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 I picked him up and put him in the wire basket along with the outdated goods going back to the garage.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 The turtle had withdrawn into its shell and the worker almost grabbed it, thinking it was a stale loaf of pumpernickel.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.
In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood says to Eli Wallach: “There are those of us with guns, and those who dig. You dig.”
When we first were married, Mimi and I lived on Pennsylvania Avenue in Newark. After a year or two, we moved to Highland Avenue, in the North Ward, near Branch Brook Park and closer to my job. The neighborhood was safe, but I wanted to have a gun. Actually, I had always wanted to have a gun, just on general principles.
One day, an ad in Popular Mechanics caught my eye: A .22 caliber 9-shot revolver, capable of firing the more powerful .22 LR long rifle cartridge, was available by mail for something like 30 or 40 dollars.
Similar advert
There was a catch, however: New Jersey residents needed a purchase permit signed by their local police department. Police departments don’t really want private citizens to have guns, and, considering the social problems of the day, I knew I’d be unlikely to get a permit from Newark.
Paperwork
To keep my car insurance down, I was using my mother’s address in Orange on my registration and driver’s license. I asked the obvious question, she said fine with her, and I filled out the application and took it to Orange police headquarters. In the “Purpose” section, I put “target practice” rather than “home defense”, which in New Jersey is a frowned-upon justification and less likely of approval. I also provided the names of two non-related character witnesses.
Progress was slow. I stopped at police headquarters every two weeks or so to ask about my application, which needed the chief’s signature. Each time, they told me “It’s on his desk”, and indicated a pile of paperwork literally on one corner of his desk. Finally, out of exasperation, when no one was looking I walked into the chief’s office and started leafing through the pile to see if my application was there. One of the cops saw me and asked what the hell I thought I was doing. I explained, and got escorted out of the building. But two weeks later, my permit came in the mail.
I sent for the gun, received it, bought some ammo, and spent an afternoon at the range. Satisfied, I cleaned it and put it away.
Similar H&R Model 949, courtesy gunsinternational.com
A neighborhood commotion
One evening there was shouting on the street in front of my house. I looked out and saw my neighbors gathered in a loose circle. At first I thought they were watching a fistfight, but they were watching one guy in his twenties menace another one with a hunting knife. The guy being threatened would edge away a bit around the circle, the guy with the knife would follow, always a few feet away, swinging the knife back and forth and thrusting it menacingly.
Remember, I was a young guy myself then, and I too was prone to doing stupid young-guy things. It seemed as though someone was going to get stabbed or worse, so I brought my shiny new gun out on the porch, fired a shot into the air, and yelled “break it up” or some similar nonsense. The circle did break up, but the guy with the knife came over to my bottom step and stood there looking like he wanted to come up and use it on me instead. I cocked the gun, making what seemed to be a very loud click, and leveled it at his chest. We stared at each other for a few seconds, then he walked away. Thank God he didn’t start up those steps, because I would have shot him dead for sure and probably gone to jail for it. We were both lucky.
So anyway. I went back inside and the cops came, but they didn’t come to my house. I found out later they only wanted to know who had the gun, nothing about the fight. My neighbors were the greatest: nobody saw nuthin’. I also found out that the fight started because knife guy thought unarmed guy had been tapping his wife.
I think my bullet ended up in Branch Brook Park, or maybe on the roof of Barringer High. Don’t shoot into the air, kids. Also, mind your own business.
Early unrest
Problems were developing in the neighborhood even before the riots. A local figure named Tony Imperiale formed the North Ward Citizens Committee to protect the neighborhood from “bad elements” and future looters. Committee members in fatigues made regular foot patrols, although I never saw one on my street. The committee was said to have an armored car and a helicopter.
When I came home one afternoon, my wife told me that while out with the baby-stroller she was accosted by four teenage girls. She was upset and afraid she wouldn’t be able to protect our children.
Coming home another day, I saw something remarkable – a mounted policeman on Park Avenue’s median strip, trying to control his horse and simultaneously swing his nightstick hard enough to discourage the girl attached to his leg and trying to pull him off.
