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.
I still have my night job at the A&P warehouse so there’s no rush. My resumé 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 employment 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 Fools’ Day, 1968 and I am at the classy Robert Half employment agency in midtown Manhattan. In honor of the day, station 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 pgood 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 Tom, 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.
Starting home on the subway 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 foot of 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 program 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 show 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.
Tom 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 not as expensive as 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 man who usually stands near our building selling pencils; people drop money into his cup but don’t take a pencil.
One day Mr. Harrison, Tom and I have lunch with Diane, our IBM Sales Engineer, who is dressed for the times in miniskirt and white 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, Tom turns to me and says “You’re crazy, man!” Yes, I probably am.
The classic IBM blue THINK sign is available in other languages and colors for those who like to show off. Mr. Harrison’s boss, the head of accounting, has one on his desk.
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 to us at our desks 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, Tom and I; computer operators the ladylike Ginny, methodical Steve, and barber-school-regular 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 fun – 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 somewhere in Europe, not much English yet, but not much is needed 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 step into 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.
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 the best days 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 walk and sometimes a bit of jostling to get from one conveyance to the next. I start thinking about another hot summer underground.
They’d all rather be somewhere else. Photo courtesy flickriver.com
Beyond the commute, two events help me make up my mind.
As I stop-start walk up the crowded stairs from one subway line 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.
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. One of my programs is still running every day. Whenever I see a photo of Manhattan with its million lights and offices, I say to myself, “I made a difference.”
While complaining elsewhere about my commute to New York City, where I loved my job but hated the commute, I said
“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.”
The first reputable agency I found was in Woodbridge. I interviewed there with a nice lady named Karen; I don’t remember the name of the agency. I wore my British tweeds, maybe the best investment I ever made. Karen wasn’t technical, but I walked her through my resumé and she liked it. She had programming jobs available at Hess Oil & Chemical, right there in Woodbridge, but unfortunately nothing further south. I thought to myself, well, it’s not the Jersey Shore, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Hess Oil & Chemical, Woodbridge, NJ
When I arrived at Hess for my interview, I met with Ted, one of the two managers involved with “Data Processing”, as people called it before things got fancy. He was interested in the time-saving programs and designs claimed on my resumé, and gave me an intensive quiz on how one in particular worked. Satisfied, he asked if I had any questions of my own and how soon could I start. Then he brought me to the office of Dave, his fellow manager, to show me off.
The relationship between Ted’s department and Dave’s was not explained, but I could sense some friction between the two managers. I soon discovered that the Hess management style was to cultivate rivalries between peers. The theory behind the style is: Hands off, let them fight it out, the cream will rise to the top. This sort of rivalry produces conflict rather than collaboration; it is contagious and extends down to team members, making for an unhappy workplace.
From The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2020: “The chief of SoftBank’s Vision Fund used a campaign of sabotage to undermine two internal rivals, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.” … “The tactics included planting negative news stories about them, concocting a shareholder campaign to pressure SoftBank to fire them and even attempting to lure one of them into a ‘honey trap’ of sexual blackmail.” So, there’s an extreme example.
I was not happy at Hess at first, and after a few weeks I sneaked down to the phone booth in the lobby to call Karen and ask whether I had any obligation to the agency if I quit. (Typically, the employer pays the recruiting agency a commission equal to one month’s pay of the placed employee.) She asked if I had been there a month; when I said that I had, she told me I could leave any time I wanted to. Feeling a sudden sense of freedom, I went back upstairs and stayed for the better part of two years.
The programmer/analyst offices at Hess were nice. They were actual rooms, not cubicles, with a door, windows looking into the building interior, and outside windows looking over the parking lot and the world. I shared a two-desk office with Aldo, a flashy dresser with a big personality, who’d been with the company several years. Our desks were one behind the other, facing the windows to the interior. Aldo had been with the company longest, so his desk was behind mine, closest to the outside window.
A local retiree had built a business of visiting area office buildings, shining shoes. He was on a loose schedule, and you knew what day he’d be in your building. The first time I saw him, he showed up at our office door carrying his shine box and asked Aldo if now was a good time. This was a new one on me – I’d seen shoeshine guys working in and around Grand Central, but I’d never seen one who would give you a shine at your desk. After a few minutes of brushing and rag-popping behind me, Aldo said “Hey, give my buddy a shine too, I think he needs one.” I said “No thanks, I’m fine”, but Aldo said “Come on, it’s my treat” and directed the guy to go ahead. So, I got my first deskside shoeshine, which turned out to be a good one and oddly relaxing. Aldo liked to buy things for people, and I was not the only one he’d treat. He was generous, and at least as far as shoeshines were concerned, an over-tipper.
One day Ted came to our office with a thick folder. Working through the material in the folder, he gave Aldo a new assignment, a project that would print an inventory of every product in Hess’s 40-odd gas stations. It took quite a while for Ted to explain. I couldn’t see what was in the folder, but the whole thing sounded pretty complicated.
After Ted left, there was complete silence for a moment, then Aldo exploded. “Fuck this! I’ve been here for nine years! I want easy shit!”. A minute later, he threw the folder into our shared wastebasket. When I left the office that night, it was still there.
About three weeks later, Ted came to our office again, asking, “Aldo, how’s the gas station inventory coming along?” Aldo put a confused look on his face and asked Ted what he was talking about. A short discussion ended with Aldo flat-out denying he had been assigned such a project. For me listening, it was sad and embarrassing. Ted walked back to his office and returned with the original folder, which had been rescued from the trash by the cleaning crew. He dropped it on Aldo’s desk, and said “This time, don’t throw it away.”
Somewhere along here I relocated my family to the Jersey Shore, another step in the right direction, and we invited Aldo and his wife to spend a day at the beach with us. They didn’t have any kids of their own, but it turned out they got along great with ours. At lunchtime we went up to the boardwalk, with Aldo insisting as usual that it would be his treat. When the waitress took our orders, she started with Aldo, and when she got to what he’d like to drink, he said “Coke”. When she asked “Small, medium or large?”, he looked almost hurt, and replied “Big. Everything’s big with me.” Even years later, “Everything’s big with me” remains a Smithee family catchphrase.
At Hess, an employee’s office location could be downgraded as a punishment. One programmer screwed up somehow and got himself relocated to the back row of a six-desk interior office. On the other side of the wall behind him was the men’s room, and when he complained about the noise of toilets flushing, he was told to listen closely and keep a record of how many times it happened each day. He didn’t stay with the company long after that.
Hess had a mean, public way of firing people – at 4:15 on Friday afternoon, the PA system might click on and you’d hear a name called out, with that person directed to “report to” his manager’s office. Those hearing the announcement would think to themselves, “…and bring your coat”.
Life in the Cube
The morning after the moon landing in 1969, everyone came to work proud, happy, and suffering from lack of sleep; we couldn’t talk about anything else. This time we were all on the same team.
Another subject that took up a lot of employee time was arguing over the expected outcome of the upcoming fight between Cassius Clay and Jerry Quarry. Quarry was clearly the departmental favorite, but it didn’t work out that way.
Fun fact for oil company programmers: there are 42 gallons in a barrel.
Hess had an excellent cafeteria. Anything you wanted – a hot meal, a custom-built sandwich, maybe both; multiple desserts, seconds on anything, all were yours for fifty cents a day. The unspoken goal was to keep employees inside the building at lunchtime, not burning up time driving to outside restaurants and back.
Management sometimes reacted oddly to an event, making up new rules. Ted’s mother ran a keypunch service that kept track of bowling league scores, and on the q.t. each week Ted brought in a pack of punched cards and ran a program to calculate and print the latest standings. On one occasion he misdirected his printout to the printer at the refinery across town, which happened to have payroll checks mounted. For several weeks following, arriving employees had to open their brief cases so the guard could see they were not bringing in punch cards.
In December 1970 the Esso refinery in nearby Elizabeth was bombed, one of the era’s hundreds of protest bombings by underground radical groups. The explosion injured 37 people, blew out windows for miles around, and caused millions of dollars in damages.
Protest bombings were commonplace then, averaging about five a day nationwide, and the bombers usually called ahead to warn targets to evacuate. There were false warnings as well, with the Hess building an occasional target. We were never told why we were being ordered to evacuate, but evacuate we did, wandering around the parking lot and socializing while the police and fire department searched the building. This occurred maybe a half dozen times, a week or so apart.
One morning Aldo and I were in our office when someone we’d never seen before walked in and proceeded to open the doors of our storage cabinets. I asked “What’s going on?”, then a second later realized, and said “You’re looking for a bomb, aren’t you?”. In this case, the company had rolled the dice and decided to put us all at risk rather than suffer more lost productivity.
At Christmas, employees received a frozen turkey and that year’s model Hess truck, always a cool and sturdy toy. When the turkey shipment arrived, they were dumped in an empty room and we were called downstairs, one department at a time, to each take one. One year the merchant who ran the lobby newsstand was invited to take one for himself. We arrived to find him crawling across the floor, checking each label to find a bird that weighed a few ounces more. Two Hess executives looked on, shaking their heads.
A signup sheet was circulated to include your home address if you were interested in exchanging Christmas cards. I was friendly with a technical writer in another department, Anne, and if I had to go to her office to discuss some business, I would hang around for a while just to talk. She was pretty, smart and divorced, and had a little boy named Scotty. She sent me a Christmas card, and Mimi, a fan of all traditional rules of etiquette, found a lot wrong with it. Besides addressing the card to me only, not to “Mr. & Mrs. Paul Smithee” as would be proper, she signed it “Love, Anne and Scotty”. “Anne” was not a name I had ever mentioned in my at-home recounting of life at Hess, so I had to explain her role there, and added “Scotty is her son.” Reexamining that long-ago discussion, I can see that Scotty’s identity was not something I should have known.
There is a saying that the four letters in “Hess” stand for holidays, evenings, Saturday and Sunday. The data processing department was pretty much immune to working overtime, but one Saturday an executive wandering through the building visited our floor and noticed no one was there. Thereafter, we had to have at least one person on duty over the weekend, “In case someone has a question”.
One day my cousin John told me he had seen a billboard advertising for computer programmers, on Route 66 in Neptune, not far from my house. A billboard?! They must be desperate. I’ll just drive by and get the address.
