Waters Rose, Factories Close, So It Goes

There is a great similarity between this year and June of 1972 in the upper central portions of Pennsylvania.  Land covered by flood water. In 1972, Wilkes Barre, Pa. found itself devastated by a little lady called Agnes. The storm and those floods were to have a direct effect on the course of my life.

That particular year found yours truly gainfully and happily employed by Olson Brothers, Inc. aka Olson Farms, Inc. We broke eggs.

Yes, there is an industry known as Egg Breakers.

The name is pretty much self-exclamatory. We would buy eggs, we would break eggs and we'd sell whatever we could get out of those eggs.

My position there was Office Manager/Cost Accountant. At the end of that year I was Assistant General Manager, but that was a brief tenure. The whole experience was somewhat weird, I suppose. In that year I learned a lot about corruption, bribery, stupidity, bullying and never putting all your eggs in one basket.

CORRUPTION

("Broken Eggs", Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1756)

They say getting there is half the fun. My half of the fun got lost somewhere along the line, replaced by a lot of anxiety.  I had been working for a bank, but my managers lied to me. I don't take being lied to lightly and I resigned. But before I dove off the deep end, I did go out and seek another job. I was able to be offered a position within two weeks of looking, and then I quit my banking job.

But then I wasn't hearing anything from my new boss. Time passed and I called the man and a person answered and said he was unavailable. This was not boding well. I had been told he wanted me to start before the person I was replacing had left, so I could get some training. But now the days ticked away and I had still not been told to report and the last day for that guy came and went. Finally I received a call and was told to report on the next Monday.

When I came to work that first day what did I find? A lot of missing people is what I found. The person I replaced was already gone. The General Manager, who had hired me, was gone. The new General Manager was gone, apparently to Puerto Rico although why or for how long was not known.

Eventually all this became clear. The man who had hired me had suddenly quit and disappeared to parts unknown. It was a mystery because he was something of a legend in the industry at that time, well known and the company was certainly showing a profitable operation. I know, because one of my duties was to do the Profit & Loss Reports each month. Each month our statement of condition certainly showed us well in the black and we were running at full production. However, this seemed odd because we didn't seem to be selling a whole lot.

I was to unravel this conundrum, conscientious accountant that I was. I decided to take a physical inventory of stock. Most of our product was frozen egg, frozen whole egg, frozen yolk, frozen white, frozen salted egg and frozen sugared egg. If their was a part of an egg you could freeze, we froze it, excluding the shell. So at the back of the plant was a huge freezer where all prepared egg product was stashed until sold.

Except it wasn't being sold.

I crawled about over and under and around all these big containers of frozen hen fruit, counting and checking off my list each drum there. Well, what do you know? No wonder the old General Manager was looking good. He was running at full production alright, but he was simply storing all that outcome away. We weren't looking good on the bottom line because of our low per unit cost and brisk sales, we were just carrying a very high over valued inventory, most of which would never leave our freezer.

Thus what product that did dribble out to customers was being sold way below cost.

This discovery was one of the nails in our coffin.

BRIBERY

There is no better way to learn a job than to be thrown into it with no one around to tell you how to do it. You just do. With the old boss out the door and the new boss on a distant shore and the once-upon-a-time holder of this job on to his next, I had to pretty much teach myself the egg business. The production manager certainly helped me on that and in the absence of the General Manager, who was officially the wheeler and dealer of the place, we had to step into the gap.

We did pretty good even though neither of us had any experience in buying and selling. We did have one philosophy about it, buy low, sell high. You'd think that was obvious, but I'll come back to this in a bit.

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) by what comes about in the egg business. Eggs are pretty durable product actually. You can store them for like six months if kept at the right temperature and a lot of eggs that look ugly are perfectly fine. Farmers sold us the eggs the supermarkets wouldn't carry. They might be oddly shaped or discolored. Some might have hairline cracks. Some were too small or too big. Mainly they just didn't look all nice, even and pretty sitting in a dairy isle.

You candled every egg that passed through the doors. Mostly you are checking for any fertilized eggs or eggs with blood. Such things would not please the Rabbi.

I guess I should mention the Rabbi. The Rabbi came around  couple times a year and wandered though the plant. If he liked what he saw, he would certify your product as Kosher. Now lets be brutally honest here. We knew when the Rabbi was coming and the day before arrangements were made, or should I say rearrangements, so nothing was touching anything that would perhaps conflict with the Laws of Moses, at least not until the days after the Rabbi left again. And also, the rabbi didn't spend a lot of time on his inspection. He tended to whisk through the place until we handed him the check for his services. His services did not come cheap. That check had a one on the left and a whole lot of zeros to its right.

