Memoirs of a Geezer!
Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth
to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!
This Episode: The Benefits of Labor -- Is Work Truly Character Building... or What?
Those of mechanics--each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat--the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench--the hatter singing as he stands;
The wood-cutter's song--the ploughboy's, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown...
-- Walt Whitman... from: I Hear America Singing
What a load of... Hey! Is it true that work enriches us, builds character? Do we work solely to enjoy our leisure time? Are the "joys of work" merely a clever piece of propaganda foolishness propagated by the wealthy -- the "mine and factory owners" -- to keep the working classes plodding along?
As I stand atop the wobbly tower of Geezerhood," I tend to gaze back upon the many strange and wondrous occupations I've had over the years. Examples...
"Bobby L." had a flat-roof-hot-tar roofing business in which he somehow hypnotized the none-too-bright to enlist their labors, certainly not their talents. He even paid us once in a while! I was one of his "Kettle Rats" who struggled in the blazing heat of high summer, filling buckets of hot tar and hoicking them up a giant step ladder to the roof above where Bobby "mopped in" and sometimes mopped scalding tar over the edge and onto the tender backs and chests of his faithful if misguided Kettle Rats. "Hot!" he would holler. That was the signal to fetch more hot tar up onto the roof! Sometimes the kettle became overheated and caught fire. Then we had to stop for the day and go to an air conditioned tavern. Such misery! To have to leave the inferno for the cool of a gin house! Of course our wages were often burned up in beer, booze and bar dice!! (I no longer take alcoholic beverages internally, and I have a horror of ladders!!)
Then there was window cleaning on relatively tall buildings, true high-rises too, sometimes working with belts, crossing from one window to another, unhooking one end of the belt, re-hooking on the other side of the window, reaching for the hook on the next window, stretching in terror to cross the gap... "Don't look down," says Baltazar, my Greek co-crazy. "Good hooks! Real safe! You shouldn't worry much!" Once a dentist pulled me into his window when a hook came out of the wall! Oh, the joys of gondola lifts or "elevator" lift platforms... I think we also called them "slip stages!" Sometimes they'd slip... Working on them in high winds was real exciting! As a young college student, I actually survived and made lots of money one summer; was able to pay a large portion of my tuition. Played cribbage with the boys during lunch hours, when we had them! (Now I'm terrified of heights!)
Fritz was our favorite tavern-keeper when I worked for a company he lovingly called, "Hair Felt." The company had a more professional name; they made indoor-outdoor carpeting. We unloaded box cars, lots of them. I was smaller, shorter, and was treated to the joys of crawling into boiling hot, cramped spaces to shove 12-foot bales of carpeting out and down into the space between the two stacks of bales in each rail car. The bales were then hefted onto specialized wooden hand trucks to be ferried into the warehouse. Two men, one on either side, "walked" the bales onto their ends to stand in enormous stacks against the warehouse walls.... waiting for orders! They looked like cigars for giants or concrete freeway bridge supports! We sweat a lot... buckets. Eventually, after numbers of injuries to our fellow workers, including a 12-foot bale that fell down and landed on the head of "Carlos," we organized and started a union. A great triumph! A boon for the working classes! (Today I prefer wood floors and small rugs!)
Road crews! What great fun! "Jumping stakes," puddling in concrete, setting and pulling forms... I did a lot of sewer cleaning on those jobs too; one had to keep the sand and gravel from clogging them, and there was often the bonus of traditional sewer content that had to be
removed along with construction debris. I mean, you couldn't really separate the intermingled stuff while filling buckets to be lifted to the roadway surface... could you??!! (Recently, I tried to repair the mechanism of a toilet... I removed a few parts, scratched my head, called the plumber!)
Factories, foundries, shipyards, even a mine! When I graduated from college and took to the road, I was able to find more elegant employment. Hotel and restaurant labors in the absence of work in my chosen field. Newspaper and radio jobs too. But, back to the hospitality trade: At a major hotel near Tacoma, Washington, I started as a lowly banquet bartender, then became a "bar-back" (schlepping cases of beer, re-filling coolers...), then a day shift co-bar-manager, then beverage manager, even ascending to catering management. What a success; what a climb up a more prestigious ladder!! (At my present age, once in a while I put pop in the ice box!)