I worked for the INSCO Systems Corporation, aka Insco, for thirteen mostly happy years, the longest I ever worked in the same place.
Lots of things ‘happened’ there and this article was getting too long, so I decided to break it up into six easier-to-digest parts. This is Part 1. I’ll try to keep the technical stuff to a minimum; these are about people.
Writing about my previous employer, Hess Oil, I mentioned my cousin seeing a highway billboard advertising for computer programmers. I got one of those jobs, and it turned out to to be a pretty good one.
Insco Systems, 3501 State Highway 66, Neptune, NJ
Some of the ‘happenings’ written about here might make the company look clueless at times, and one or two of its people mean-spirited, but that can be true in any bureaucracy. I enjoyed my years at Insco. I kept my head down, stayed out of office politics as much as possible, and have many fond memories.
Moving the work to New Jersey
Continental Insurance was outgrowing its office in New York City, so they commissioned a three-story modern building in Neptune, New Jersey where they would relocate their data processing. Expecting a tax advantage, in 1968 they established the site as a separate company, naming it INSCO Systems. During the next tax season, they discovered there was no real advantage to having a separate company, and changed the name back to Continental. I’ll call it Insco here because that’s what the employees always called it.
Getting hired
I hate commuting; it’s a waste of time and money. Insco was only thirteen miles and one toll plaza away from my house, so even knowing nothing about the company, I was interested in working there. I sent them a resumé but I didn’t have expertise in the operating system they were using. I got a personal letter that thanked me for applying, said my resumé looked fine, but that one skill was lacking. A few weeks later they ran a newspaper ad; I answered it and got another nice letter, same skill still lacking.
After one more cycle of this, they realized they were not going to find that skill in Central Jersey. They designed a four-week training class, ran a new ad and contacted people like me that they’d been turning down.
I came in, filled out an application and had the usual is-the-applicant-sane initial screening. Next, they gave me an IQ test (employers could do that then), then a “spatial reasoning” test, imagining rotations of 3-D objects. The 3-D puzzles were easy, and after a technical interview with a department head, in May of 1971 I was hired.
Starting work
They had already moved the mainframe computers from New York to Neptune, along with the programming staff who wanted to relocate. After the class, I was assigned to a development group and given the first of many assignments.
About two months later, I got a phone call asking me to come downstairs and see Bob Hoberman, the head of Personnel. Mr. Hoberman said he had heard good things about my work, but Orange High School couldn’t find any record of my graduating. I explained that I didn’t actually “graduate” graduate, but had taken the state high school equivalency tests a few years earlier, and had a GED certificate. He really wanted to help, and said “So, when you said on your application you graduated high school, that was a figure of speech?” I grabbed that phrase like a drowning man, and said he was correct. Thank you, Mr. Hoberman, you are a gentleman.
I never received the actual GED certificate in the mail, and asked my wife to help track it down. She talked to a nice woman in Trenton and found out I had juussssstt missed passing one of the five test sections, math. The woman went all-out, working with Mimi to identify any “life experience” that might get me some extra educational credit. Finally, she asked if I’d been in the military, and bingo, I had some life credits and a GED.
The company had two mainframe computers – a production one to collect data from branch offices around the country and handle insurance-policy production and claims, the other a VM system to support development and testing of the production programs. VM stands for Virtual Machine, and each VM user has their own separate and independent virtual computer, with exclusive access to an imaginary card reader, card punch, printer, and tape drive. It’s so clever it’s almost magic.
Application programmers wrote their programs with pencil on paper forms at their desks, got them punched into cards by the keypunch department, then used the terminal room workstations to test, modify and improve them.
“Talking to the metal”
After I’d been in applications development for about a year, an opening came up in the technical unit, the group that fed and tended the mainframe computers. I knew assembler language, which is how software “talks to the metal”, as the expression goes, so I had a leg up. I interviewed for the opening and was offered a transfer. Special thanks to vice president Phil Keating, who did not oppose my transfer out of his group, saying he wanted to have at least one friend in the technical unit.
Managing attendance
At some point, the company switched to flextime, a policy that respects employees’ need to sometimes conduct personal business such as medical appointments during work hours. Borrowing from Wikipedia,
Flextime allows workers to adjust their start and finish times as long as they complete the required daily/weekly number of hours. There is a “core” period during the day when all employees are required to be at work, and outside that a flexible period, within which all required hours must be worked.
I didn’t have any childcare issues or rely on public transportation, so to me flextime wasn’t that big a deal . But it did mean I could go for a run in the morning without starting out in the dark.
My boss’s boss, senior vice president Gordon Gilchrest, was old-school; he hated what he saw as the unpredictability of flextime. When we discussed the policy, he kept interrupting with “But when will you be here?”. I wanted to answer “Whenever the hell I feel like it, that’s the whole idea” but instead I just said I’d probably come in two hours later on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He wasn’t thrilled with that either, but at least it was predictable.
Tracking our hours
Right about the time flextime went into effect, the company bought, or had sold to it, the “Accumulator” system, with an Accumulator placed in each department, near the secretary’s desk. It was a little bigger than a hardback book, with maybe 20 slots on the front. Each employee had a card with their name on it sitting in one of the slots. Each card, or ‘plug’, was like a tiny odometer, clocking how long it was plugged firmly into its slot, meaning the employee was at work. When the employee was not at work, the plug was pulled out far enough to disengage, making a soft click and stopping the clock. At least that was the theory.
Side story: at 8:30 one morning, a supervisor saw two clerks from his department having a cafeteria chat with someone from another unit, and suspected they were clocked in and chatting on company time. Co-opting an unrelated figure of speech, he asked “Are you girls on the plug?”, to which they replied indignantly “NO WE’RE NOT ON THE PLUG.”
Humans, professionals in particular, don’t like punching a time clock, which is basically what the Accumulator was. Consciously or unconsciously, people forgot to push their plugs in or pull their plugs out as appropriate when they started work, went to lunch, or left for the day, making the system effectively worthless. Plugs were recording weekly attendance from zero hours to over 100.
Flextime became a permanent policy, but the Accumulators, rendered useless by human nature, were removed. There are no photos of the Accumulator out on the internet for me to show you, suggesting they never worked anywhere else either.
The building’s floor space was set up on the “open” plan, that is, broad areas divided into cubicles, with walls, more politely called ‘dividers’, four feet high. Project managers got corner cubicles, nice because there were walls on only two sides and you could look out the window without standing up. There was also greater privacy because a corner cubicle was generally not the shortest distance between two points. Department heads, assistant vice presidents and vice presidents got enclosed offices, with windows and a door.
Status was important. You could determine the size of an office and the relative rank of its occupant by counting the four-feet-square fluorescent lighting fixtures making up the ceiling. For example, there were two levels of assistant vice president and thus two office sizes, leading to expressions such as “Is he a six-light or a nine-light AVP?” There were smaller distinctions also. In one case, a new AVP was housed in a standard six-light office but it was furnished with the fancier desk phone normally issued to the next higher level. A complaint of “too many buttons” was made by another six-light AVP, and the offender’s phone was rightsized.
In another case of jealousy and comeuppance, my final boss at Insco, Ramesh, a vice president who used his six weeks of vacation each year to visit his homeland, had been issued a standard executive desk, but with an oversize desktop – there was an extra four inches of mahogany between him and his visitors. The day after he left for vacation, two of the other vice presidents were in his office with a yardstick, confirming a longstanding suspicion. Next day, workers removed the desktop and took it away, presumably to be cut down to proper size, along with its owner. The two drawer-pedestals underneath were left without a top, their contents exposed to the world.
Ramesh was not popular with his peers, and the other vice presidents just happened to stroll by his office that day, suppressing snickers.
Ramesh was not popular with me, either, and once at an industry social gathering where there was drinking, he introduced me to one of his countrymen as “My employee, Paul Smithee”. I took out a business card, indicated the Continental Soldier and said “That’s funny, you don’t look anything like this.” Writing this today, I realize that was right around the time Ramesh began making my life at work more difficult.
1977 Pontiac Trans Am, bringatrailer.com
There was another indicator of status, in the employee parking lot. About twenty of the spaces closest to the building entrance were striped off and available on a first come, first served basis to employees of a certain job grade or above. I had made it to that grade, and one morning I pulled in simultaneously with a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, a car that seemed badly out of place in an insurance company parking lot. Mr. Spohn, a vice president and gentleman, stepped out looking embarrassed. When he saw me, he felt compelled to explain “It’s my son’s.”
Gordon Gordon, my boss’s boss, was senior vice president in charge of all things directly computer related. He was the first executive to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. This allowed him to get daily face-to-face status reports from each of the three computer room shift leaders.
Gordon and I once had to go to the company’s New York office, and on our way back walked by a loading dock where the workers were passing around a hand-rolled cigarette. Without thinking, I commented “Smells like those guys are having a good time.” Gordon asked “What do you mean?”. I told him what the smell was, and he said “How do you know that?”. I got myself off the hook for knowing what marihuana smelled like by telling him the absolutely true story of how my wife and I were at a PTA meeting and a sheriff’s deputy came in with what he called “an artificial marihuana tablet” on a tray, set a match to it and passed the tray around so parents could recognize the smell and manage their children accordingly.
Some of the guys from work formed a hockey team that played in a league at the Ocean Ice Palace. Even though I hate the cold, I let them talk me into coming along to watch their first game. They knew Gordon had played hockey back in college, and asked him to referee. After the game, one player invited everyone to his apartment for a beer. Two players slipped into the kitchen to smoke, and after a while someone noticed Gordon was missing. Apparently, he got a whiff and left without saying goodnight. He just didn’t want to know.
IBM SE Marty
IBM assigns a permanent on-site systems engineer, or SE, to big customers like Insco. The SE serves as interface between the customer and IBM, and as a general rule all communications should go through them. The SE works to keep the interface friction-free, and tries to stay close to the customer’s technical executive, in this case Gordon.
Gordon had me writing a monthly status report about the VM project, copying other Insco executives as well. I never got any feedback to show that anyone was reading it, so I dropped “Stop me before I kill again” into the middle of a paragraph. No response. In the next report, I wrote “Since no one ever reads it, this report will be the last.” Marty came to me a day later and said “Please don’t stop writing your reports, everybody loves them.” That was a surprise: Gordon was passing what I assumed to be an Insco internal report on to Marty, and she in turn passed it to her management.
