Lawton and I had joked about Boca and its superficiality, and when I showed him the ad from the paper, I said “Here’s a great example of everything that’s wrong and phony about Boca.” He said “Well, I have a Rolex, but I own it”, and took it off to show me. It was a nice piece of engineering, heavier than I would have guessed. I don’t remember for sure which sport he said, but I think he said he won it playing football. Fair enough, as far as I’m concerned. I felt embarrassed for bringing up the subject.
It was kind of funny that I sat across from him in meetings breathing his cologne for a year without ever noticing the Rolex sticking out of his French cuff. I’m usually more observant.
This is unrelated to watches, but once Lawton and I had to go to Lexington, Kentucky to visit IBM’s PC printer facility. When we went to get dinner that night, with me driving the rental because I was the junior person, we stopped for a red light at the bottom of a hill. A horse-drawn tourist carriage headed crossways to us was stopped at the crest. With the full moon directly behind him, one of the horses took an extended whiz, hitting the pavement in an explosion of flying, moonlit sparkles – almost like a small fireworks display. I said “Oh, Lawton, isn’t it beautiful?” but he didn’t answer. I don’t understand how he could not appreciate such a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.
Franck Muller Color Dreams ladies’ watch, courtesy timeandtidewatches.com
Just for fun, here’s a pretty ladies’ watch I ran across while rummaging through the Rolexes. I don’t know if it’s possible to rent one, but you can buy one for $77,000 Australian dollars, $56,315 US. If you ever see a lady wearing one, tell her how beautiful it is and after a while ask if she’s seeing anyone. It never hurts to ask.
Here’s everything you need to know about Yogi Berra.
Yogi was a catcher for the New York Yankees. He charmed and puzzled the world with his child-like musings and malaprops.
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi
He made enough money playing baseball to afford a nice house in Montclair. In fact, he made so much money that he could afford to buy a second refrigerator, just for beer, and get it installed on his front porch.
Two of the older guys from our corner worked part time delivering heavy appliances. They were thrilled that they’d get to meet Yogi.
They lugged the new refrigerator up the porch steps and got it over to where he wanted it. They made it level and plugged it in.
He gave them each a dime.
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi
I never got an allowance and never asked for one, although I did steal money from my mother’s purse once, thirty cents to buy a pet turtle. I never lacked for anything that was truly necessary. My brother and I mostly wore hand-me-downs from our Uncle George’s youth; Grandma must have saved everything he ever grew out of – in my 3rd-grade class photo I am the only boy wearing knickers. In high school I wore George’s wartime Eisenhower jacket, proudly. Until I got my working papers, which New Jersey requires for anyone under 18 to get a “real” job, money for things I wanted came from doing odd jobs and getting small handouts from my uncles.
Eisenhower jacket, courtesy monstervintage.com
Uncle George spent his early career years working for Western Electric, helping build the Mexican telephone system. He was there so long that in his photos he looks Mexican, maybe because of the mustache. During WW II he was a Signal Corps major stationed in New Guinea, fighting the Japanese and taking occasional target practice against stacks of canned Spam .
After the war he returned to Western Electric, picking up his career where he left off. He had a good job and a bit of money, and he owned a grand old house on Park Avenue (the Park Avenue in Orange, not the one in New York) that was divided into several equally grand apartments. His house was three blocks from ours, and sometimes I’d be sent over there on a Saturday morning to get me out of my mother’s hair for a while. Sometimes he would give me a quarter, equivalent to about $2.50 today, for no particular reason. He knew my name, but for some reason always called me Sport. Maybe that’s what he called everybody.
When visiting him, I pretty much kept quiet (he was usually lying on the couch, hung over in a gentlemanly way) while I read through his New Yorker magazines and tried to understand why the tiny cartoons embedded in the text were not funny. I later learned that they were not really ‘cartoons’, but just design elements to break up the text.
On one visit, I had recently read a magazine article about the excellence of Louisville Slugger baseball bats – how the wood was chosen, how carefully they were manufactured for maximum ball flight, etc. etc. Not owning a bat of my own of any brand, I tried to plant in George’s mind the idea of him buying me one. (I have a strange aversion to actually asking people for what I want.) Through the morning, I produced a slow trickle of factual nuggets from the article. Being hung over, he was uninterested in, and unmoved by, my low-key salesmanship. Bad timing on my part.