As a truck driver for a major metropolitan newspaper (like that guy on television with the blue long johns and red underwear he wore on the outside!), I was a mild-mannered news medium employee. I made a great many "state runs" with the fat Sunday paper. On one occasion I happened to be assigned a rental truck that had a canvas and chain tail gate. Unbeknownst to me, all of the papers fell out of the back as I motored north. A traffic cop rather easily followed my trail and made me retrace the route and retrieve all of the "jettisoned" paper bundles... or pay a large fine. I went back. Oh, my yes, the character-building joys of work, the personal gratification and self-esteem enhancing glories of the workaday life!! (These days I prefer to read the "free press," and discarded newspapers!)
Oh well... (this could go on far too long!) I guess it must be true that work makes us better citizens, makes us appreciate the value of our labors and able to see the contributions we make to this great land. My sweet and talented wife, for example, wrote manuals on "legal advocacy" and "child custody" while working in the domestic violence arena, manuals that, I'll wager, may still be the standards in use today! My brother designed a couple of bridges -- one that serves dually as a runway -- and buildings that stand and function to this day! Me? I'll betcha the "electric blankets" I built when doing temp work at "Knot Labor Force" still melt ice on the bridge they were designed to serve. I'll betcha motorists still silently praise my valorous effort as their tires gain purchase on what otherwise might have been a skating rink!!
And so this, my friends, is my humble homage to work, labor and meaningful employment. Today as I sit staring at a computer screen -- "sit" being the operative word -- I long for the fresh air of the gondola on a 70-story building, the sweet aroma of the factory floor and the lilting rhythms of the punch press, the ambiance of the sewers, the insults of drunken hotel bar regulars... not to mention the angry growling of the dribbling, corpulent chef who'd holler, "No beverage host vermin in MY kitchen...!" Verily, The joys and memories of labor echo in my skull, as do Whitman's elegant and elegiac * refrains (* ...Walt's dead! So are the "Singing Workers" of his verse, and so too may be the nation's respect for labor and ordinary working people)!
-- Walt Whitman... from: I Hear America Singing
What a load of... Hey! Is it true that work enriches us, builds character? Do we work solely to enjoy our leisure time? Are the "joys of work" merely a clever piece of propaganda foolishness propagated by the wealthy -- the "mine and factory owners" -- to keep the working classes plodding along?
As I stand atop the wobbly tower of Geezerhood," I tend to gaze back upon the many strange and wondrous occupations I've had over the years. Examples...
 |
| I'm moving a Hot Tar Kettle into position at the roofing Job Site! |
"Bobby L." had a flat-roof-hot-tar roofing business in which he somehow hypnotized the none-too-bright to enlist their labors, certainly not their talents. He even paid us once in a while! I was one of his "Kettle Rats" who struggled in the blazing heat of high summer, filling buckets of hot tar and hoicking them up a giant step ladder to the roof above where Bobby "mopped in" and sometimes mopped scalding tar over the edge and onto the tender backs and chests of his faithful if misguided Kettle Rats. "Hot!" he would holler. That was the signal to fetch more hot tar up onto the roof! Sometimes the kettle became overheated and caught fire. Then we had to stop for the day and go to an air conditioned tavern. Such misery! To have to leave the inferno for the cool of a gin house! Of course our wages were often burned up in beer, booze and bar dice!! (I no longer take alcoholic beverages internally, and I have a horror of ladders!!)
Then there was window cleaning on relatively tall buildings, true high-rises too, sometimes working with belts, crossing from one window to another, unhooking one end of the belt, re-hooking on the other side of the window, reaching for the hook on the next window, stretching in terror to cross the gap... "Don't look down," says Baltazar, my Greek co-crazy. "Good hooks! Real safe! You shouldn't worry much!" Once a dentist pulled me into his window when a hook came out of the wall! Oh, the joys of gondola lifts or "elevator" lift platforms... I think we also called them "slip stages!" Sometimes they'd slip... Working on them in high winds was real exciting! As a young college student, I actually survived and made lots of money one summer; was able to pay a large portion of my tuition. Played cribbage with the boys during lunch hours, when we had them! (Now I'm terrified of heights!)
