It wasn’t unheard of for college-bound kids to spend the summer after high school doing factory work. What was unusual was for one to remain there after the new school year began.
In the weeks when I was unloading trucks, I hadn’t really seen the factory beyond the room adjacent to the loading docks, where we cleaned the machinery after the last of the trucks were unloaded. But when I went from temporary to full time, I moved into yet another world. The factory floor was dark, one huge two-story room, with adjoining locker rooms, relatively dimly lit by overhead fluorescent lighting. The walls, which had no windows, were concrete block. The floors, also concrete, were grimy from the tracks left by the forklifts, and often wet after being hosed down to remove that grime.
I was as out of place among the factory workers as I had been in high school. Within the factory there was a rigid if unspoken class distinction. The offices, housed in a separate building, were the civilian equivalent of Officers Country, populated by the executive and secretarial staff, coat-and-tie people, white and apparently educated, whose day’s work left them clean. You would think I belonged among them, and perhaps I did, but I certainly didn’t identify with them.
The people I worked among were Negroes, and Puerto Ricans, and poor whites from exotic places like West Virginia and rural Virginia or Kentucky. They were a long way from the bottom of the heap: They were holding down steady jobs, and had a stable place in the world they knew. But in those days, TV never portrayed Negroes or Puerto Ricans nor poor whites. I had known some migrant farm laborers, and some of my father’s tenants. But this was the first time I saw how the other half lived.
Any class structure is more clearly seen when looking upward from the lower decks. It was as though something wanted me to see the world from that angle, before I left home. It was a far cry from anything I knew, and a far cry from anything I would see in college.
I try to remember that time and I have only a few memories.
- Old Bob, at least he seemed old to me, a grizzled black man, entertaining those around him in the locker rook with his unending series of humorous, R-rated stories and sayings.
- The very slight casual friendships I struck up with a couple of boys more or less my age, Harold and Doug, brothers from someplace out of state. I wonder sometimes what happened to them.
- Continually playing over my head, trying to do the simple jobs I was assigned as the newest and least skilled person there.
- Mostly, the paddles. How I ached! Certain kinds of soup could not be stirred by electric mixer, but still required continuous stirring while they cooked. I was given a six- or seven-foot long aluminum paddle, and set on a metal platform, and assigned to do the stirring as they cooked. Half an hour at a time, perhaps, 1200 gallons at a time, and then another kettle, same thing., all night with only a break for a meal. Toward the end of the night, I would need to throw my weight on the paddle to keep on stirring, because my arm muscles by themselves wouldn’t do it any more. By the end of that long winter, I had developed considerable upper-body strength, and I never lost it. But I had paid for those muscles!
It was a bleak time. I had nothing I wanted to do, beyond getting through week after week I would go to work in the afternoon, get home sometime after midnight, sleep for a while, waste the few hours of the solitary day, and go back to work. In March came a big layoff, for reasons management never bothered to explain. (I remember taking a certain pleasure in finding a pencil and correcting the ungrammatical misspelled notice they posted on the bulletin board, but I was still laid off.) A couple of months later, i hired on at a nearby glass factory, employed at casual labor, doing the odd jobs that had to be done, but weren’t worth detailing shift-workers to do. After a while, a few college boys came in to work for the summer, visitors from a world I hadn’t yet seen.
I can’t remember which factory i was referring to, but years later, my mother reminded me that at some point i had said to her, “Mom, these poor people! i don’t know how they can stand it.”
i still don’t.
People without marketable skills and without education basically sold their lives, one shift at a time, to keep body and soul together. “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” notwithstanding, the work was repetitious, their labor interchangeable, their job satisfaction mainly their endurance and competence. Their function was to be cogs in a vast machine. there was satisfaction in not causing the machine to jam up, but that’s about it. Not much job satisfaction there.
Oh, did I mention that management tended to treat them like children? Did I mention that this is a great temptation to live down to expectations? Experiencing this world, not as a college boy working a summer job but as a high school graduate with few social or mechanical skills and no self-confidence, was the best preparation for college I could have received. A couple of years later, a friend drove me home for Thanksgiving and I showed him the factory floor as it looked to the factory worker. It was an eye-opener to this son of a music teacher. “It puts a new light on my Thanksgiving,” he said.