George had probably heard about my experience helping my father paint a house at the shore, and through my mother he asked whether I’d be interested in a job repainting the decks, railings and stairs of his apartment house. Yes, of course I was interested, and I spent many sunny days that summer working on his house. Aunt Louise kept me in iced tea and sandwiches as I painted my way through several gallons of battleship gray.
George and Louise met and married during the war; she was an officer in the WACs. The grownups in my family didn’t seem to like her very much; she may have been too boisterous for their tastes, similar to how they felt about my Aunt Sweetie, also an ex-WAC and a bit on the rowdy side.
Once all the painting was done, George shook my hand, said “Thanks, Sport!”, and handed me an envelope. When I got home and showed my mother how much was in it, she was astonished. How much did he give me? I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot.
Uncle Bill, aunt Mabel’s husband, would give me a quarter once in a while too, for no particular reason. We didn’t see Bill and Mabel very often until Grandma started showing her age and went to live with them; then the two families would trade her off on weekends, with Bill driving back and forth from their house in Livingston. I especially enjoyed the drive back down the mountain; coming down Northfield Avenue at night there was, and still is, a spectacular view of Manhattan, stretched out and sparkling 15 miles away.
Bill was a production foreman at the Ford plant in Mahwah. He was not Italian, but I came to think of him as a gavone, a word I picked up from my neighborhood friends, defined as:
Cafone (also caffone, gavone)
Noun
1 A labourer; a peasant, especially one who is Italian or of Italian descent.
2 slang Especially in Italian-American usage: a coarse-mannered person; a low-life, a lout. – Lexico
That opinion was solidified when he came into our kitchen once after bringing Grandma home, hawked up a big one, and spat into the sink. I was offended, and without thinking gave him the stink eye. He responded with a sneer and after that, the Uncle Bill revenue stream dried up.
*If you’re under 18 in New Jersey, you need an employment certificate, better known as “working papers”, to get a job. What’s involved? First, a parent has to give written approval, then the school district arranges a physical. If the district is satisfied that the job hours and working conditions will not interfere with your school work or damage your health, they will issue your papers. Some occupations are forbidden – you may not operate a blast furnace, forklift or deli slicer.
Courtesy Cynthia Beach, via Pinterest
I got my first set of working papers at age 14, to deliver newspapers. The local paper wanted to boost circulation, and posted an ad for carriers. I was assigned to a few streets near my house, and early each Thursday morning I’d find about 120 copies of the Orange Transcript on my front steps. The paper provided a canvas bag with a strap, and I’d stuff as many copies as would fit into the bag and take off on my bike. The paper was a free one, with lots of ads, and I left a copy at the front door of each house on my street list, returning home as needed to refill the bag. I forget how much they paid me, but it was okay for one morning a week.
This went on for five or six weeks, then one day all the carriers were called to a meeting at the newspaper office. The paper would no longer be free, they said, and our job was to go to each house on our route and convince the people there to start paying for this “invaluable guide to shopping savings”. We would also collect for it once a month.
Armed with my pad of subscriber forms, I started off that evening at the top of my street. I’m sure the newspaper people gave us some good selling tips, especially to identify yourself as the person who’s been bringing you this great shopping resource every week, but I’m no salesman. I found it hard to convince people to start paying for something that had been free all along. After being turned down four or five times straight by otherwise pleasant people, I couldn’t see facing the same result at another hundred houses, and when I got home, I told my mother that I was going to quit.
She’d worked in the business world for many years, and thought it important to do things the right way, so she gave me a writing exercise. The next afternoon I went to the newspaper office, asked for the publisher, and handed him my Letter of Resignation.
Courtesy Gallery One Auctions & Estate Sales
Later on I had another job similar to the newspaper one; it was delivering that year’s official phone-company telephone books. They were big and fat, mostly yellow pages. We lived on the second floor then, and the day the books were dropped off at my house, I came home from school to find our first-floor entryway and one side of the stairs to the second floor clogged with stacks of phone books, along with a hand truck. The publisher paid on a piecework basis, so many cents per book delivered, and the money was decent. Because you couldn’t put more than 15 or 20 books on the hand truck and still be able to push it, it took me several days to deliver them all.