My job meant I had to sometimes lodge complaints about IBM support. Right in front of me, an IBMer tracking an unresolved problem asked Marty, “How can we keep Paul happy?” I told him I didn’t want to be happy; I wanted the problem to be fixed, and for a while I called Marty our Happiness Engineer.
When a group from Insco went off to a technical conference, Marty would often go too, staying at the same hotel and joining us (and sometimes paying) for dinner. I always believed her main assignment on the road was to make sure we didn’t go off the reservation and talk to someone from another computer company.
I usually told my wife about anything of interest that happened on a trip, and once I said “I was talking to Marty, and she said…”, interrupted by “’SHE said’? MARTY IS A WOMAN?” I said “Yes, I told you that” and she said “No, you never told me that!”, and we agreed to disagree, in silence. I’m sure I told her that years earlier. Pretty sure.
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. 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 caddie 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 caddie, 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 Luckys that day.
Gordon had been in the Marines, fighting in the Pacific as a young second lieutenant. He and his platoon 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 computer gear, 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 in the executive suite 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 left the building.
Gordon, my boss’s boss at Continental Insurance, was a Scotsman, and he met the Scottish stereotype for thriftiness. In addition to leasing our computers, he oversaw the company’s phone services, including those of the computer room and branch offices, and paid the bills. He was a talented manager of the company’s money, and of his own.
He lived in Brielle, an upscale town at the Jersey Shore. One day he told me he had asked the phone company to set up his home service as an old-fashioned party line, getting a monthly discount.
I knew how party lines worked from visiting my uncle’s farm as a kid in the 1940s. A single line, a length of wire, was shared with several neighbors. Each neighbor had their own unique incoming ring code, such as two longs and three shorts.
When an incoming call arrived, the code rang on every phone on the line. If it was your code, you answered. If it wasn’t, and you were nosy, you could quietly listen in. Anyone else on the party line could listen in, too.
To make a call, you picked up the phone and hoped to hear the operator say “Number, please.” If instead you heard a neighbor talking, you tried again later.
I didn’t understand why Gordon would want to put up with all that uncertainty just to save a few dollars. He explained that no one else in Brielle would ever want to be on a party line, so for him it was a private line, at a reduced price. Gordon was always one step ahead.
With few exceptions, the people I worked with at Insco were good, friendly people, and I miss them. Seeing the building being torn down last year made me very sad.
Arthur
When I started at Insco, I inherited maintaining one of Arthur’s older insurance programs, and got to know him. He was an incredibly productive programmer and a CPA – a mad genius who could write an entire property insurance system without a written specification, based only on Insco’s contract with some far-off state agency, inventing the parts that were necessary but not written down. It seemed like he worked 12 hours a day; any night I stayed late I’d pass his desk on my way out, him still furiously spinning out code, surrounded by cigar smoke and stacks of program listings. Arthur was old and gray and frail, and he loved the company and his work.
I had known Arthur for only a year when I saw his name on the local newspaper’s obituary page. He died in Jersey Shore hospital, no mention of the cause. He left behind a wife and five children, a terrible thing, but to me most terrible was that this worn-out old man was only 48 years old. I kept a copy of his obituary to remind me of what’s important.
Paul Prinzhorn Paul was a young programmer and philosophy major who was taking a night course in statistics at Rutgers-Newark. As he started home one night, he was stopped by two locals who wanted his wallet and briefcase. He resisted, and they stabbed him to death. When I heard, I thought, one more crime that will never be solved. But while writing this I found out, via newspapers.com, that the two were identified by a witness, arrested, and in 1982 sentenced to life in prison. 1982 is a long time ago, but I hope “Life” means life, and they are still there. That’s why I pay taxes.
Don’t resist, friends. I know it goes against every normal instinct, but don’t.
More Gordon
Gordon and I got to talking about when I worked at Hess. He dismissed the Hess notion of keeping people in the building at lunch time with a cafeteria that served great and unlimited food for only 50 cents a day. I told him Hess had another great idea; cafeteria staff rolled a cart into your department twice a day with free coffee, juice and soda. He looked at me as though I was crazy, but I said Hess saw it as win-win because the employees weren’t burning up time going back and forth to the cafeteria. He seemed to like the idea better after that, but didn’t say anything more and I forgot about it. A few weeks later I heard a buzz of excitement down the hall, and here came a cafeteria lady, pushing a cart of coffee, juice and soda, AND a selection of pastries. The catch? She also had a little cash box to make change: none of it was free; Gordon wasn’t giving anything away. Everyone was happy about the great new convenience, but only I knew what might have been.
Tech manager Bob
Bob was the first manager of the technical unit, the collection of programmers that fed and tended the two mainframe computers. I knew IBM 360 assembler language, which is how applications “talk to the metal” as they say, and when an opening in the unit came up, I interviewed with Bob and was offered a transfer. Special thanks to Phil Keating, the vice president who did not oppose my transfer out of his area.
Kermit Says
Bob had a strange approach to managing, but it worked. I don’t know if he did it to keep us entertained, or because he had a mental block about directly assigning work. He’d put a sock puppet on each hand (one was Kermit, I forget the other), crouch behind his cubicle wall, raise his hands and start a Muppet-voiced conversation:
Kermit: IBM sent us an operating system update! Not Kermit: I hope it fixes all the bugs! Kermit: Me too, but we’ll have to shut down the system to install it! Not Kermit: Oh no! Kermit: It’ll be alright, we’ll all come in at six o’clock tomorrow morning after production finishes! Not Kermit: That sounds great! See you there!
Tech manager Dennis
When Bob left the company for more money, we got a new manager, Dennis. Dennis had a peculiar loyalty to the hardware brand Itel (sometimes misread as Intel), a cheaper non-IBM brand of disk data storage, and he persuaded Insco to install eight units. Itel was a subsidiary of Hitachi, a Japanese company, and thus automatically on the wrong side of Gordon, a veteran of World War II. Gordon took quiet satisfaction in every Itel hardware failure, which were common. When an Itel unit failed, their service person sometimes had to drive to the Army base at Fort Monmouth, about ten miles away, trading circuit boards back and forth between the two sites to isolate the failure to a single bad board. Dennis once asked me to make up a six-letter name for a new Itel unit, then was unhappy when I chose BRANDX.
Dennis was a bit shady, and he’d roam the department in the evening, searching for candy or gum. I kept this note in my pencil tray. It seemed to work. Notice how it suggests that nobody actually knows who “cheap bastard” is.
As the company added programmers, the VM system slowed down, and a faster machine was needed. I don’t know every detail of what happened next, but here’s the general idea as best I understood it. Remember I’m not a hardware expert.
When Gordon read the specification for the newly announced IBM 370/148, it appeared to be 20% faster than our current computer, a 360/67. Dennis said Gordon didn’t understand the specification – although the cycle speed was faster, the 370/148 would require more cycles per instruction, meaning any given unit of work would take about four times as long as on the old machine. Gordon disagreed with Dennis’s interpretation. There were heated arguments, but Gordon outranked Dennis, Dennis gave up, and a 370/148 was ordered.
Gordon was a great manager and negotiator, but not an expert in the fine points of computer hardware, and his interpretation of the 370/148 spec was wrong. The 370/148 was installed, and as more users arrived at work on its first day, performance went from slow to terrible. After a few hours, the users were ready to riot and Gordon took me aside to ask, in an indirect way, about the possibility of sabotage. No, there had been no unauthorized changes, by Dennis or anyone else. It took two or three days to get the old machine reinstalled, then IBM helped Gordon choose a better, faster model. The whole thing was a disaster, and a huge embarrassment for Gordon. For me, the worst part was that Dennis was right.
Jenny and me? Nah.
One more thing about Gordon. I never saw it in his dealings with me, but apparently he could be impatient and nasty in his dealings with his secretary, Jenny. She and I were friendly and she knew I understood Gordon, and one day she came downstairs in an emotional state, looking for some sympathy. She appeared in my office doorway and asked if she could come in. Of course she could, and I closed the door. (How different things were then!) Gordon had finally worn her down, and she spent the next five or ten minutes crying about the way he treated her. I can be sympathetic when I want to be, and she eventually calmed down. I opened the door and she left, still red-faced. Meanwhile, my own secretary, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, had been listening at her desk outside the door. Based on all the crying, she tried to float a rumor that Jenny and I were lovers, but nobody was buying it.
Crashing
IBM 2741 terminal with continuous fanfold paper. Courtesy Northwest Computer Club
Before there was VM, there was CP-67, a predecessor that ran on an earlier IBM machine, the 360-67. I call them both “VM” here for convenience, and because for people developing programs there wasn’t much difference, except for the terminals/workstations. Invented before the silent CRT, the noisy 2741 terminal was based on the IBM Selectric typewriter and printed the same way, by banging a typeball through an inked ribbon onto paper, one letter at a time in a machine-gun clackety-clack.
In the early days of VM, you could expect at least one system crash a day, sometimes more. People made a habit of issuing a “Save” command every few minutes, sometimes more often, to minimize how much work they’d have to repeat after a crash.
On a VM system with the noisy 2741 terminals, a computer crash really was a crash. Suddenly the room went silent and all keyboards locked. For a second, the human mind imagined the silence might be a coincidence, that maybe everyone was forming a new thought and had stopped typing. As the silence stretched into several more seconds, we accepted that the system was crashing under us; the silence was the system organizing itself to restart. During those last seconds, there was a collective sigh – we knew any work since our last Save was lost.
The silence ended with an actual crashing sound – every terminal in the room simultaneously banged out the system’s Welcome message, “IBM CP-67/CMS online”. The best way to think of that sound is to imagine a stack of dishes dropped straight down, staying together until they hit the floor. That sound confirmed the system had indeed crashed, and was followed by a dispirited “Awwwwwwww.”
Charles
Charles was a programmer who smoked a lot of marijuana. Maybe he was stupid already, but who can say.
One day he was sitting next to me in the terminal room. In his befuddled state, he typed in a command that deleted the only copy of the program he had been working on. He still had a paper listing though, so he began typing it in. The program was relatively small, maybe 200 lines of code. After he’d been typing for an hour or so, the system crashed, and Charles let out a sad “Ohhhhh.” I could tell he hadn’t saved his work, because he went right back to the top of his listing and began typing it in again. After a while the system crashed again, and he put his head down as though he was going to cry. I said “You didn’t say ‘Save’ this time either?” He hadn’t.