Now, I'm not saying that transaction was a form of bribery, but I will say this next instance probably was.

Representative of a big time chicken guy came in to visit one day, trying to make a deal for us to take more of their eggs. Eggs weren't what they built a reputation upon, it was the chickens that lay the eggs that they concerned themselves with. They sold some pretty good tasting roasters, but I will tell you, they shipped us some of the worse eggs you'd ever lay your eyes on, let alone smell with your nose. Although I had the "white-collar" job of Office Manager and Cost Accountant, there were times my duties extended to a more hands-on approach.

Not that I wanted to lay hands on that companies raw materials, but I was out there unloading their truck and what I unpacked was black eggs, rotten eggs and eggs with maggots.

Now here comes this representative wanting us to take more of this stuff from his company. He came in like a movie cliche, big old cowboy hat and a sur'nuf down home good ol' boy accent, with y'alls and back slaps all around. "Want you boys to come visit our plant," he says. "We'll take good care y'all. You come on down. We'll get you a woman and a good bottle of bourbon."

STUPIDITY

Remember that thing about buying low and selling high? Well, after a few weeks our new General Manager finally shows up back from Puerto Rico. He's all proud because he made a deal to sell the people on the Island a lot of egg white to make meringue.

Now that he had returned, for the moment, the buying and selling was back in his hands. He apparently hadn't read any pillows stitched with the production guy and my philosophy, because he bought high and sold low.

Now, and maybe this will surprise some, but there are consequences to buying high and selling low, and to having an overstocked inventory, and of running full bore full productivity when your sales are underperforming. It is called, NOT MAKING MONEY! Now that the inventory ploy was exposed (by yours truly) and the valuation reevaluated our bottom line so it didn't look so great. It looked a little red in the face. Things needed tightening up and our General Manager's idea of tightening up was not paying our suppliers.

This resulted in some suppliers refusing to sell us anything and those who would demanding a premium to do so. In other words, our buying high got higher.

Then one day, this new General Manager was gone. It really wasn't unusual for him to be gone. He was gone a lot, a la Puerto Rico, but he wasn't selling more meringue this time. Oh no, turned out he had another business on the side and he was devoting more hours to that business than to our eggs. And like our egg products, he was canned.

I suppose this belongs here under stupidity, but I thought I had a bright future with that company. I liked working there, liked my job, liked the people. It looked like we were going to expand. They were going to buy a bigger and better plant in Blue Anchor, New Jersey, move operations out of the confines of North Philadelphia. They had big plans, big dreams and here I was in on the ground floor of all this expansion.

I revisited my old employer, the bank, and discovered those managers who had lied to me were gone. In their place was the former auditor and he asked me if I would come back to work there. He even asked me to name my own salary to do so. But I told him I had a great opportunity where I was and turned it down.

Then my wife and I moved to New Jersey. C'est la vie.

BULLYING

Despite the corruption and the stupidity, it actually looked for a while we might turn it all around and get that dream factory over in Blue Anchor. But something else happened, which I'll get to later. The result of what happened I will deal with here. Basically, we tanked.

When things became clear that hope was going south, the company stopped production altogether. Everybody in the back was laid off, all the sorters and the sniffers, the washers and the breakers. These people weren't paid a lot to begin with, now they were getting nothing.

It wasn't long after the workers were laid off that there came a loud knock on the office door. I happened to be there with my secretary and no one else. We answered the knock and there were these gentlemen standing there who would have made find cast members for The Sopranos. These were guys who instantly made you wonder just how much broken kneecaps hurt. They were Teamsters, the Union that represented our now laid off work force.

Were they here to plead for the works jobs? Not exactly. They wanted us to know that they expected us to make sure these workers continued to pay their union dues.

I told them we couldn't do that. They would have to deal directly with their members.

As you can see I am still around and my kneecaps are fine. I can't speak for those long ago workers.

NEVER PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET

So what happened to finally kill that job? What promoted me from Office Manager to Assistant General Manager helping to oversee the dismantling of the plant? A sweet young thing known as Agnes.

This hurricane came up the Eastern Seaboard and inundated upper Pennsylvania with water, lots and lots of water. Much of the same area was flooded by Agnes as suffered the same fate last week. Up in Wilkes Barre was a big company called Interstate Bakeries. Interstate Bakeries was our biggest customer, too big to fail, at least too big to fail us.