After my deliveries were finished, there was a surprise. In what I guess was some sort of early environmental program to not clog up town dumps with old phone books, the publisher offered a bonus, much higher than the delivery fee, for each old book collected. It sounded simple – all we had to do was walk up to the door and ask for the old one back. It seemed like easy money and I still had the hand truck, so I pushed it to the furthest point on my route and started knocking on doors. After a few houses, I realized that nobody wants to give up their old phone book. People write their favorite phone numbers and make other notations on the cover and inside, and they’re not going to give them up. A couple of houses promised that if I came back in a week they’d have all the information copied over, and they’d give me their old book then. That’s no way to run a business, so as far as I was concerned, the return program was dead.
The next two were just neighborhood odd jobs, no working papers involved.
One day Vince’s son Junior asked if I wanted to make some money weighing out a 100-pound burlap sack of coffee beans into one-pound retail bags. I pride myself on accuracy, and he was happy with the resulting 99 and-a-half bags. He gave me five dollars, pretty good for a couple hours work.
My buddy from the neighborhood and I tarred the roof of his uncle’s six-story apartment house. On what seemed like the hottest day of the year, we lugged 5-gallon cans of black tarry sealant to the roof and spread it around with brooms and squeegees. There were no railings, so the trick was to never turn your back on the edges and work outward from the center. I went home with a good day’s pay and a sunburn.
Caddieing is a good way for kids to earn summer money, and through her connections at work, my mother got me an introduction to the caddie house at the classy Essex County Country Club. To get there, I’d walk to the bottom of Mount Pleasant Avenue, then hitchhike the rest of the way up the mountain. One driver squeezed my knee and told me what nice strong legs I had for caddieing, but he was the exception. My fellow caddies were college guys, and one day that turned rainy they taught me how to play poker, an expensive but worthwhile lesson. Whatever skill level I may have today , I attribute much of it to those helpful lads.
I didn’t know anything at all about the game of golf, so I was a lousy caddie. The caddiemaster usually had me carrying bags for crusty old ladies whose satisfaction he wasn’t concerned about. Not knowing or caring anything about the game, for me each round was a long, often tipless trek, and eventually I stopped showing up at the clubhouse.
Great, but too late for me. Courtesy New Jersey State Golf Association
thief THēf/ noun- a person who steals another person’s property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence. – lexico.com
When I was in high school, I worked part time at the Kingsway supermarket in East Orange. I learned the shelf-stocking and floor-sweeping ropes from Pete, a crazy and charismatic kid who was two years older than me and working full time. Pete belonged to a Newark gang called the Roman Dukes. By legend, the Dukes were armed, and had discouraged an enemy gang incursion into downtown Newark by throwing its members off the balcony of the Empire Burlesque. Pete held some sort of leadership role in the Dukes .
Two rungs down from the Dukes, but you get the idea
Pete was a prolific thief. He would never buy anything he could steal, and anything he stole but couldn’t use, he sold. It was scary to watch him operate, but, having grown up in North Jersey, I knew and respected the principle of omerta. Pete liked me, and we got along.
Each morning, Pete backed his car into the parking spot immediately below the window of the second-floor employees’ lounge, and each evening he lifted one corner of that window’s screen and pushed out five or six cartons of cigarettes that he had smuggled away from the checkout stands by mixing them in with the trash. They landed right behind his rear bumper.
Pete got promoted to receiver and checker-in of all arriving grocery trailers, a position of responsibility that multiplied the opportunities for theft several fold. Pete’s new approach was to unstaple the multi-page invoice, remove the next-to-last page, and steal every item on it. Since the last few pages always included some carton cigarettes, this was much more productive than pushing them through the screen. When the department manager in charge of cigarettes, razor blades, candy and other things favored for employee theft later moved them into their double-locked storage cage, every item on the re-stapled invoice was present and accounted for.
One Sunday, the usual bunch was hanging around outside Vince’s store when Pete happened to drive by with some of his Roman Duke cohort. So, here we are, standing around in our All-American “Lakeside A.C.” jackets in the orange-and-black high school colors, and holy shit, here’s a carload of leather-jacketed Roman Dukes pulling over on the wrong side of the street right in front of us, Pete driving. Although our numbers were greater, we felt suddenly surrounded.