He looked so upset that I felt sorry for him. I wasn’t his boss, so I couldn’t tell him what to do, but I made a sort of tough-love suggestion. I said “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, go home, and think about whether computer programming is the right line of work for you?”
He did leave for the day, and the story had a happy ending, for both Charles and for Insco. A few weeks later, Charles gave notice. He’d found a better job, as a programming consultant for one of the big accounting firms. Those of us who heard just rolled our eyes.
James and the Giant Printer
IBM 3800 laser printer, courtesy IBM History, via Pinterest
Insco ordered a high-speed laser printer, the new IBM 3800. The VM operating system didn’t support the 3800, so IBM arranged time for us to develop our own support code in their Madison Avenue office. We would give IBM a copy of our changes to provide to other 3800 buyers. VM shops were a small, friendly community in those early days, and innovations were freely shared.
Jim was a systems programmer who knew his way around VM, and was also an expert mechanic who kept his church’s old school bus running and getting parishioners to church each Sunday.
IBM 3330 disk pack with carry handle. 200 megabytes, baby! ibmcollectable.com
After some planning, Jim and I headed for New York. We brought along a copy of Insco’s own customized VM system, on a disk pack in one of those plastic carriers that looks like an oversize birthday cake. Boarding the subway for the trip uptown to IBM, I suddenly imagined that our system might be erased if we sat too close to the motors, and we kept to the center of the car. The system survived just fine.
Insco was reasonable about letting people stay in a hotel short-term rather than commuting back and forth, and that’s what we did. After we finished up each evening, we had a leisurely dinner and headed back to the hotel. James was not a drinker and kept to his room; I headed for the hotel bar. In moderation, of course.
I think we were in the city four days, changing code and running back and forth between our workroom and the seemingly locomotive-sized printer. We used up a lot of paper getting that monster working, but it finally did, quietly and at great speed.
Insco’s own 3800 arrived one weekend and was installed dead center in the computer room. It took up a lot of space and was the first thing you saw when you walked in. When I got my first look, I was surprised and disappointed: our world-class, superfast printer was crooked. Instead of sitting parallel to every other piece of equipment in the room, it was misaligned, just enough to look a bit silly. The computer-room manager said the installers had a terrible time with it (it weighed 2200 pounds), and said the resulting position was the best they could do. The manager’s vice president said it wasn’t off by very much, and did it really matter? I was not happy, and for a while I had to see it every day.
Chairman Ricker
I never met Continental’s chairman, but he became something of a hero to me. On his next visit to Neptune, the first thing he said when he saw his new printer was “Why is it crooked?” Nobody tried to convince him it wasn’t, and it got fixed.
When you’re the chairman, it’s easy to make things happen. He often flew between the New York and Chicago offices, 720 miles, and when he became chairman, he adjusted company policy to allow first class travel for any trip exceeding 700 miles.
Feeding time. A full-time operator was often assigned to satisfy the machine’s endless appetite for paper. Courtesy historyofinformation.com
Queeg had been a captain in the Merchant Marine during World War II, and he seemed to think he still was. Queeg was not his real name of course, but he reminded us of the unstable disciplinarian captain of the WW II minesweeper USS Caine, the Humphrey Bogart role in The Caine Mutiny. In peacetime, Queeg was vice president in charge of Insco’s physical plant – such things as cleaning and maintenance, heating and cooling, landscaping, the parking lot, and building security.
New rule
Soon after the building was fully staffed in 1971, Queeg held an all-hands meeting to familiarize us with the rules. Back then, people dressed for business: women wore conservative dresses or suits, men wore suits and ties. Queeg reminded us of the dress code, and added that men would need to wear their suit jackets when away from their desks. I raised my hand and asked how far away from our desks could we be before we needed a jacket. He was annoyed by the question, but instantly invented a rule, “Ten feet.”
Attitude survey
I think Queeg’s high-handedness was responsible, directly or indirectly, for a lot of employee unhappiness and turnover, especially during Insco’s early days. After a while, the personnel department developed an anonymous attitude survey, ostensibly to identify problem areas. The survey was immediately suspect because it wasn’t available for everyone to take – people were selected for it, perhaps one in every five or ten employees. People thought “happier” employees had been chosen, to make things look better at headquarters. Many of those not selected wanted to air their views, and asked for a chance to take the survey. These requests were denied, resulting in more discontent. Management eventually relented, and a new survey was offered, this time to everyone. The results were not made available.
Old Coffeestain
One day coming back from the cafeteria with a cup of coffee, I got on the elevator; Queeg and one of his direct reports, the site electrician, boarded right behind me. There was a fresh coffee stain on the beige carpet. Queeg said, I assume to the electrician, “Bunch of fucking pigs work in this building.” I couldn’t believe my ears, and winced. The electrician gestured at my cup, and in a roundabout way excluded me from, and apologized for, the insult, telling his boss “He’s got a lid on his.”
Surveillance
Trying to gather intelligence on what employees talked to each other about, one day he slouched down in the chair of an unoccupied corner (low traffic) cubicle, just listening. Word spread, and after several people walked by and pretended surprise to see him, he got up and left. He didn’t even have enough respect to invent a reason to be there. Jeez, bring a book and pretend you’ve found a quiet place to read.
Returning from lunch one day, I was surprised to see a security camera facing the elevator doors, a sign of things to come. Because the camera was new, I presumed there would be a crowd in the security office watching the feed, and faked a little flamenco dance. That’ll keep ‘em entertained. One more thing to hate us for.
I don’t know what our security guards’ crimefighting backgrounds were, but most of them seemed to come with an us-against-them mentality. “Hate” is a strong word, so instead I’ll say the guards disliked us – for making more money than them, for laughing and enjoying ourselves, for our low-grade disrespect, for sometimes soiling the carpet and making the Captain angry.
One night I was working alone in the terminal room and put my feet up on the workstation table while I studied the printout in my lap. A guard came by, stood in the doorway and stared at me, hard. I could tell it was all he could do to not slap my feet off that table.
People below a certain pay grade were paid $5.00 an hour for overtime. You’re right, it’s not much, but it was at least something, more than a lot of places. The back door was locked at night, and after six o’clock everyone had to exit through the front, signing their name and time in the logbook at the guard’s desk. One night several of us left at the same time, but twenty feet down the sidewalk I realized I had forgotten something. I turned around and reentered the building, to find Queeg leaning over the guard’s shoulder, checking the log to see if we had fudged our exit times. How did he get there so fast? He’d been hiding in the closet behind the guard’s desk.
I wasn’t doing the programming work I loved anymore; mostly I managed the people in my department. Sometimes I had to get involved in office politics, in my opinion a low activity.
Twice a year I had to do performance appraisals; these gave me problems getting to sleep and a nervous stomach on appraisal day. My boss made me review each one with him beforehand; in his management book, everyone has something in serious need of improvement, even if we have to stretch the truth. This feels dishonest.
My group researched and travelled to manufacturers’ sites to identify the best new midrange computer for the branch offices. When we made our recommendation, we unfortunately chose a “wrong” brand, not the one favored by our higher-ups. The company president made a crack to me about “shitting in the punch bowl”, that is, spoiling something that was going along oh-so-well. Not a career booster.
Insco had been paying me pretty well over the years, and it seemed unlikely anyone else would pay me that well to do something I liked doing, so I wasn’t really looking for another job. Life at Insco wasn’t so great anymore, but it was still borderline okay.
Then one Sunday I was browsing the New York Times help-wanted section, and saw a job that seemed to have my name on it: IBM’s Yorktown Research Laboratory, not very far away, was looking for VM/370 systems programmers. Programming! Hands-on tech stuff! I thought about it for a day, then had a talk with Mimi. She was ready for a new adventure, and I started working on my resumé .
Some people in Yorktown already knew about helpful improvements I had made to the VM operating system, and I was invited for an interview.
The clerk who phoned to set up the interview said to bring a copy of “my highest degree”. When I told her I didn’t have a degree, she said “Not even a bachelor’s?” She sounded very young. Remembering the “figure of speech” issue that came up at Insco thirteen years earlier, I had been very careful when filling out my application, and I asked “Is that a problem?” She seemed flustered, and answered “Oh, no, no, not at all.” When you drop out of school, the explaining never ends.
I got through my interviews and the physical just fine, and was offered a job again doing the work I loved.
Side story: The physical was quite thorough, and included taking a blood specimen. While checking my blood pressure later, as the pressure cuff was doing its stuff, the doctor asked if I had any objection to them running a drug screen on my blood. I said that would be fine. I think the odd timing of that question was calculated to produce a pressure spike in pot smokers or such.
When I gave notice at Insco, nobody was surprised.
Here’s a link to my daily life at Yorktown and beyond. I stayed at IBM until I took their generous 1992 buyout offer and retired.
Comment on smoking: I started smoking as a teenager, and have quit many times – for a few hours, a few days, once even for five years. I always went back. At Insco, the stress of being in management got me smoking again. Sitting on the beach the day after my last day at Insco, I realized I no longer had an excuse or the desire to smoke, and I quit again, this time for good. I do sometimes wish I had a cigarette though, even 36 years later. Don’t smoke, kids. You’ll be sorry.
Epilogue
Continental Insurance
Continental Insurance was taken over by CNA Financial, who now send me a small check every month.
The site
Sometime in the 1990s, Continental’s lines of business dried up or were sold off, and Continental leased the Neptune building to Prudential. I don’t know how long Prudential stayed there, but a Google Earth timeline shows no sign of life after 2006. When I drove by in August 2020, the main building was being demolished.
Old Rob and me
I recently got on the ordering line at a Jersey Mike’s, and recognized the gent ahead of me as someone who was a programmer at Insco 35 years ago. After we talked for a few minutes, I couldn’t help myself, and made a little joke, “Wow, you got old.” I don’t think it was well received. It would have been a better joke, and much more accurate, if I had said “Wow, we got old.”
Henry In my layman’s opinion, Henry offers a good example of what stress, competitive pressure and overwork can do to a brilliant mind. Henry was a proud member of Mensa who also played chess and bridge competitively.
He was also a talented programmer, and late one summer night he was summoned to work to solve a production problem. He arrived wearing flip-flops, a bathing suit and a bathrobe, probably what he was wearing when the phone rang.