In reality, Interstate didn't fail. They had an old factory in Wilkes Barre and it was destroyed by the floods. Rather than rebuild this ancient structure, Interstate decided to pull up stakes in the region and as a result, they no longer needed our egg product. And without Interstate, we had no reasonable chance to make a profit.

Good bye Blue Anchor. Goodbye Philadelphia. For me, hello unemployment. No company, if smart, should ever depend too much on one large customer.

One other lesson I learned there. Never eat dog food. Eggs rated not fit for human consumption went into big barrels and was sold to pet food manufacturers.

Adventures in iLand: Cops, Computers and Breaking Bad

Now, about getting the new computer. My old iMac was slowing down, aging like your's truly. I was getting that pinwheel a lot and it was spinning there for an exorbitant period of time. Then the internet would freeze up. I had updated the machine many times since purchased, had installed Snow Leopard not so long ago and now wished to upgrade to Lion. Everything I read of Lion mentioned wireless mouse. I use to be very techno, but have been out of the loop a decade now and I wondered could I download the upgrade and still use my little plug in mouse with its skinny white tail? 

So Earlier last week, I went to the Apple Store, three doors down the mall from us. I had been waiting in the hall for one of our managers to arrive with the key. It was a little before nine. I was eyeing the gapping entrance of iLand. The Apple Store always flung wide it's doors by 8:00 AM, often to a long line of already waiting people. A few months ago it had begun hiring State Police to guard it in the mornings. I don't know if this was from mayhem or their. Probably both. One day I arrived at the mall just after the last iPad or iPhone or iPopular-beyond-all-reason Device came out and there were four State Trooper cars across the entrance. I was half afraid to go inside. Was it terrorist? Had the roof caved in? Were gunmen running up and down the corridors? No, Apple addicts were lining those halls waiting to snag the lasted upgrade from the Great Gadget God Steven Jobs.

It's been pretty much that way like that ever since. Apple announces another iThingee and the lemmings come scurrying to wait in line all night if necessary. I think they have more clerks in Apple to handle these hoards than we have customers in our (oh wait, I'm not an our anymore) store in a month, maybe a month of Sundays. For a long period these lines were made up of Asian-Americans. These were people obviously long accustomed to waiting in lines. They came equipped with tiny chairs and stool on which they could squat for hours. It mystified me where they were coming from because I didn't believe we had that many Asian-Americans in our little state. It was explained to me they were car pooling down from New York to escape the high New York sales tax. For what they saved in sales tax they could buy a few extra of these iDevices.

Anyway, on this particular Monday morn I ambled down to the Apple Store. There were no lines that day. It must have been a lull in product announcements. There was a State Trooper however, standing stiffly just inside the doors. Beyond this sentinel were wall-to-wall Blue Shirts apparently assisting customers. I asked the officer if the store was open.

"It's open to people having appointments," he said authoritatively in that clipped way cops and military sergeants speak. "The store opens at 10:00. Can you come back at 10:00?"

"Yeah, I can come back later. I just had a question I wanted to ask."

"Is it a simple question, sir?"

"Yes."

"If it is a simple question, go ahead in. Ask those three guys sitting there." He pointed to three Blue Shirts at a center table.

Simple question? I am sure those three Blue Shirts considered it a stupid question, but I asked anyway and was told that I could indeed use my plug-in old mouse.


So when I got home that evening, I went on the old iMac to download Lion. I am not totally bereft of good sense yet, so first I clicked on "system requirements". 

• Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor.   Okay, got that.
• OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended).  Yeah, I;m fine there.
• 7GB of available space.   Sure, no problem.
• 2GB of memory.  Dum-de-dum-dum! Problem. My iMac only had 1.8GB of memory.

I guess I'll live with my Snow Leopard. I didn't have enough memory to change its spots.

So I go to work on Thursday and I look at next week's schedule pinned to the board and I have no days after my name. Hmm, I had seen a schedule lying on the office desk on Wednesday that had me on for Monday, Thursday and Friday. What happened? 

So I asked.

My Manager said, "I need to talk to you about that" and I knew what that meant and if you read my last post, so do you. 

It wasn't a complete surprise or a shock or anything, but you still feel a bit discombobulated when such a thing is dropped upon you. There was a lot of work to do, too, and I knew it would take an effort to do all I would normally do to make everything tidy and neat, shiny and bright; more effort than my last two days would allow and more effort than perhaps I was psychologically prepared to deal with at that moment. But I tried. I really wanted to leave them with as properly stocked back room as I could.