I was the only one there who had ever seen any of these Dukes, or for that matter ANY Duke, before, and there was great anxiety among us. When Pete greeted me with “Hey Paulie, is this where you hang out?”, we relaxed a bit, knowing that we weren’t going to take an immediate beating. We stood and exchanged cautious small talk with the smiling Dukes, all the while remaining alert in case they should change their minds, or Pete give them some sort of signal – not that he would with his friend from work there, but my bunch didn’t know that. After a while, Pete asked if we’d care for some beer. All we really wanted was to be left alone, but we each chipped in the two dollars suggested by Pete to pay for our order. The Dukes drove off, returning with a case of quarts. After we’d all had our fill, the Dukes drove off again, taking the empties and the remaining beer with them. We wondered how they had found a liquor store open on Sunday, but guessed the rules were different in Newark.
The next day’s Star Ledger helped us understand. East Orange police checking out a Sunday burglar alarm had found a Park Avenue liquor store’s back door kicked in and a case of beer missing. Later that day, the door was kicked in a second time and the empties returned.
Supermarkets were not open on Sunday then, so even the lowliest of clerks had the day off. One day the manager at Kingsway called all the part-timers together and told us to come in that Sunday; we would be cleaning the store. Reading our expressions, he added, “If you don’t come in Sunday, don’t come in Monday.”
I didn’t come in on either of those days. I was now seventeen and had my own car. I could work anywhere.
Setting up bowling pins paid pretty well, and I liked the predictability and orderliness of it. The customers were always 60 feet away, so they didn’t have to be dealt with, beyond making sure they got their ball back and didn’t throw a second one while I was still in the pit. Similar to my “cellar man” supermarket job later on, I could be alone with my thoughts and operate on autopilot.
In the 1950s, the Palladium in Orange had 24 lanes of modern semi-automatic pin setting machines, and eight older lanes where pins had to be set by hand. New hires were put in charge of a pair of the older, “peg” lanes, so called because each had a foot pedal to raise a set of steel pegs onto which the pins were placed. When the pedal was released, the pins stood perfectly aligned. The invention of the pegs eliminated the problem of mis-placed, or “mis-spotted” pins, and put an end to the most common bowler complaint about pinboys.
If you were a hard, fast worker, showed up for work on time and got along with management, you’d probably get promoted to the machines after two or three months. You may ask, how fast is “fast”? Truly fast pin cleanup and resetting looks something like a NASCAR tire change.
Working the pegs, courtesy Youbou Hall and Bowling Alley, via livevictoria.com. Note exposed steel peg, speed blur
The original Palladium had only the eight peg lanes; the machine lanes were added later. The peg side of the house was almost a separate room; when people came in to bowl, the desk manager assigned families with small children and anyone who looked like a troublemaker to a lane on the peg side.
The machines were only semi-automatic: you still had to toss a replacement pin into the slot for each one that got knocked down. The best feature of the machines was that they, not you, picked up the ball and got it started on its way back to the bowler. While I was working on the peg side, someone said I must get mad when a bowler throws a strike; I said no, because then I only have to pick up the ball once.
“The job was pretty much an OSHA nightmare. Pins often went flying, their wild arc broken by my feet or shins. Sometimes a pin came out of the pinsetter wobbly, and tipped over, so that I’d have to wriggle out onto the lane headfirst on my stomach after it, praying that the bowlers saw me.” – “Strikes, Spares and Bruised Shins”, Steven Kurutz, New York Times
Pinboys got 12 of the 50 cents bowlers paid for each game. This was decent money, and some “pinboys” were grownups supporting a family. About half were grown men, the rest were teenagers like me.
The air was smoky and the general atmosphere a bit seedy. Pin-setting work seemed to draw a lot of alcoholics. One of them was quite open about only wanting to earn enough to pay for his room and get a couple of bottles. Once he had enough, he’d go missing for a while.
Another pin setter carried a briefcase and wore a business suit to work every day. After he’d made his way down to the pits, he’d hang the suit up behind him and put on his coveralls. His wife probably knew what he did for a living, but his neighbors certainly didn’t.
Joe Pappas, who I think had Down syndrome, never got promoted to the machines. He was kept on the peg side, where the action was slower. Joe got paid 12 cents a game, the same as the rest of us.
Seedy or not, I never felt uncomfortable or unsafe there, except when I walked home late at night past Saint John’s cemetery and floating Jesus.