A guard who went to check on him found him at play in the second-floor men’s room. He had filled the sinks, and was splashing in them like a child, scooping water from one to the next.
His family got him into the Carrier Clinic, a well-regarded behavioral-health hospital. Friends who visited him during what he called his “vacation” reported he was feeling fine, and in few weeks he was back at work, with a reduced workload.
Sunny
The company hired a records clerk who was flashy and sexy and wore short skirts. The men loved her, the women not so much. Someone, probably a fellow female, gave her a nickname that I won’t repeat here. It wasn’t dirty, it was just mean. Let’s call her Sunny, that’s a nice nickname.
When Sunny was hired, space was short, and she had to double up in a cubicle with my friend Fran, who formed an instant dislike. Fran tried to engage me in an anti-Sunny discussion, trying to get a rise out of me, trying to get me on her side.
Fran (to me): She’s not a lady, you know.
Me: (Silence)
Fran: You know how I know?
Me: (Silence)
Fran: She lifts her leg to fart!
As for the other women “seeming” to dislike Sunny, she once exited the ladies’ room with her skirt tucked into the back of her pantyhose and her butt showing, and none of them said a word.
Maddie
During the search for new branch-office computers, I was promoted to head up a new unit, which meant the unit and I rated our own secretary. This would be a one-person net increase in the site’s secretary count. The woman in charge of managing secretaries wanted to assign me one, a sweet girl named Maddie, but I wanted to interview more-experienced candidates from the outside world. I did eventually hire someone from outside, and I apologize to Maddie, who was next in line for a promotion, for causing her to miss out.
Sandy
Sandy was a computer operator and a breath of fresh air. When the evening shift began at four o’clock, she’d send a message to everyone on the system, “Hi, anybody need a tape mounted or anything?” She was super helpful and pleasant, and instead of replying “OK” to requests, she charmed us with a happy “OKEYDOKEY”.
Carl
Carl was also a computer operator. If you didn’t know him, he could be scary. Carl was a deaf mute, but not entirely deaf and not entirely mute.
Programmers brought jobs to be run to the computer room, filled out a ticket, and left the deck of punch cards on the job table. When your job finished, Carl would phone you to come and get your output. As I said, Carl could hear a little bit, and when he heard your phone pick up, he did his best to say “Your job is done.” We all knew Carl ‘s voice, so there was no mistaking the message. In addition, we could always tell when another programmer’s job was finished, by hearing that person shout into the phone, “OKAY, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”
It seemed that almost everyone in Florida started out somewhere else. Mimi and I ended up in Florida after my first project at IBM was cancelled and I flew down for an interview in the middle of January. I fell in love with Florida’s green, tropical lushness.
After my transfer was approved, we began house hunting west of the Florida Turnpike, where houses were cheaper and the streets had numbers instead of names. When a trial run from IBM to a potential house took 40 minutes, we decided to stretch the budget a little and get something closer, in Boca Raton proper.
Boca was mostly an upscale town, but our development was one of the less expensive ones. I remember watching a Rolls-Royce wander through the neighborhood, obviously lost, with the passenger looking anxious about the modest houses and scruffy homeowners doing their own yard work.
Mimi loved helping other people and got involved with the library’s adult-literacy program. Her first student was a truck driver – one day his truck broke down in an unfamiliar area and he couldn’t read the street signs to tell his employer where he was. Another student was a woman originally from Itta Bena, Mississippi. She learned to read, then how to read a map, then how to read a map of her home state. One day she had a breakthrough, saying “You know, you could use this map to take a trip!”. The volunteers received fancy award plaques from the Sun-Sentinel and had their pictures in the paper. Mimi was proud of her award.
Beyond her literacy work, Mimi got a paying part-time job as a medical-records clerk at the hospital in Delray Beach. Her hours were from 9 to 3. She enjoyed working with a group of other women, and knowing she was making a contribution. The other women soon discovered that Mimi knew a lot about a lot of subjects, and would come to her with questions beyond those about proper spelling or writing style. Her manager had her ghost-writing herreports to upper management and they were happy. Mimi really loved that job.
Mimi growing up
For a while we socialized with our next-door neighbors, seemingly nice people from Canada who turned out to be stingy tippers of waitstaff and low-grade grifters. We saw the light when the wife scammed us on tickets to their daughter’s dance recital. We made better friendships with people we knew from IBM and the library.
We were in Florida for Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that leveled entire towns 50 miles south of us, but left Boca relatively intact. The Friday before landfall was predicted, my buddies at work laughed when I left early to tape my windows and bring the potted plants inside. They weren’t laughing on Monday when they saw how terribly the storm had damaged the state. We were lucky, and lost only some patio screens, but during the highest winds we hid in the dark between a sofa back and a wall, with a flashlight and a hatchet in case we had to chop our way out. We promised each other that next time we’d get in the car and head north at the first warning.
Even before the hurricane, Mimi wasn’t happy about being in Florida. She missed her family up north, especially her sister, for whom she’d been more like a mother than a sister growing up. One day we had visitors, and when they casually asked “How long have you been here?” we answered simultaneously – I said “About a year and a half”, but Mimi said “18 months”. When I heard her say it that way, I knew we weren’t going to be spending the rest of our lives in Florida.
It turned out that staying in Florida forever wasn’t an option. IBM had a company-wide downsizing of personnel, and offered buyouts to employees like me who would be of retirement age by a certain date. They offered to credit me with an additional seven years of service, giving me the 15 years required for a decent pension. I signed up and never looked back.
I couldn’t find a job in Florida that paid anywhere near what IBM had been paying, so we packed up and started working our way back north, first stop Atlanta. In Atlanta I worked for the software company KnowledgeWare, and we learned how to live happily in a high-rise apartment building, one that happened to overlook Stone Mountain.
After I got the job at IBM Yorktown, I needed a place to stay during the week until we found a house in the area. Someone in the personnel department had the job of finding leads to short-term housing. There were always people living near the lab who were happy to rent rooms to IBMers, for if you can’t trust an IBMer, who can you trust? With my leads came a document that basically said “IBM takes no responsibility for whatever terrible things may happen to you there”.
One of the leads was to a room with private bath in Katonah, a quiet town on the commuter line to New York City and about ten miles from the lab. The room was expensive for the time, $300 a month. On my way over to check it out, I saw lots of roads that looked good for running. When I got there, I saw that the house was in a green, wooded area next to one of New York City’s beautiful reservoirs. The owner, Mrs. Fraser, showed me the room, which had an easy chair, a TV, a table and a bed — what more could I want? It was on the lower level of the house, with a private entry by sliding doors facing the woods. When I drove up from New Jersey the next Monday morning, I brought my suits and my running gear and moved in.
Mrs. Fraser’s husband owned a business in Europe and spent most of his time there, so I didn’t meet him for a few weeks. I don’t know how he felt about having a non-dweebish IBMer in the house with his wife, but I know my rent helped out with the bills.
On the day I have come to think of as BPD, Bachelor Panic Day, there was a surprise, late-season snowstorm, and at 10 o’clock in the morning IBM sent everyone home. Virtual bachelors like myself, who now had nowhere to get lunch, rushed the vending machines, emptying them completely of junk food and canned soup. When I got back to the house, Mrs. Fraser invited me to have lunch with her and her daughter, home from school on a snow day. It was the first I’d ever been upstairs.
Blue Dolphin diner, Katonah Avenue
Normally, there were plenty of small restaurants and diners where I could stop for a meal after work. I had a bottle of port wine I bought to keep me company in the evening, and on general principle I hid it so that Mrs. Fraser wouldn’t see it when she cleaned. I went for a morning run twice a week, saw lots of deer and once got lost in Pound Ridge Reservation – not Hansel-and-Gretel lost, but lost enough that I had to flag down a passing car and ask for directions.
Avery Cemetery in Pound Ridge Reservation. Photo by Howard Dale
For the Fourth of July, I was worried about traffic and decided not to drive home. I drove over the state line into Connecticut, where the town of Wilton was having an old-fashioned Fourth, with beer, fireworks and a parade. Norman Rockwell would have been completely at home in Wilton.
House hunting
The way it worked out, I drove home to the shore on Friday night and back to the lab on Monday morning. The trip took two hours each way and could be difficult, especially the trip home Friday evening. But, at only twice a week for a few months, it was tolerable. During the week, I’d look at houses with a realtor, Irene. She was really sharp, and after a while understood what I liked and what I didn’t, and we generally didn’t waste each other’s time. If she showed me a house I thought was a strong “maybe”, I’d bring Mimi up to Westchester on the weekend so we could look at it together.
One place I was shown was a townhouse in Bedford Hills. It was nice, but as we were about to leave, I realized the kitchen had a clear view of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum security prison surrounded by razor wire and only a quarter-mile away. When I said I wasn’t in love with the view, the seller’s agent reassured me by saying “Oh, they can’t get out.”
On one of our cross-Westchester drives to see a house, we passed a beat-up Volkswagen bus parked alongside the road, where a woman had set up a sort of flower stand. She may have had other flowers too, but there were roses, lots of them. Mimi said “Oooh, look at the roses!” I said “Yeah!” in agreement, and kept on driving.
Amelia’s not-beat-up flower truck, photo courtesy KT Sura
On the way back, she said “There’s that rose lady again!” and when I didn’t respond, she gave up and said “Can we get some?” Well, I can take a hint, and I pulled over. I bought a dozen roses from the lady, who was acting all goofy, as through love was in the air and I was buying flowers for her instead of from her. I got back in the car and handed the flowers over to Mimi, saying something like “Here ya go.” Yes, I am aware this all makes me sound like a jerk. Mimi didn’t say anything, and both she and the flower lady seemed disappointed in my presentation. For the rest of the day, Mimi called me “Mr. Romantic”.
Driving in New York
Seeing a car with Jersey plates driving around Westchester County was like a thumb in the eye to the locals there. Also annoyed sometimes were the State Police. One Saturday morning out house-shopping with Mimi, I was doing about 75 on one of the expressways, along with everyone else, when a cop pulled me over. Once it became clear he was going to write me a ticket no matter what, I said I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t pulled over the black Jeep that just passed me doing about 90. He replied “I didn’t see him. I saw you.” After that, I decided it was time to become an official New York State resident, and switched my plates and driver’s license from New Jersey to New York.