But the sudden change to my life weighed on me and that computer situation nagged at me. I didn't want to go into the great unknown with a computer that might be wearing out. I really began considering buying anew iMac, if I could get credit to do it. I decided I would go to the Apple Store after work and check it out.

I didn't get off until 4:00. Four o'clock was the beginning of the rush hour, a miserable time to be chugging back up good old I-95 from their location. There was hope I could avoid that. I had a 15 minute break allotted to me, in fact, it was supposed to be mandatory: "All employees will take a fifteen minute break under penalty of death or termination because we care. So you better take it."

I never took it. I hate those breaks. What am I suppose to do for fifteen minutes? Pace about looking at the clock being bored out of my mind. If you want a break, need a break, then you certainly should be allowed a break, but if you have no use for one, then get out of my way and let me work. They had another stupid must do, lunch. "If an employee worked five consecutive hours, they must clock out and take a half hour lunch." That isn't the state law or the federal law, that was just a company law. Now if I am working full time and sever or eight or more hours a day, yeah, I want the lunch break. Five or six hours, come on, I'd rather get done and go home. Why clock out and then have to be about the place an extra 30 minutes. And the corporate MBAs were very adamant about it, too. More Moronic, Boobish Activity to justify their getting a paycheck.

I never took those lunch hours either.

But now, under these conditions, that my career would end tomorrow at 3:00, why not take the break?

So I trotted out of the store sometime after 10:30 that morning. I wanted to tell the Manager I was taking my break, but she was on the phone, so I just left.

The Apple Store was a-bustle as usual. Blue Shirts everywhere and customers trying do-dads and gadgets right and left. I walked into the sea of humanity and was immediately greeted by a male Blue Shirt offering to help. I told him I was interested in buying an iMac if they had financing. He said they did, and whipped out his trusty iPad. Well, he didn't actually whip it out of a holster on his hip or anything. he simply picked it up from a nearby table, but you get the picture. Everything was done through that device. he was apparently fairly new to this and had to ask assistance from another Blue Shirt occasionally, but even so, in about five minutes I had my credit and was pointing out the iMac I wanted.

"It does have Lion?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "when they bring it out we can check. Some do and some don't. If it doesn't we will install it for you."

Someone toted the box out from a back room and plopped it at my feet. He asked about Lion and no, this one didn't. No biggie, they would install it. So we completed the transactions and he took me over to a Customer assist desk and introduced me to a young Blue Shirt who would handle the install.

"Shall I just leave it and pick it up later.'

They looked concerned. "Oh no, said the Customer Assist Blue Shirt. The customer must stay with the computer. It'll take about 45 minutes to install Lion."

"Okay," says I. "Just let me run down to my store and tell my manager where I am."

"I'm sorry, the customer must stay with their computer."

"Well, I wouldn't be away from my computer very long."

"Uh, where is your store?" he didn't say your store, he said the name of the store because that is what I had said instead of my store. You would have thought he would know. We were only three doors down the hall. But then again, why notice us. We had trickles of clients while the Apple Store had lines in the seemingly millions every day.

"It's three doors down," I say.

"Okay," says he, "but you (turning to the sales guy) go with them and carry his computer."

So there we go, out the door and down the hall and over the bridge and through the woods to my Manager, me and my shadow, the Blue Shirt lugging my computer being me. I tell my manager I will be at the Apple Store for 45 minutes and she says okay and me and the Blue Shirt Computer tender traipse back to the Customer Assist Blue Shirt in the Apple Store.

Now I know I was breaking bad. I was certainly at the Apple Store more than 45 minutes. It wasn't something I would ever do, had ever done, in my fifty-plus years of working. I felt and feel bad for my manager for my doing it, but you know what. That corporation tossed me aside in the discard heap because their upper management didn't know how to make a profit in the last five years. I had given them my all and my best and I had a year and a quarter accrued breaks, so overall, I don't care.

I spent some time being instructed by the Customer-Assist Blue Shirt guy and then was turned over to a Blue Shirt gal named Lauren until the install was completed. They had me do it, but they watched over me and paid me attention and helped get things just right. Over the years I have had many a MicroSoft filled PCs and all those times of purchase, I paid and they handed me the box, rather boxes and wires and manuals, shoved me out the door into the cold, cruel world of do-it-yourself techno install. Apple had people who treated me with respect and took the time to make certain my purchase was working and I understood enough to leave the nest. Unlike some companies, Apple seems to know what they are doing.

And Amber and I (the cat in my lap in the first picture) are very perfectly pleased with the new toy.