A long-brewing fight between blacks and Italians broke out in the Barringer cafeteria and spilled onto the grounds. This was not a food fight, it was a cutlery fight, with knives and forks and trays, and the police arrived in force. Barringer was located one block before my street on the way home, and I saw the police presence and wondered what was going on. I learned something important that day – if you’re dressed for the part, you can go anywhere. I was still wearing the Columbo–style trench coat I usually wore to programming school when I walked over to have a look, fully expecting to be shooed away when I got too close. A clutch of detectives nodded as I walked past them, and I realized they think I’m a cop, too. (Another simple trick to go places you don’t belong involves carrying a clipboard.)
1967 riots
By the summer of 1967, I was working nights at the A&P warehouse and going to school during the day. When rioting broke out in July, the Watts riots of two summers earlier were still fresh in everyone’s mind, and we knew how bad it could get.
The next day, I drove my wife and sons to the shore to stay with her kind and generous Aunt Peg for the duration. When I got back that night, I took a quick drive around the neighborhood and saw jeeps and personnel carriers on Bloomfield Avenue, and armed National Guardsmen posted on street corners. After I parked, I took a careful look around before I got out and went inside. So far, all quiet in the North Ward.
I still had the attaché case I bought as a prop for my unhappy career selling mutual funds, and I began taking the gun to work and to school.
One night at the warehouse we were sitting out front taking a break, when racing down Frelinghuysen Avenue came a state police car, no lights, windows bristling with rifle barrels. A moment later there was a burst of gunfire, followed by “Halt!”
There was a lot of pointless arson. One night a warehouse worker ran up to the office, yelled “I have to go home, they’re trying to burn my house down” and continued out the door. He was talking about his apartment building.
Fixed bayonets on Springfield Avenue, July 14, 1967. Courtesy NY Times
1968 MLK disturbances
Next year, the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked riots in over a hundred cities. Fortunately, Newark was not one of them. We had only “disturbances”, including arson and heavy vandalism. Ultimately, nothing came to our end of town, but we remained anxious and alert.
Four days after Dr. King was killed, I went into New York City for a job interview, and saw painted on the wooden panels surrounding a building under construction, “DA KINK IS DEAD”. The pure evil and just plain meanness of that always stuck with me.
After I got the job and started riding the subway, I switched from my bulky attaché case to an un-jostle-able leather portfolio, basically a piece of black cowhide folded in half with a zipper.
Later that year there was some national news, I don’t remember what, that created an expectation of violence, and for a few days I carried the gun in my portfolio. One morning on the train to New York as I walked down the aisle looking for a seat, I noticed a black girl looking at me and smiling one of the friendliest smiles I’ve ever seen. I smiled back, and as I passed her she said “Cool, baby.”
After I took a seat, I realized the gun barrel had pushed through the portfolio zipper and was sticking out the front.
Sophia Di Martino, Sylvie in the 2021 television series ‘Loki’
This goofy picture of a young Sophia Di Martino and her T-shirt made me think of our upstairs neighbor Josie on Highland Avenue in Newark. Sophia is half Italian and proud of it. Josie was 100% Italian and proud of it, skinny and fierce. Once when a big-time Italian gangster was assassinated, I teased her by offering my condolences, since he must have been a relative. She knew my background was mixed German and Irish, and said, “At least I know what I am – I’m not a mongrel like you!” Ouch.
My wife and I loved her, and the families got along very well. Highland Avenue was a great place to live then, and deserves its own article. But first, here’s one just about Josie.
Did I ever tell you about the time I was on a quiz show?
Merv with astronauts and their wives
I was the newest employee at my job, so I got last pick of vacation dates. I ended up with the third and fourth week of November. The weather was still pretty good, and Mimi and I took day trips into New York City – seeing a play, hitting the museums, wandering around taking in the sights while favoring the sights that were free. When we got to Rockefeller Plaza, we took the tour of NBC’s Radio City Studios, where we saw a taping of the game show Play Your Hunch. I’ll let Mark Evanier’s “TV relic” site, oldtvtickets.com (worth a visit) explain how the show worked. Thanks, Mark.