Westchester signage. It’s actually pretty good
A lot of New Yorkers drive like idiots, and that includes both driving too fast and driving too slow. New York didn’t yet have the common-sense law that says “keep right except to pass”, so I’ll chalk up the slow-driving-in-the-left-lane idiocy as mostly the state’s fault.
After I switched over to New York plates, whenever I was back in Jersey on the Parkway, maintaining my speed in continuous traffic and passing in the left lane like I’ve been doing since I was seventeen, there was always some Jersey jerk coming up behind me and flashing his lights to get me to move over. By definition, if you have New York plates and are in the left lane, you are driving too slow. You just can’t win.
As I often say while recounting Everything That Happened, all good things must come to an end, and one day Mrs. Fraser knocked on my door and said their son would be coming home from school and they’d need the room by the end of the month.
I went back to the personnel department and told them I needed a new place to stay. They gave me the number of a woman in Peekskill who took in transient IBMers, Mrs. Garrison.
Mrs. Garrison
Peekskill is a working-class town on the Hudson River. Mrs. Garrison’s house looked old but was well maintained, with a long set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. She appeared to be in her early 70s, and mentioned she was a widow. She began showing me around the first floor, starting with the front entryway. On the table there was a framed photograph of two men dressed to go fly fishing. She said the man on the left was her late husband Everett, and the other was Hoagy Carmichael. “Hoagy Carmichael?!” I said. Carmichael was one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, hugely popular from the 1920s through the 1950s, and I reflexively crooned the opening of his theme song and greatest hit, Stardust:
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
the lonely night
Dreaming of a song…
Carmichael at work
Mrs. Garrison got all teary-eyed, and said “I never thought anyone as young as you would know that song.” I gave her my standard response to people that I somehow favorably surprise, a gentle “Well, I know some things.”
(FYI, Willie Nelson sings a lovely version of Stardust in his familiar, reedy voice.)
She showed me the room and I took it, even though I’d have to share the bathroom with two other IBMers who had rooms there, and pay a few dollars extra for electricity if I wanted the window air conditioner hooked up. Writing about charging for electricity makes her sound like a cheapskate, but she wasn’t; she was just trying to get by on her Social Security and some income from her roomers. She was a pleasure to chat with in the evenings, sitting in her ‘parlour’. The other IBM roomers were basically children, and had no interest in anything an old lady might have to say.
Classic parlour
Mimi and I eventually found a place we liked, an almost-new townhouse in the sleepy village of Croton-on-Hudson. The price was higher than we were comfortable with, and we tried to negotiate. The owner was an IBMer who was retiring, and he would not budge an inch. I think he expected the housing market would improve enough to meet his price if he just held out long enough. We hadn’t found anything else we liked, and now we had an offer to buy our house in New Jersey, so we bit the bullet and signed for the full price. The market was indeed improving, because when IBM cancelled my project eighteen months later and I transferred to Boca Raton, we priced the townhouse high, so high that Irene thought we were delusional, and made a profit.
Jumping back a bit, the day we moved into the townhouse I stopped by Mrs. Garrison’s to say goodbye, and I made sure to bring Mimi along to meet her. Mimi knew the words to Stardust too.
“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 and was hired as an advisory programmer at IBM Research, based mainly on some helpful improvements I had made to IBM’s CP-67 and VM/370 operating systems 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 only interested in advancing their own career.
IBM Yorktown, the Thomas J. Watson Research Center
To give you an idea of the attitude at Yorktown, a local doctor visits the site every 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 too are free to have a beer.
The four programmers 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 hit the Big One is to 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, a habit as natural 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 rare bird 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. The page “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 tanker truck delivery of liquid nitrogen, which creates a stagecraft-like London fog over 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 scientist 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 audacity to warn a research staff PhD about regularly stretching his lunch break to two hours on the tennis courts. His 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 cancelled. 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 tropical 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, IBM PC Development Center
IBM people hold high opinions of Yorktown. When Mimi 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 at IBM. Later, when she’s alone with Mimi, 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 Mimi, 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 Victor 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 in the same building.” 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 supporting register tapes, I get a call from a person in accounting, who tells me “We’ll pay for your groceries, but you have to pay for the Heineken yourself.”
I can’t remember where I was working at the time, but I remember a discussion with a co-worker whose wife had just had their first baby, and him saying, “I want my son to have a job with a chair.”
Here’s part of my own strange path to a job with a chair.
Studying the market, 1960s
When I was driving for Dugan’s Bakery, I got interested in the stock market. I studied the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Magazine, and bought a couple of stocks, Clorox and Reynolds Tobacco. They went down instead of up, so I tried to figure out where I went wrong, and became interested in technical analysis, a way to predict where a stock price is headed based on how it’s behaved in the past. Mostly it works, but sometimes it doesn’t – it’s more of an art than a science. I kept daily charts on about 20 stocks.
Above, a modern stock chart and analysis, courtesy xm.com
If I finished my route early, I sometimes stopped in at the Nugent & Igoe brokerage in East Orange, where my broker was Walter ‘Tiny Hands’ Wojcik. If you ever went by and saw a bakery truck parked around the corner, that was probably me. There were eight or ten regulars who hung around watching the electronic ticker tape crawl along one wall, and, when inspiration struck, speed-walking over to their broker’s desk to make a trade. The room was not unlike an OTB horse parlor, and the tone of the conversation was similar. Maybe that’s another article one day.
Collecting unemployment
After Dugan’s was sold down the river in 1966, I collected unemployment for a few months while applying for stockbroker jobs in New York City. Meanwhile, I subscribed to a weekly chart service and continued to make small trades and read all the financial stuff I could get my hands on.
I learned one thing about unemployment that I’ll pass along: if you show up for your weekly appointment wearing a suit and tie, they’re not going to hassle you too much. So, Mr. Smithee, you want to be a stockbroker but have only the most remote of qualifications? Here’s your check, and good luck with next week’s search. After many weeks they got sick of seeing me, and put me with a group of others who hadn’t found jobs, to take a manual-dexterity test with a view toward getting us assembly line jobs somewhere. That’s another article some day, too.
iBM 403 accounting machine plugboard, courtesy Ken Sherriff, righto.com
At the Nugent & Igoe office, I was friends with a young guy named Jerry, who would look over my shoulder at my charts. He said if you like doing stuff like that, you should get into computers. There was a programming and control-board-wiring school directly across the street, and I paid them a visit. Programming school was not in session, but they showed me their accounting machines and the control boards, and I fell in love with the boards’ combination of complexity and orderliness. I filed Jerry’s career suggestion in the back of my mind.
Mayflower Securities
A while after Dugan’s went out of business, I got a call from Tommy MacMillan, a former supervisor who knew I was interested in the stock market. He suggested I might like working for Mayflower Securities. At the time, Mayflower was on the level; I know that because I asked my bank to get me a Standard & Poor’s company report on them.
My eventual manager Skip Zarra had no interest in the finer points of the stock market or investing; his only interest was in making sales. During my interview, he asked who in the world of finance I most admired, but didn’t recognize the name Jesse Livermore, a famous day trader, and on and off one of the richest people in the world. That’s not exactly a black mark on Skip, but it tells you something.
Mayflower and other securities firms sent their prospective brokers, aka “registered representatives”, to an intensive three-weekend securities course held in a classroom in the instructor’s home in Union. As I recall, we had to pay for the course ourselves; fair enough, I suppose. The object was to pass the SEC Series 7 Examination to get our brokers licenses. I’ll let the SEC explain it:
“Individuals who want to enter the securities industry to sell any type of securities must take the Series 7 examination—formally known as the General Securities Representative Examination. Individuals who pass the Series 7 examination are eligible to register to trade all securities products, including corporate securities, municipal fund securities, options, direct participation programs, investment company products, and variable contracts.”
Next we took the examination, which was multiple-choice. I’ve always been a good test-taker, and I passed.
A company dinner
Mayflower gave a Christmas dinner for their sales people and spouses. I’m not sure if there were any female sales people at the time, but there might have been. It was at a fancy restaurant, and the sky was the limit. Mimi and I were seated with Skip and Tommy and their wives, and there was good conversation all around. No introductions were offered beyond an informal “Hi, I’m…”.
After the meal Gene Mulvihill, founder and owner of the company, got up to give a motivational speech. During the speech, Skip leaned over and whispered to me “His wife owns thirty percent of the company”. I whispered back “Yes, I know” and he seemed surprised. During a lull in the conversation later, he asked how I knew about Gene’s wife’s partial ownership, and I said it was in the company’s S&P report. He next asked how I had come to see an S&P report on the company, and I said I had asked my bank to pull one for me. This did not go over well, and he said “You pulled an S&P report on us? YOU pulled an S&P on US?”, as though the world had turned upside down.
A couple of weeks later, I phoned Tommy’s house with a procedural question and his wife answered, She said he wasn’t home, and asked if she could take a message. I said “Yes, this is Paul Smithee”, and when she didn’t respond, added “We met at the Christmas party.” After a second, she said “Oh, at the Christmas party, right.” The next day, Tommy phoned to ask what my question was, and also said “That wasn’t my wife at the party.” I apologized profusely, but he said it was his own fault for not properly introducing his friend. When I passed this news along to Mimi, she was not surprised, and said “I thought there was something funny going on with them.” Hey, thanks for telling me.
Tweed.
Early on, I went to Brooks Brothers and invested in an expensive three-piece British tweed suit and a good tweed overcoat. I wore them to every job interview and important meeting I had for years afterward. I also bought a new car, a ‘67 Valiant, partly to impress clients that I had a new car, and partly because I needed one. That car lasted a long time, almost as long as the suit, which eventually no longer fit.
Making sales After we were SEC-licensed registered representatives, we were trained to go to commercial areas such as strip malls and ask small-business owners “Has anyone ever talked to you about mutual funds?” Mutual funds were just then coming into their own and getting a lot of positive press coverage. We sold monthly investment plans in Oppenheimer and Dreyfus funds, nothing shady about either one, both are still around today. The SEC required we make potential clients aware that half their first year’s investment went toward sales commissions, so it would be important that they continue the plan and not cash out early. Some salesmen conveniently forgot to mention that point, but I never did.