Freedom!

Sorry, it seemed much easier to snag a scene from Braveheart to illustrate the "Freedom!" cry than to paint me face, don a wig and re-enact it.

I barely know where to begin for my first posting on my new iMac (more about that next post) and first since we got our internet back. This has been quite a week, very much a "That was the Week That Was" one. In between the earthquake and the hurricane came an event that surely has seismographic effects on my personal life.

I lost my job.

Well, I didn't exactly lose it. I know where it is. Right there where I left it last Friday. The work I did didn't go away...at least, not yet. No, I didn't misplace my occupation in a senior moment, lay it down somewhere and forget where I put it. Officially, my position was eliminated. I suppose it sounds better to say, "Your position has been eliminated" rather that "You have been eliminated", although the latter is more the truth.
Technically, I guess, nothing has been eliminated. I'm still here, although no longer there. the work I did is still there, though. So the work wasn't eliminated, just the position. Now the work must be done by someone who already has another job to do. My lighter burden becomes their heavier burden. They're up the creek with one less oar in the cold water to help row. (There are some hints there, those who have eyes, see.)

It didn't take me by surprise. I was on the bottom rung, stock person. Always the first to go when a company begins tanking. First they come for the stock person, then for the sales clerk, then for the store manager and then they give the CEO a $40 million  pension and call it a day. In other words, the people in the trenches, who do the real work, who know the customer, know the product pretty darn well, too, and know what the product lacks, get the boot first. The people who run all these businesses into the ground are never the first cast overboard, when they should be at the head of the plank. Heck, they should never have been whistled board ship to begin with. Most places these days are run by a bunch of MBA (that is a degree in Moronic Boobish Activity) who wouldn't know how to sit down if it wasn't a theory in a textbook written by a person who never sat down. And of course they would miss the chair, because after all, it is only a theory. (By the way, there is another three-letter acronym for CEO, but this is a family Blog so I won't mention it.)

Anyway, they eliminated my position across the board so I'm told. Yeah, that'll save the company, we all made so much.

See, this is what I mean by freedom. I would never have spoken so bluntly if I was working or expected to look for another job. It may be a bit tighter financially, we may have to draw in our belts, but as far as I am concerned I am retired. Now I can speak more freely about what is in my mind. I don't have to worry some one at work will read it and fire me. Oh boy, I've kept a lot of stuff pent up inside me for fifty-plus years. This should supply me with posting for a while.

It is very interesting that I walked in on Thursday and walked out Friday set free. At Wilmington Trust (remember them, around over a hundred years before Moronic Boobish Activity did them in) I got told on a Wednesday and was out the door on Friday. That event was almost exactly 10 years ago. My current ex-employer missed that anniversary by 10 days. I was lucky in a way. Everyone else I saw get terminated at WTC was escorted out the door by security on the day the axe fell. I was asked to stay about for two more days and walked out at the end alone with my dignity. Both that bank and this company harped a bit on loyalty. Where is the loyalty when they cast you aside like a damaged glass vase. If I had quit, I would have always given two weeks notice. I would be considerate, which of course the Corporation would expect, although consideration is a concept they don't understand when it is expected of them.

But don't think I am upset or unhappy with this turn of events. Remember, freedom! I've craved this freedom for such a long time. So here it is and I m adjusting. You may see a different tone going forward, but hopefully I will still write in good taste and Christian love.

And let me tell you, my direct boss was one of the best, a wonderful person who deserves better that she has received over the last several years. The people I worked with were all great, too. The problems in the company are not these people, not those who are the faces the public sees and deals with. You gotta go higher to the invisible elite who think they actually know what their doing. I wonder what company they will be ruining next year?

A History of Work

There I am, off to the office in 1953, age 12. No not really. The suit and tie jobs were still in the distant future, although I traded in that bow tie for Windsor Knots. This must have been my "Sunday-go-to-meeting" outfit.

How about the hat? This was the de rigeuer style back then.

I don't remember my first paid "job".

There was a small store on Chestnut Street, just around the corner from where I lived. (The photo on the right is how that building looks today, no longer a store.) It was a mom and pop operation, very akin to what we might call a convenience store today. It sold a variety of foodstuff and other things people regularly needed or often ran short of. It wasn't a place anyone did their weekly grocery shopping, just a place to fill in the daily needs. Early on in my boyhood, neighbor's might call me over and ask if I would run to that store and get them bread or milk or some such item. They would give me a couple pennies or even a nickel for my trouble. Pennies could actually buy things in those days, they had real worth, even if sometimes I blew it on wax lips.