Automation today
Improvements in the machinery have made pinboys obsolete. The lanes now have automatic score sensing and tracking; bowlers no longer have to add up their score frame-by-frame across a paper form. If you can’t tell how many pins just got knocked down (the answer is ten minus the number still standing), or if you can’t clearly understand what just happened 60 feet in front of you, or if you can’t add a 1- or 2-digit number to a 2-or-3-digit number correctly and consistently, modern bowling technology has your solution.
A sad ending
Palladium destroyed by fire, Red Bank Daily Register, 3 July 1962
“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. I’ve quit my job at Kingsway due to some bad management choices, and have resolved to stay out of the supermarket business.
Similar to the way my brother got a foothold as a lowly apprentice oiler 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 to an apprenticeship in the Ironworkers Union.
Ironworkers looking for work come to the union hiring hall to “shape up”, that is, to 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 the fencing 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 six-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 on TV 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 panel 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 full 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 two 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 their 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.
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 died as I lost interest in “applying myself” to my lessons.
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 Schlitz 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, but the subject 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 into 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 our truck 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 whiz 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. We fill 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 and 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 man 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! I get back to the yards with no one 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 supervise and help us. He’s wearing sandals and some sort of crotchless wrap-around terry loincloth, and that is all. Every time he bends over to pick up a case, his nuts hang out. Two NYPD officers arrive, they see Mr. Bruno’s outfit and look at one another. They have been sent here on a blue-law complaint: non-emergency labor is not allowed in New York City 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 the 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 big paychecks spoil me for going back to school: why go back to pointless boredom when I can be earning good 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.
In the 1960s, Foodland supermarkets gave out Blue Chip trading stamps with each 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 1200 stamps. After shoppers collected enough books to exchange for an item in the premium catalog, they brought the books to a redemption center. One of my jobs as bookkeeper was keeping the cashiers supplied with stamps.
The Blue Chip premium catalog included such useful items 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 pictures.
Each pad of stamps had 50 pages, 100 stamps per page, 5 thousand stamps in all, equivalent to just over four full books.
Our store had two tiny 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 the female employees had left, often the remaining men would use the ladies’ to wash up. In the morning, the man (back then it was always a man) who opened the store might use the ladies’ to straighten his tie and otherwise get ready for the day.
On Sundays we usually had a single female employee working, 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 sealed 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 combination to the safe after I left, adding “If it was Neil leaving it would be a different story.”
But first let me tell you about some other Things That Happened at the first Foodland I worked at.
L Three W-_]-omen, Fernand Léger 1921, via flickr
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 has been 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 on 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 our store window; he gives me free movie passes. One day 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 the sticker.. The process seems demeaning, both me and to my car, 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 when having lunch at Marino’s bar across the street. Mr. Marino cashes the vouchers and sends them to the bank 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 discover the phone on my desk has been disconnected. When contacted by pay phone, the phone company tells me Foodland’s bill hasn’t been paid for several months. I call the main office and they say there’s been a small mix-up, and they take care of it.
There is a liquor store next door. A man who’s been loitering in front of our own store waiting for his wife to finish shopping beats her up because after she pays for the family groceries she doesn’t have enough money left over to suit him.
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 good people who happen to be struggling.
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 still flattered, they hop off and run back inside the store.
After a couple of years as bookkeeper here, the company sends me to manage their small store in West New York while its 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 to get a haircut, the owner is jumpy; he thinks the stranger in his chair wearing a white shirt and tie might be a cop. As we talk, I mention why I’m in town and he relaxes. Men enter the shop, speak briefly and leave; my barber is the local bookmaker.
After my stint n West New York ends without disaster, the company sends me to be assistant manager of what I’ll call Foodland II. It’s in Elizabeth, the same town as the first Foodland, but is newer and much 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 front door to admit occasional early shoppers who arrive before any cashiers do, then tallies their purchases old-style, #2 pencil on a brown paper bag, making change out of his own pocket. I think he knows 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 could 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.” After a bit more back-and-forth, he fires me. He probably engineered the confrontation because I’m on to his early-shopper scam, but I’m not terribly upset; I’m tired of supermarket work. Maybe it’s time to try something new.
One day at the first Foodland I worked at, I was sitting near the front door in my little raised-up bookkeeper office, what they now call a courtesy counter. I was idly watching the cashiers and making mental bets about who would be next to need a roll of nickels or a pad of trading stamps.