I sold an Oppenheimer monthly plan to my upstairs neighbors; they needed to cash it in the next year and took a big hit, and I felt bad. I also sold an Oppenheimer monthly plan to a restaurant owner who I happened to catch during the afternoon lull. When I went to his home to pick up his shares of AT&T to sell to pay for the Oppenheimer, his family was very suspicious of me and the whole deal, but over the years he got a much better return with Oppenheimer.
As a kid trying to sell newspaper subscriptions, I realized right away I was no salesman. Looking back, I was too ready to accept the prospect’s first “no” and move on, instead of trying to counterpunch and wear down their resistance. Mayflower encouraged us to talk to 30 people every day, and I bought a pocket clicker to keep track. Hairdressers always seemed to have time to talk, but they never bought anything. One day working my way through a strip mall, I spotted a city worker hand-digging a hole for a traffic sign. I walked over and said “Excuse me, but has anyone ever talked to you about mutual funds?” He looked up and said “No entiendo.” Even as I clicked my clicker to count the contact, I knew I was just kidding myself.
Shady doings
I finally quit Mayflower when they changed their philosophy and wanted us to start pushing penny stocks they bought by the bushel, instead of standard, legitimate mutual funds.
Mayflower was later absorbed by the infamous “pump and dump” penny-stock outfit First Jersey Securities. First Jersey was headed by Robert Brennan, later described by Forbes as “a swindler of a recognizable type: totally unscrupulous, with the nerve and audacity of a second-story man”. In 2001, Brennan was found guilty of money laundering and bankruptcy fraud, and sentenced to nine years in prison.
After looking into other schools, I used the GI Bill to register for a computer programming course at Automation Institute, and an old friend gave me a lead on a night warehouse job I could work at while I attended school during the day. I was on my way.
San Geraldo leaving St. Lucy’s church to greet the expectant crowd
Moving in
When Pennsylvania Avenue started going downhill, Mimi and I found an apartment in a two-family house in a nicer part of town, Highland Avenue in Newark’s North Ward. It was near Branch Brook Park and close to my job. For a few weeks before we moved in, I stopped by for a couple hours every day on my way home, painting and putting up wallpaper. The owners, Fred and Evelyn, lived in the upstairs apartment and were happy to see the downstairs looking nice again. Our rent was very reasonable, only $90 a month. A few years later, they raised it, apologetically, to $95.
The neighborhood
With some exceptions, our neighborhood was Italian, from the family-friendly bar at one end of the block to Celentano’s latticini food store and pasta works at the other. A fancy Italian bakery was a few blocks west on Bloomfield Avenue; small and casual Vesuvio’s restaurant was a half block east. A tiny grocery store, John’s, was in the middle of our block, two steps down into what was once someone’s cellar. On the narrow shelves along one wall, there was just enough room for four units of any item you might need to make a meal or do a load of laundry. After you left, John would go into the back room and restock the shelf.
One exception to the mostly-Italian rule lived a few doors down, an Irish gent so pale that our new neighbor Josie referred to him as Mozzarella Face. My family and I were also exceptions to the rule, the worst kind, new arrivals to the neighborhood. When the window of a garage behind our back fence had a rock thrown through it, the owner implied that our five-year-old was responsible, saying “There was never any trouble in this neighborhood until your kind moved in.” I asked my son about it later. He didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but he finally told me who threw the rock. I was happy to tell the garage owner that she might want to talk to little Carlo Parisi, a budding sociopath from the other end of the block.
The Saint
It’s true – you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone. One day we heard the sound of a brass band, and a religious procession began making its way down our cobblestone street. If you’ve watched the Sicilian funeral procession that opens Godfather II, you know what they sounded like. Our landlady Evelyn ran downstairs to announce “The Saint is coming!” and asked “Do you have your money ready!?” Mimi and I just looked at each other. By nature, I am a suspicious type, and I asked why we needed money. She said “For the Saint! To put on the Saint!”, as though it was the dumbest question she’d ever heard. Mimi was brought up Catholic, but this was a new one on her too, and we looked at each other again. Evelyn said “You have to, it’s bad luck if you don’t!”
So we located some cash and stepped outside. I hate making another Godfather comparison, but if you’ve seen the feast day procession in Godfather II during which Don Fanucci meets his end, you’ve seen the feast day procession of Saint Gerard too, Saint Gerard’s on a smaller scale of course. When the procession paused for a moment, someone gave us pins and we pinned our offering to the statue of Saint Gerard Majella, patron saint of motherhood, pregnancy, and those trying to conceive.
Adorning the Saint with donations
Summer fun
During the summer, portable kiddie rides like the Whip and the Ferris Wheel came by and parked for a few hours. Looking at the pictures now, the rides look pretty tame, but the smaller kids were crazy about them. A Good Humor or Mr. Softee ice cream truck usually tagged along.
Portable whip
Portable Ferris wheel on a day off. Courtesy morfar.info
For personal fun, Fred made radio-controlled airplanes in his cellar workshop, big buzzy ones with a four-foot wingspan. I went flying with him once out in the boondocks. It was fun, but I think he was disappointed that I wasn’t interested in taking it up as a hobby myself.
Raw beef tripe, courtesy ruthatkins.wordpress.com
The North Ward seemed to be hosting the last hurrah of the horse and wagon. A wagon carrying fresh, green produce clopped down the street regularly, and every Friday a peddler of tripe, a local favorite, came by shouting “a-tree-po! a-tree-po!”. For anyone wondering, tripe is the stomach lining of a cow. I have not tried it. Occasionally the ragman’s sad wagon came by, with him calling out his offer to buy rags and old clothes.
I was making good money on my sales route, and we bought a window air conditioner, one of the first on the block. I put strips of red reflective tape on the sides so no one coming up the alley after dark would walk into it. With Fred’s blessing, I hired an electrician to add another circuit to our box downstairs. Under the air conditioner’s friendly hum, on Memorial Day 1964, Mimi and I made another baby.
Toward the end
The father who was treasurer of our son’s Cub Scout pack skipped town with the proceeds of a candy sale they held to finance a trip. I was elected the new treasurer. When I called Scout headquarters to ask what the Scouts could do about the stolen money, basically they said “Tough”, and that the kids were out of luck. So, the kids did not get to go on their trip, and justice was not served. I regret now that I didn’t threaten to notify the newspapers; that would have made them step up, I’m sure. Of course, nowadays the Scouts have bigger embarrassments to worry about.
A young Hispanic couple moved into the second floor of the building across the street. Their electricity wasn’t on yet, but I could see generally what was going on. She was leaning with folded arms on the windowsill, watching traffic. He stepped up behind her, flipped her dress over her back and together they christened their new apartment. I didn’t watch all of it, but it was sweet. May their first child be a masculine child.
While still on Highland Avenue, I finished computer school and got my first programming job, at Condé Nast Publications in New York City. Looking back, Condé was the best place I ever worked. I loved working there, but I didn’t love getting there — if it weren’t for the commute, I probably would have stayed there until they carried me out. Instead, I took a programming job at Hess Oil in Woodbridge, with the goal of eventually moving my family to the shore.
Moving out
While I worked at Hess, we took the next step. We found a winter rental at the shore and made it our base while we looked for what optimistic people call their “Forever Home”.
Our Newark neighbors, including Mozzarella Face, whose real name was Tom, helped us load the U-Haul.
I began commuting from the shore to Hess, 40 minutes each way, always keeping an eye out for a job closer to home.
Saint Lucy’s Church, home to the National Shrine of Saint Gerard Majella
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 looks abandoned, its parking lots empty and overgrown. Trying to find an 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 see that giant demolition machines have begun chewing away at it. Already one corner of the building has been torn away – the third-floor executive offices are now just a ragged hole and a pile of broken concrete. 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 never lived in California, but I visited there many times on business trips and came to love it. Here are a few things that stayed with me from those visits, arranged in no particular order. If I have some details wrong or backwards, apologies to my companions on those trips, who became my friends. Writing this, I couldn’t remember a lot of detail about the actual work we did as a team, and didn’t try. But I remember very well the good times we had on side trips sightseeing and exploring California—or just hanging out—when we were not working.
Cars make their way down Lombard Street
Most of my California trips were to San Francisco, Santa Clara or other towns in “Silicon Valley”, the hub of America’s high-tech computer business. On a different trip I got to visit Los Angeles, but only for a three-hour layover between planes. I was alone on that trip and took a walk from the terminal building down to the bottom of the main road in, where I sat on a low wall to catch some sun. Sitting there alone, I felt as if every person who turned onto the airport road that day was checking me out. That’s no credit to me – in California everyone is checking everyone else out all day long. It is the land of opportunity.
Job interview
My first California trip was for a job interview. After working for Continental Insurance/Insco for a few years, I was looking for a change. I saw an ad for VM programmers at the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, another Silicon Valley town. Amdahl was the new kid on the block then, making full-size mainframe computers and giving IBM a run for its money. I sent them a resume, we had a short interview over the phone, and before I knew it I was on a plane headed west.
The San Jose airport was so small that the entire rental car fleet sat right outside the terminal door. Japanese cars were just becoming popular, and the one I rented was the first I ever drove. I spent the evening getting a feel for California —just driving around the hilly green countryside, no other cars in sight. I forget what make it was, but it was peppy and fun to drive, and I gave it some exercise.
Fact sheet courtesy Wikipedia
The next morning I drove to Sunnyvale for my interview. First I met with the personnel manager and we had a nice, friendly conversation, mostly about California, its hot housing market, and our families. He seemed to be a happy person, but at one point surprised me by dropping “You’ll find that most people in California are very shallow” into the conversation.
Next I met with a pair of technical managers and told them about all the cool software modifications and tools I’d designed and added to Continental’s VM operating system. Unfortunately I got caught up in trying to show that I wasn’t just the usual inward-focused bit-jockey systems programmer, but also a team player and leader. I shot myself in the foot by injecting the words “we” and “my team” into the conversation too often. Free advice to job seekers everywhere: don’t be modest. I didn’t take enough credit for my own work that day, and I didn’t get the job.
Housing boom
On a different trip, I shared a taxi with a gent from back East who was headed to the same hotel. We were talking about the booming real estate market, and I mentioned a newspaper story that said many Californians were stretching to carry mortgages on second or even third houses, counting on big future profits. We were still shaking our heads over the madness of this when our driver, silent until then, said “I’ve got six.”