So I suppose you could call that my first job.

I had a number of chores at home I was expected to do, wash the car, mow the lawn, help weed the garden when we had one and keep my room clean and neat. I hated those first three and was a dismal failure at the fourth. I had one chore I loved, taking out the trash.

Things were not like today with all our many restrictions and fears. There was less waste and there was a kind of a priori recycling. You didn't throw anything away until it was beyond recognition, let alone use. Clothes were patched and socks were darned. When you found yourself patching patches, then the item became a dust cloth and beyond that use it was a rag for the Ragman. Yeah, there was a Ragman who came about the neighborhood and took old rags.

We lived in a town bursting at the seams with paper mills (almost all gone now) and our used foolscap and magazines went to paper drives and back into the hoppers of these plants. Soda bottles and such were collected by we kids and returned to the store for a couple cents deposit. Garbage, real garbage, potato peels and apple cores and table scraps went to the curb in iron pails. The Garbage man took the contents. You knew when he was coming since you smelled him two blocks away, maybe even across town on a hot summer day if the rotting pulp from the paper mills didn't overwhelm all other scents. He drove an open bin truck. The refuge from our plates went to the slop troughs of the pig farms.

Ah, but there were some things not gathered or collected by others and this was the trash, mostly odd papers and boxes. This was the trash I had responsibility to depose of and how I enjoyed it. You see, it was burnt in large steel 55-gallon drums. Just about everyone on the street had their drum and from it regularly waifed a thin white smoke of burning trash. What made it attractive to me was I got to play with fire.

Here I am (back to the camera and wearing my motorcycle hat) with friends finding other uses for those 55-gallon trash barrels.

But those were household chores, not paying jobs, unless you count my quarter allowance. Oddly, as much as I hated doing most those at home, I jumped at the opportunities to do these things for others. I would mow a lawn, wash a car, even hoe a garden for a fee. I would solicit from a neighbor those things I tried to duck out from at home. So I guess they were my first employments.

I was in elementary school when I did those.  I was also in elementary school when I became a professional writer writing, publishing and selling a newspaper ("The Daily Star," although it came out weekly) with my buddy, Stuart Meisel. We charged a penny a copy. We did make money. We were very successful.

Newspapers were to be important in my early "careers". When I moved from Grade School to Junior High I also moved to more regular employment, Paperboy being one. That occupation came a bit later and lasted only a short period, although I loved doing it and thought it the greatest job in the world. I kinda still think it was. I guess I'm a strange fish, but one of the things I enjoyed about the job was doing it in harsh weather, pushing on through the snow and battling the rain to keep my wares dry. I could imagine myself some kind of adventurer attempting to get supplies to an isolated outpost in some godforsaken part of the world, such fun.

I didn't like the breezy days or that blowhard Old Man March, no not at all. I could cover up my product from the downpours and hail stones if need be, but if an ill wind got under my pouch papers would do what Charles Brown's kite wouldn't. They would fly, here, there and everywhere.

I took over the route from my friend, Ron Tipton, known today as "Retired in Delaware". He moved on to bigger and better things, I hope, and turned over his customers to me. I had about 100 clients for the daily and perhaps a third less for the big Sunday edition. This was the Philadelphia Bulletin, then the premier Philly rag, now defunct. I was earning between 18 and 20 dollars a week, a lot of money for a thirteen-year-old kid in the early 1950s. That would have been around $148 to $165 today. Dailies cost a nickel and the Sunday paper was $25. I had to split that four ways, a portion for me, a portion for my Supervisor, some for the delivery truck driver and the rest to the owner of the newsstand where I picked up my allotment. I got a penny-and-a-half for the dailies and five cents for the Sunday.

And it only took me an hour a day to deliver. Wow, wouldn't you like to make a $165 an hour today?

I said this bonanza was short lived.  Ron held onto his route until after Christmas the year he quit. He wanted to garner those extra-bonus Christmas tips from his cliental. I took over for the New Year, but then my parents moved out of town and in June I was living in the country and could no longer do that route.

I had held other positions in my Junior High days. I had spent a time being caretaker for my friend Stuart's family, cutting grass, watching the place and so forth.

The Meisel's had a large stone house on a good sized lot in the historic part of town. Here is a photo of the front of the home. Sadly, despite attempts by my friend to have the place preserved, it was torn down and apartments built upon the site.