The main part of my job there was approving customer checks. As a general rule, if I never saw the customer before, I would ask them to bring the check back after they finished shopping and were ready to check out. That weeded out the people who thought supermarkets were banks and just wanted to cash their paycheck and be on their way.
I’d note their driver’s license or other ID on the back, then scribble my initials up in one corner to tell whatever cashier they went to that the check was okay to cash. Probably 98% of the checks I saw looked fine and I approved them. But I had a good eye for people who wrote personal checks without enough money in the bank to cover them, and if I didn’t feel right about a check, whether personal or payroll, I’d just say “Sorry, we can’t cash that.” If they argued, I’d give a reason like “Sorry, I don’t know that company”, or “Sorry, that’s an out-of-state bank.” I didn’t get fooled very often.
If they still argued, I’d call the manager over and he’d listen to their story and make a decision. If a check bounced, it was something of a demerit for whoever approved it, and of course Foodland was out the amount of the check
On this particular day, a skinny guy about 30 years old came to the desk. He looked like a regular working man, wearing working man clothes, and he had a working man’s paycheck, something like $180, a good week’s pay back then, from one of the local chicken companies. It was already signed on the back. He passed me a beat-up paper driver’s license, looking at the floor as he did so.
I’ve never seen a worse fake ID. The poor thing looked like someone took the top half of one washed-out driver’s license and the bottom half of another, put them together with scotch tape on the back, then handprinted on it the name that was on the check.
I couldn’t believe anyone would offer such an obviously fake ID, and I said “Can you just wait here a minute?”, took a dime out of my cash drawer and dropped it into the pay phone on the wall behind me. The customer asked what I was doing, and I said “I’m calling the police.” He turned and ran out the front door. Operating on pure greyhound/mechanical rabbit instinct, I was right behind him. I ran out of the office, slamming the door behind me, and began chasing him through the parking lot.
When we got to the back fence and he jumped over, I came to my senses and stopped. I didn’t have a plan, not of catching him, tackling him, or anything else; it was just blind instinct. To be honest with myself, I think it was mostly because I was insulted by being offered that terrible fake ID. I didn’t consider the possibility of getting punched, stabbed or shot in the face until I got to the fence and stopped. As I’ve admitted elsewhere here about a different subject, “I was a young guy myself then, and I too was prone to doing stupid young-guy things.”
I took my time walking back to the store, getting my breath back and trying to come up with the funniest way to tell the story of what just happened. When I got back inside, the cashiers were cashiering, the baggers were bagging, and nobody even glanced at me. I sat at my desk for a while, looking out across the checkout area, waiting for someone to meet my eye and mouth “What the hell was that about?”. But no one did.
The paycheck and fake ID were still on my desk.
As my breathing returned to normal and it became obvious that no one had noticed my impulsive chase, I was overtaken by a fresh impulse. If you have even a speck of latent opportunism in your soul, you will have already guessed what it was. I destroyed the license, scribbled my approval on the check, cashed it, and put the money in my pocket. The check went to the bank along with the rest of the day’s receipts, and of course it bounced and was reported to the police.
A few weeks later, two detectives came to the store. They had a folder with the bounced check in it, and they asked if the scribble on the back was my approval. Yes, it was. They asked if I remembered what the customer looked like. No, I don’t think so. They said if we showed you his picture, do you think you’d remember him then? Yeah, maybe. They produced a small stack of 3×5″ front-and-side view mugshot cards, maybe six in all. They told me to take my time and go through them slowly, one at a time. As I did, they watched me for a reaction. My customer was the fourth one down. When I reached the bottom of the stack without picking one out, they asked me to try again, and really pay close attention this time.
I went through the stack once more, with the same result, and opened my hands in the universal what-next gesture. They knew their guy’s picture was in that stack, he’d probably cashed those checks all over town, and I know they were disappointed in me that I didn’t recognize him. They thanked me and left.
I spent that windfall on my family, with us probably taking a jaunt somewhere we couldn’t have afforded otherwise. Yes, I am a little embarrassed by my impulsive act, but I won’t say that I regret it.
When I worked at the Foodland in Elizabeth, there was a Greek lunch counter across the street; I was there at least twice 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 directly across from my usual seat, 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.
Box turtle looking fierce, courtesy pocolover1957, via flickr
One day on my bakery route, I saw a turtle trying to cross busy Route 10 in Morris County. I picked him up and put him in the wire basket along with the outdated goods going back to the garage. He was well-behaved as I finished my route, except for peeing on the cardboard basket liner.