Fritz was our favorite tavern-keeper when I worked for a company he lovingly called, "Hair Felt." The company had a more professional name; they made indoor-outdoor carpeting. We unloaded box cars, lots of them. I was smaller, shorter, and was treated to the joys of crawling into boiling hot, cramped spaces to shove 12-foot bales of carpeting out and down into the space between the two stacks of bales in each rail car. The bales were then hefted onto specialized wooden hand trucks to be ferried into the warehouse. Two men, one on either side, "walked" the bales onto their ends to stand in enormous stacks against the warehouse walls.... waiting for orders! They looked like cigars for giants or concrete freeway bridge supports! We sweat a lot... buckets. Eventually, after numbers of injuries to our fellow workers, including a 12-foot bale that fell down and landed on the head of "Carlos," we organized and started a union. A great triumph! A boon for the working classes! (Today I prefer wood floors and small rugs!)
Road crews! What great fun! "Jumping stakes," puddling in concrete, setting and pulling forms... I did a lot of sewer cleaning on those jobs too; one had to keep the sand and gravel from clogging them, and there was often the bonus of traditional sewer content that had to be
Factories, foundries, shipyards, even a mine! When I graduated from college and took to the road, I was able to find more elegant employment. Hotel and restaurant labors in the absence of work in my chosen field. Newspaper and radio jobs too. But, back to the hospitality trade: At a major hotel near Tacoma, Washington, I started as a lowly banquet bartender, then became a "bar-back" (schlepping cases of beer, re-filling coolers...), then a day shift co-bar-manager, then beverage manager, even ascending to catering management. What a success; what a climb up a more prestigious ladder!! (At my present age, once in a while I put pop in the ice box!)
As a truck driver for a major metropolitan newspaper (like that guy on television with the blue long johns and red underwear he wore on the outside!), I was a mild-mannered news medium employee. I made a great many "state runs" with the fat Sunday paper. On one occasion I happened to be assigned a rental truck that had a canvas and chain tail gate. Unbeknownst to me, all of the papers fell out of the back as I motored north. A traffic cop rather easily followed my trail and made me retrace the route and retrieve all of the "jettisoned" paper bundles... or pay a large fine. I went back. Oh, my yes, the character-building joys of work, the personal gratification and self-esteem enhancing glories of the workaday life!! (These days I prefer to read the "free press," and discarded newspapers!)
Oh well... (this could go on far too long!) I guess it must be true that work makes us better citizens, makes us appreciate the value of our labors and able to see the contributions we make to this great land. My sweet and talented wife, for example, wrote manuals on "legal advocacy" and "child custody" while working in the domestic violence arena, manuals that, I'll wager, may still be the standards in use today! My brother designed a couple of bridges -- one that serves dually as a runway -- and buildings that stand and function to this day! Me? I'll betcha the "electric blankets" I built when doing temp work at "Knot Labor Force" still melt ice on the bridge they were designed to serve. I'll betcha motorists still silently praise my valorous effort as their tires gain purchase on what otherwise might have been a skating rink!!
And so this, my friends, is my humble homage to work, labor and meaningful employment. Today as I sit staring at a computer screen -- "sit" being the operative word -- I long for the fresh air of the gondola on a 70-story building, the sweet aroma of the factory floor and the lilting rhythms of the punch press, the ambiance of the sewers, the insults of drunken hotel bar regulars... not to mention the angry growling of the dribbling, corpulent chef who'd holler, "No beverage host vermin in MY kitchen...!" Verily, The joys and memories of labor echo in my skull, as do Whitman's elegant and elegiac * refrains (* ...Walt's dead! So are the "Singing Workers" of his verse, and so too may be the nation's respect for labor and ordinary working people)!
(Special Note: The perpetrator of this Blog wishes to make it abundantly clear that in no way is this posting intended to denigrate work or labor, or the value and dignity of work, in any of its multitudinous forms. The objective is to poke a bit of fun at his "careers," and to make sport of the perhaps rather fatuous choices made over time by the writer... who's kind of fatuous himself, sometimes! The writer, by the by, is happy to have survived his many noble occupations!)
Humbly Submitted 08-20-15 -- Joel K.