In those times, too, some us walked just east of town and got jobs at the Farmer's Market. The Market was only open on weekends. A lot of Mennonites and some Amish from Lancaster County came down and had produce or meat stalls there. The place was something of a bizarre, selling a little of much, books and boots, clothes and clothes lines, hunting gear and records. It had a penny arcade of pinball machines. The place was our hangout on weekend nights, feeding nickels into those contraptions or making little records in recording booths. I and a friend got jobs one year with a greengrocer. I was not happy. My friend got to wait on customers. I stood in the back behind a tub of water washing celery.  I wasn't long for that job.

When we moved from town upcountry, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for a teen. It was still real country then and there wasn't much around. In the summers I got employed on some farms in the area as a picker. I picked tomatoes and I picked strawberries. It was sweaty, uncomfortable work. It isn't called stoop labor for nothing. You either spent the day bend over or waddling up the rows like a duck. You came home sticky, covered with dust, thirsty, stiff and tired.

I plucked plants for the two summers between ninth and tenth, and between tenth and eleventh. On the third summer of High School  I moved up and out, getting a job loading 18-wheelers at the farms in Lancaster County. Those Amish boys would gee their horse wagons up along side and I would offload their harvest onto the flatbeds, bushel baskets of tomatoes heading to the ketchup factories in the Western end of the state. The baskets got stacked to just above my head all down the trailer. You have any idea how many bushels of tomato you can stack six high down thirty feet of truck?

I think I got paid ten bucks a load.

That was summertime, when the livin' is easy. The winters were harsh and sparse. I got an occasional gig shoveling snow, mostly the parking lot of a restaurant called Flowing Springs Inn in Kirkwood, about four miles from my home. That was a hit or miss proposition. I only made money when a snow storm hit, otherwise I missed out on earning anything.

That's the Flowing Springs Inn as it looks today, under the name Titus Inn. That enclosed porch was open back then, so I had to shovel it and its steps off as well.

I guess I started those childhood chores for hire when I was 8. I might have done some earlier, but I was living isolated from the world in a swamp for a couple years. So all those little scraping jobs covered about a decade, from the third grade until I graduated high school.

They were the beginning of a history of work. Much more was to come and still is.

Buildings I have Worked In -- As Best As I Can Show

Today I was reminded of places I have worked in my adult life. It got me thinking about all the buildings I have worked in and I decided to just do a post on them.

We didn't have digital cameras over all those years, so many of the places I worked I never took a photo of and some of them have ceased to exist.  So I supplemented my own photos as best I could with pictures taken off the internet. Even here, some places can't be found and some have been torn down and several have turned to other things. But here is my work journey through buildings as well as I can put it together.

I count as my first adult job the one I had with Proctor & Gamble in the fall of 1959. It is represented by the first photo at the top of this post. That is the Pottstown Train Station of the Reading Railroad Line. I didn't actually work in that building, although I was to ride trains from that station to jobs in Philadelphia for a couple years.

What happened on my first job was I worked the streets out of a van. It had a big Mr. Clean on the side and we walked about the towns hanging sample bottles on doorknobs.

In November I got my first permanent job. This was with the Atlantic Refining Company (later Atlantic Richfield or ARCo).

I began as a clerk in Sales Accounting on the sixteenth floor of the twenty-one story headquarters. It was at 260 South Broad Street in Philadelphia.

The building is still there, but ARCo is no more.

I worked most of my nearly ten years in that building at different positions in different departments on different floors. There was a brief period when I worked as a Traffic Manager at the loading docks in the heart of the refining yard of South Philly.

The headquarters building smelled much better.

I was a free-lance writer for a while after I left ARCo, but in that period I also took a part time evening job at the Philadelphia Gum Co. in Havertown.

I began as a Wad Slinger and worked my way up to Bubblegum Welder.

I came home every night covered with powder sugar.

Philadelphia Gum made various products. They had bite-sized pieces (which I was cutting as a welder), bozuka-type gun and they also made packets containing trading cards. On the left is a series of "Dark Shadow" cards they did about the time I was there. On the right is a much, much older baseball card.

When I finally went back to a full time job it was as a Circulation Manager for North American Publishing.  They were located on the Northwest corner of 13th and Cherry Street in Philadelphia.

I have no photo of the place and wasn't able to find one. I tried Google Maps and discovered the Philadelphia Convention Center sits atop the location where it was, so it is gone now.

I do have a picture I took of the magazines I managed.

When I left the publisher in the early part of 1970 I went to work for Lincoln Bank. It was the new kid in town and very innovative. I began work in the operations center somewhere up 38th Street in West Philadelphia. I would walk from my University City apartment, through Powelton Village to our site, which was beneath a parking lot.