The project
For a while, Continental had a sort of flirtation with several computer companies to decide which could best replace the aging workstations in its 40 branch offices. Our team would test and evaluate proposed replacements.
I sometimes had my doubts about whether the project to find a replacement branch office machine was on the level. Our management was very conservative about choosing computers and computer gear, seeming to honor the adage “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” —meaning, if you chose IBM and it somehow didn’t work out, it was still a reasonable choice because IBM was the world standard. Any fault would be IBM’s, not yours.
IBM didn’t yet offer a suitable small machine, so maybe our management was stalling in hopes they would have one soon, solving the problem for everyone.
The team
Our first team trip will be to Convergent Technologies in Santa Clara. We’ll be testing their latest minicomputer. In a few weeks, we’ll do the same thing at Hewlett Packard.
There are four of us on the team, representing four different Continental departments. We don’t know each other yet. As team leader, I get to drive the rental and am generally deferred to. When our plane lands in California, it’s a sunny, pleasant day. Once we’re out of the airport and on our way to the hotel, I ask “Would it be a good idea to open the windows?” There is a happy chorus of YES PLEASE!
In the Castro
We have a free day before testing begins and decide to go to San Francisco. Looking for a place to have dinner, we wander into a busy neighborhood and get in line outside a restaurant that seems popular. We are three men and a young woman only two years out of college. She is pretty and sweet and smart, and by the end of the day each of the men is half in love with her.
A sign tells us we’re in the Castro District. She says “Oh, the Castro District! That’s the gay section!” Many of the people in line with us or passing by appear to be of the rainbow persuasion, some very much so. In an excited whisper, she asks “Do you think we’ll see any gay people?”
At Convergent Technologies
The Convergent people have set up a row of their workstation computers for us in one corner of their factory floor and we get started. Our hosts make us think of the Avis “We try harder” slogan – they are desperate for our business and it shows, sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. Spotting my half-empty cigarette pack on the table, one of them offers to go buy me another.
Convergent has a cafeteria, but a Mexican food truck visits our side of the factory several times a day and we come to favor the exotic food off the truck.
None of us has ever seen the Pacific Ocean, and one day after work we take a drive west to the nearest beach.
Not the same beach, but like it
The beach is wild and rocky, not at all like the friendly, flat beaches back home in New Jersey. No one will ever play in the surf here, or lie on a towel to work on their tan.
We roll up our pants legs, stow shoes and socks in the car, and walk into the chilly water. The ocean here is calm, with flattish boulders washed over by low, polite waves. As the tide goes out, tiny crabs and other marine life are stranded for a while in shallow pools on top of the boulders. If you put your hand into one it feels alive, and the salt water hot from the afternoon sun.
Free weekend
We’ll be testing at Convergent for two weeks, which gives us a weekend in between for sightseeing. Driving out of the city, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and continue north. We are like children, staring and pointing at things not to be seen in New Jersey. We drive into a touristy redwood forest, where we sit together on the colossal stump of a thousand-year-old redwood as we eat lunch and marvel at our surroundings. We follow signs that lead us to a winery tour, then wear out our welcome at its sampling bar. On our way back we shout out in unison a town name we see on a highway sign, “SNAVELY!”
Lombard Street
Another day we take our rental for a ride down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, known as “The Crookedest Street in the World”. Lombard Street got that way in the 1920s, when the city installed eight hairpin curves to reduce its dangerously steep downhill grade. Over the following years, taking a slow ride down Lombard Street became a favorite tourist thing to do, with the street eventually becoming so congested it created a quality-of-life issue for its homeowners.
When Lombard Street is not too crowded, it’s a fun, careful drive, offering scenic views of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the suspension bridges to Oakland. When we took that ride years ago, we enjoyed it so much we made our way back to the top and went again, drawing annoyed looks from a few homeowners who remembered us from our earlier pass.
On the fault line
A few weeks after finishing up at Convergent Technologies and writing our report, we return to California to run the same tests at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco.
Much of California is on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault. Map courtesy adobe.com
Hewlett Packard wants visitors to be aware its buildings in Palo Alto are on the San Andreas fault, the earthquake-prone sliding boundary between two of the Earth’s major tectonic plates. Hewlett takes earthquakes seriously and thinks visitors should too. Their buildings are low and stubby, and thus less likely to fall over. They are laid out around a central open quad with enough space for all employees to gather safely during a quake. If there’s not enough warning to get out into the quad, the next best thing is to crawl under a desk or other furniture. If that’s not possible, stand in one of the reinforced doorways.
Survival poster
I won’t detail the testing we did in the two weeks we were at Hewlett Packard because it wasn’t much different from what we did at Convergent. Nor will I detail any of the side trips or other fun we may have had outside work hours while at Hewlett. To any of my former management who might happen to have lived long enough to read this, rest assured that we all worked very hard and didn’t have anywhere near as much fun as it sounds.
What’s next for California?
I’m disgusted by the way California has gone downhill. The city I’m most familiar with, beautiful and livable San Francisco, is now often referred to as a third-world shithole. After following the news over recent years, I have to agree, and California is off the list of places I might ever want to live. Collectively, California’s problems seem unsolvable.
Smash-and-grab looting, consequence-free shoplifting, acts of violence against strangers (the knockout game). Release without bail of criminals with lengthy arrest records. Providing free drugs to addicts instead of forcing them into treatment. The criminal class has taken over, and the rule of law has ended.
Add uncontrolled wildfires, the end of standardized testing, the leftward tilt of the education system, the general failure of the schools to educate. I could go on and on.
I guess there’s always hope that something or someone will come along to fix California. Short of martial law or outright civil war, I don’t know what that might be. But I’m glad I got to enjoy California a bit before its destruction.
After I left my first after-school “real” job at Kingsway because they expected us to come in on Sundays to clean the store, I got a job at the Mega Foods in Glen Ridge, where I was again grocery clerk , shelf stocker and sometime cashier.
I eventually gravitated to a job I’ll call “cellar man”, for lack of a better name. I listed grocery items that needed restocking, pulled the corresponding boxes out of the stacks, price-stamped them, and put the box on the conveyor belt leading back upstairs. Simple-minded, predictable and repeatable. Working without any immediate supervision, uninterrupted and alone with my thoughts, that cellar job turned out to be good practice for my later career of programming computers.
Not that I was totally alone down there. The conveyor belt rose from a spot only a few feet from the ladies’ room, so I often got the chance to see and kid around with the cashiers. In particular I remember flirting with Myrtle
Hmm, did anybody else in the history of the world ever type in those exact three semi-rhyming words? Let’s ask Google… …dang, I am disappointed, someone has, “About 1,960 results (0.75 seconds)”. Tom, best friend of “The Great Gatsby”, has been “flirting with Myrtle”, the wife of the owner of the garage halfway between Gatsby’s place and New York City. It’s also something Harry Potter does in chapter 19 of the fanfiction “Harry Potter and the Daywalker”. It all goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun.
But I digress – back to the real Myrtle. She was 29, shy, petite and sexy in her coarse cotton wraparound company smock. She really knew how to hold a man’s attention. On the downside, she was married and about 10 years older than I, so nothing ever came of our talks except the pleasure of flirting.
There were other temptations associated with being cellar man. Who has not wanted to sample those fancy jarred pickles and olives on display? In the privacy of my cellar, I did just that, popping one or two vacuum seals every day, maybe unscrewing a maraschino-cherry lid as well. As far as I know, no customer ever complained. Kids, if you buy a jar of something and the lid doesn’t pop when you open it, take it back. It probably won’t kill you, but why find out?
Relatedly, on my earlier, Kingsway job, Tuesdays were a special day for us part-time clerks. It was the store manager’s day off, and assistant manager Freddy went to class in the afternoon. On a typical Tuesday afternoon, we’d destroy one or two sheet cakes and several large bottles of soda. It was like being invited to a birthday party every week.
JustRite self-inking price marker, amazon.com
There were no scan codes then, so every item had to be hand-stamped with the price. Like any job, no matter how menial, stamping prices on groceries can be interesting and fun if you make it a challenge. For example, a case of single rolls of toilet paper contains 100 rolls, in five tiers of 20 rolls, 5 by 4. Sounds like it would take a long time to stamp, right? Ha, not the way I did it!
Upstairs is the bottle-return station, where a cashier counts customers’ empty, usually dirty, glass bottles and refunds their deposit money, two cents for small bottles and five cents for large. (A Seinfeld episode touches on these values.) There’s a sort of vertical conveyor belt with buckets big enough to hold two or three bottles lying down. The cashier holds down a button and the buckets head for the cellar, where they invert and their contents clank into a sawdust-padded carousel. Not every bottle survives the trip in one piece.
Emptying the carousel involves picking through the sawdust and sorting the bottles into crates by brand and size. Nobody in their right mind wants to do that, not even wearing gloves, so management assigns each part-timer a turn at it. Part-timers are expendable and band-aids are available. Only rarely does anyone need to go get stitches.
Our sister store in East Orange had a fire, with much water damage. After the insurance adjusters left, one of the Mega Foods executives apparently decided that the damaged stock in the cellar was still saleable and could go back on the shelves, likely double-dipping the insurance settlement. The remains were trucked over to Glen Ridge and heaped up in my cellar. Although there are companies that do fire remediation for a living, yours truly was assigned the task of cleaning up those soggy piles and getting the goods back on the shelves.
The boxes were soaked and falling apart, the goods inside were wet, and everything stank of smoke. For two days, I made an honest job of cleaning up some of it, but it was hopeless. There was just too much; it was enormous and depressing. I called in sick for a few days, then quit. Hmm, I wonder if Mom could get me an introduction to one of the trade unions like she did for my brother?
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 back seat 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 was filled!” “What were thy filled with?” “They was 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 my route customer 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 strike. (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.
Paul was a young programmer and philosophy major who was taking a night course in statistics at Rutgers-Newark. As he started home one night, he was stopped by two locals who wanted his wallet and briefcase. He resisted, and they stabbed him to death. When I heard, I thought, one more crime that will never be solved. But while writing this I found out, via newspapers.com, that the two were identified by a witness, arrested, and in 1982 sentenced to life in prison. 1982 is a long time ago, but I hope “Life” means life, and they are still there. That’s why I pay taxes.