“Merv Griffin hosted for most of the run, and the show was pretty simple. Two teams of contestants (usually husband-wife) would be shown little puzzles, usually involving three people coming out on stage or three objects being unveiled. The correct answer to the question would be one of the three choices, which were labelled X, Y and Z. If you guessed right, you got points. That was it.”
After the taping, they invited anyone who wanted to be on the show and would be in town the next week to stick around. The next week was Thanksgiving, so not too many people stayed. Our interviewer liked us, and said to come back ready to play on Monday.
The show was broadcast in color, and male contestants were “strongly encouraged” to wear blue shirts, not white, because white sometimes confused early color cameras. I didn’t own a blue shirt, so before we left the building we visited the upscale shoppes on the first level. A camera-ready light-blue shirt was $30, about $25 more than I was used to paying, but we saw it as an investment.
On Monday, we chatted with the other contestants in the hour or so before the show. The first couple we would play against were a pleasant brother and sister from Australia, traveling the world as a gift from their father.
Another pair of contestants was a country clodhopper and his wife, in the city for the first time. They had tickets for the musical Purlie Victorious, where “Purlie” is the lead character, and the wife was quite excited. Her husband kept calling it “PURELY Victorious”, what a rube. I mean, I’m from New Jersey, so I don’t have anything to brag about, but at least I crack a newspaper.
Wally Cox. What’s not to love?
Before the show, Mimi and I got to meet some of the celebrities who would present the “problems”, as the show’s puzzles/games were called. Among them was Mitch Miller, who was later instantly recognized by our one-year-old watching at home (“Mehh Mrrrr!”, according to his grandmother). We also met Minnie Pearl of the price-tagged bonnet (“Howw-deeee!”), and shy science teacher “Mister Peepers” Wally Cox, who seemed to share a mutual attraction with Mimi.
As the show begins, host Merv chats a bit with the contestants. I’m not good at small talk, but Mimi covers for me nicely. I think Merv made a little dig about our chat imbalance, but maybe I’m too sensitive.
The contestants played their hunches, solving puzzles such as which of three students crossing the stage wearing graduation robes and oversized placards identifying them as student X, Y, or Z is transporting a stack of books between his knees. Yes, it was dumb.
Wally secret-signaled Mimi that the Swedish word “blyertspenna”, a word he enjoyed repeating, meant “pencil”, so we won that round.
We sailed along pretty well, but all good things must come to an end, and on the third day we were defeated by “Purely Victorious” and his smarter wife.
In the two years before Play Your Hunch first went on the air, a number of scandals revealed that some game shows were rigged.
The revelations eroded public trust and ended an era of prizes that for some shows could exceed $100,000. Play Your Hunch was never intended to be a big-money show, and for our run we took home $375, about four months’ apartment rent, so not too shabby.
No one foresaw the Game Show Network getting rich off reruns of old quiz shows, so the shows often reused their tapes, writing over earlier episodes again and again – what a loss. A few Play Your Hunch episodes have survived, making it to YouTube or a DVD collection, but apparently none of the ones we starred in. I recently spent some time on YouTube looking so you wouldn’t have to, and saw:
• Three pretty young women wearing knee-length puffy dresses take the stage, and the puzzle is announced:
“ONE OF THESE WOMEN” (you have my attention)
“ISN’T” (isn’t what?)
“WEARING ANY” (I am giddy, oh please please please)
“STOCKINGS” (feh, what a disappointment)
After someone hunches a hunch, the women, one at a time, pull a pinch of stocking away from shapely calves, but one of them cannot, BECAUSE SHE ISN’T WEARING ANY.
• I get a twinge of nostalgia when on another show I see a model dangle as a prize my favorite piece of 1960s techno-candy, the “Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera”.
• On another episode, Merv flirts outrageously with the one songwriter out of three who wrote that year’s big Elvis hit.
“As Seen on TV”
• We were seen by my Dugan’s Bakery customer Mr. Bryan, who owned a grocery store where routes 46 and 10 intersect, at Ledgewood Circle in far-off Succasunna, New Jersey.