Back at the garage, I didn’t say anything to the worker whose job it was to unload each truck’s returns. The turtle had withdrawn into its shell and the worker almost grabbed it, thinking it was a stale loaf of pumpernickel.
I brought it home for my kids to play with, to the extent that you can “play with” a turtle. We made a sort of low-walled pen in the backyard out of loose bricks. He liked lettuce and earthworms, and apple and banana slices, and we all co-existed peacefully until one day he escaped and wandered over into a neighbor’s yard. We heard her screaming and went to her rescue. We decided wild turtles would rather be free, and next day I took him for another ride.
One of my customers was Dalrymple’s General Store and Ice House, in rural Randolph Township. The store was next to Dalrymple Pond, where in winter crews sawed the pond ice into blocks to stock the ice house. I asked Mr. Dalrymple if it would be okay to set the turtle free near his pond. Kids swam in the pond in summertime, so he came out to the truck to double-check that our former pet was indeed a box, not snapping, turtle, and it passed inspection. The pond was only a mile or so from the spot where I had rescued him, and he’d been heading in the general direction, so I considered it a sort of homecoming.
At its peak, the New Jersey resort town of Mount Freedom had eleven hotels and over 40 bungalow colonies. I wish I had better pictures, but the Catskills seem to have gotten all the photographer love.
I had a wholesale baked-goods route selling pastry and such, similar to what Entenmann’s sells today. My two customers in Mount Freedom, Max Shiffman and Hesh Steinberg, owned competing grocery stores about a mile apart.
Deserted colony, 2007, courtesy Carolyn via flickr.com
Max was the more enterprising of the two, bringing his wares direct to the customers. He filled his Volkswagen bus with baked goods, coffee, eggs, laundry soap and anything else he thought vacationers might need, and circulated through the colonies. On Friday morning I would leave a double or triple order with Max – weekend sales were brisk because all the hard-working fathers came down from the city to visit their families. Dugan products were kosher, so that helped too.
The 1999 film ‘A Walk On The Moon’ features life in a similar colony in the Catskills. We can consider Max a counterpart to the film’s Viggo Mortensen “Blouse Man” character. While Max sells pies and cakes to vacationing Holocaust survivors, Blouse Man’s truck is fitted out as a general store where he sells sexy blouses to frustrated housewives like Diane Lane.
Max had a wife who watched the store while he was out on his rounds, but Hesh did not, so Hesh’s business was limited to walk-in trade from the nearby bungalows. A while back I wrote about a memorable experience I had at Hesh’s when I accidentally disrupted a transaction.
With the construction of the Garden State Parkway came easy access to the Jersey shore and its nearby communities, and Mount Freedom began to fall out of favor as a vacation spot. The bungalows, built for occupancy only between May and September, were eventually classified as substandard housing and demolished, leaving only fond memories.
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 NJ, 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 would be so dangerous.
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 walk into Hesh’s to get his order, I see that he is concluding a sale to a dark-haired young 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.
She sees that I see the numbers on her outstretched arm and snatches her hand back. Her change rolls on the counter.
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 idiot 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 other drivers 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.
Union book. 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 did that, so I stayed 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.
For sale: lapel button, never worn.
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 much bigger than his, so the whole notion is ridiculous.
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 – changing jobs means I won’t be home at three in the afternoon any more.
Once I took my five-year-old 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.
Produce outside a 1930s A&P, Sherman Avenue, Newark. Bobby Cole Archives
While going to programming school during the day, I worked nights at the A&P produce warehouse in Newark. According to pre-employment testing, 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 ammonia 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 “Son of a bitch! Fucking E-1 sheets, every night of the week!”
Johnny was also what might be called the “window man”, the dispatcher. 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 that included Store 37 in Toms River, way down in South Jersey.
Steve, the warehouse-floor foreman, occasionally visited the office to rant about some indignity he had suffered 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-Two was the day foreman. The Vietnam war was grinding on, and Steve-Two was angry and disappointed with anyone who believed the war might be a bad idea. He had a son in the army.
My buddy Lou 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 of shipping produce 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 your fingers 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 school, I put on my tweed suit and started looking for my first programming job. The warehouse manager, Mr. DeBow, directed 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.