• Tony Imperiale, a neighbor who formed the North Ward Citizens Committee to protect our section of Newark from “bad elements” and future looters, shouted “I saw you! I saw you!” and waved madly from behind the fish counter at Food Fair.
• Jack Moore, a cousin on my father’s side who jumped into Lake Mohawk to save three-year-old me after I fell off the dock, called from Texas to congratulate us and say we looked great.
We have more friends looking out for us than we realize.
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.”
In the tiled passageways connecting New York City subway lines are colorful posters advertising businesses and products. One endorses The New School, a progressive university in Manhattan with a goal of supporting continuing education. Above a lush Gauguin painting, it counsels “IT’S NOT TOO LATE”, and reminds commuters that “At 35, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker.” In the margin, someone has written “At 35, Mozart was dead.”
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.
A few people from work
out to get lunch
you in the middle, me
on the right
all new employees, first time
we’re all together
You can tell how long ago this was —
that car had a bench seat.
On the floor there is a hump
where the car’s transmission fits
you have to keep your feet up on it, no choice
and keep your knees together, no choice
so your leg does not touch mine
I keep my knees together, too
so I don’t infringe.
Why, we hardly know each other.
It’s hard for a human to
keep both knees together
that long, but it seems we must
for miles and miles,
almost exhausting.
Me in my suit
you in your summer dress
your feet high upon the hump.
Mind if I relax, I finally ask;
you laugh, and you relax too.
Your leg is warm
through your summer dress
we are friends
nothing can come of this
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.
+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ “Study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his teachings and act according to his instructions.” — preface by Lin Piao ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In 1967, Mimi asked her sister to babysit and we took a ride to Montreal to visit that year’s World’s Fair, also known as Expo 67. As we wandered through the different countries’ pavilions, we came to a table loaded with stacks of the first English translation of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. I instantly wanted my own copy of that much-reviled and radical book, partly out of curiosity but mainly because I didn’t think I was supposed to have one – what was the big mystery? The Chinese ladies staffing the table happily took my fifty cents, and the Cold War ended. Well, not quite yet.
Mimi was not comfortable with my purchase, and, referring to the authorities we’d have to face when we crossed the border back into the United States, worried “What if they find it?” I didn’t expect I’d have to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee if they did find it, but back in 1967, who knew? Before we started home, I hid it in the trunk of the car, under our literal dirty laundry.
I left the book on my bedside table and read a little bit off and on; it was interesting in parts but kind of a slog. I wonder what my brother would have thought, given that he had been an infantryman fighting in Korea when the Red Chinese started streaming across the border to reinforce the North.
Soviet pavilion, courtesy westland.net, more at westland.net/expo67/map-docs/ussr.htm
Researching pictures for this post, I was surprised to find that the People’s Republic of China, mainland “Red” China, did not host a pavilion at the fair. So where did I get that book? Probably at the Soviet Union pavilion, the most popular one there. I think the Russians likely shared some of their exhibition space with their Marxist comrades. Wherever it was, the space was decorated with heroic propaganda posters exhorting the citizenry to increase production in all things.
In unrelated Expo 67 news, I remember trolling an exasperated staffer at the Bell Telephone pavilion over whether dialing the newfangled “pushbutton phone” being demonstrated was really faster than the rotary model, and if so, was that bit of speed important?
The Mao book did eventually cause a problem, I believe. My cousin Barbara lived out in southwest Jersey somewhere toward the Delaware River, so family get-togethers were seldom. However, at Barbara’s husband’s funeral Mimi and I renewed our friendship with her, and we invited her and her teenage daughters to visit us. One day they did, and after lunch, the two girls went upstairs to change for the beach.
In a few minutes, they came back down and had a quick huddle with their mother, who then made some not-very-convincing excuse to leave and the three departed, never to be heard from again. What I think happened was that while doing some normal teenage-girl snooping, they saw the Mao book on my bedside table. This is just a theory, I never shared it with my wife, but why else would they leave in such a hurry?
Anyone who isn’t scared off by now can read a dozen or so selected quotations here. See you at re-education camp!
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.
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.