I am not positive, but I think the above picture on the right is of the site as it looks today. You can't tell from the photo, but looking down from above on Google Maps you can see cars do park on the roof.

The bank then moved its operations from West Philly to a site on Sansom Street near 13th. Would you believe it? We were under another parking lot, this time a garage. Here we were in the basement with some of the biggest roaches I ever hope to see.

I left that bank when they lied to me (another story).  Lincoln Bank no longer exists, it was gobbled up by a bigger bank decades ago and the bank that gobbled it up was gobbled up by a bigger bank and so on until I couldn't tell you all the gobblers anymore.

Now I went to North Philly, rode the Frankford El to Tioga and then walked down to Tulip Street to my Office Manager/Cost Accounting position with Olson Brothers, Inc. They were an egg-breaker. They're gone, too.

I am not absolutely certain, but I think this was the site where they were as it looks on Google Maps today.

When Olson's closed after I had been there only one year, I ended up on Weccacoe Avenue in South Philly working for Welded Tube Co. of America, largest of their kind in the day, but also no longer in existence.

It may not look it in these google map pictures, but that office was very futuristic looking at the time.

On the left is a photo I took of our lobby at the time. The man standing there was my friend, Victor. This was on his birthday.


On the right is me at my desk. I was the Assistant Controller.






Here I am a year or so later at my other desk. I was still Assistant Controller, but I had added being the Systems Manager to my title, so I alternated offices. I had also shaved my beard.

I don't know who, if anyone, owns the factory now. The area looks a bit disheveled these days. The long building running back into the distance from the offices was the plant. We made structural steel tubing in there.

But in 1978, because of the economic situation in the steel business, the owner decided to close down the Philadelphia operations, which was the headquarters and main plant, and move to Chicago.

The Little Woman and I, just having our first child, did not want to move to Chicago, although the company offered me a good amount of money to do so. Instead I ended up here.

Actually this seems to be a new headquarters built on the site of the one I was in at Mercy Catholic Medical Center in Darby. I came on as Budget Director.

Although my office was in the headquarters building, I spent time in the other buildings of the Center, which wasn't all that centered.

I had to spend sometime in Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital, which is also where one of my children had died some years earlier and where my second daughter to live would be taken to Neo Natal ICU to keep her alive.

I would also travel into our other hospital in Philadelphia. It was called Misericordia at that time, but when I was pulling this photo off Google maps I see it has changed its name to Mercy Philadelphia Hospital.

It looks pretty much the same.

After two years I left the Medical Center (another story for another time) and became an Operations, Methods and Project Manager in Deposit Services and Data Preparation for a large bank in Delaware.
That didn't mean I didn't have different jobs or always work in the same building. I became first an Operations Officer, then a Retail Banking Officer, then a Financial Officer and when I was finally pushed out 21 years later, I was a Marketing Officer and a Senior Marketing Information Database Administrator.

When I began there I had an office on the mezzanine of the Monchanin Building on Tenth Street.

A couple years later we moved to the new headquarters, which was a high rise built within the shell of the old post office and simply called The Center.


Here are the different buildings I worked in for the bank thereafter:

In 1988 they opened a new operations center called The Plaza. Here on the left I am preparing to move all my stuff out of my Wilmington Office to my new office in the New Castle Corporate Commons and on the right, a few years, pounds and less hair later, in my Plaza office.

In the mid-nineties I bounced around a lot, leaving the Plaza to return to The Center.

That is part of The Plaza on the left and the front of The Center on the right.

Then to an office high up in the Pei Building.

And finally, before I was forced into retirement, an office in the new Plaza in downtown Wilmington next to the YMCA.

Now after I left that bank, I signed on with a temp agency. Where did they send me for a job?

Why with that bank, of course.

The job was located in this windowless building, though. The Bank had some operations in the Brooks Armored Car Money Room.

The temp jobs were not very steady, so I got a part time job with a printing company called Mercantile Press. I was the assistant accountant.

I was there about a year and a quarter, then due to cost reductions was let go. I next had a job as Office Administrator for the Juvenile Diabetes research Foundation.

The irony of this job was I was back in the Monchanin Building where I had had my first office in Wilmington. Now I was on the twelfth floor, which back in that day had been the executive offices of the Chairman and other high officers of the bank.

The building was now called The Community Services Building.

I didn't find this job a good fit and left after a short time. I decided I wanted a different type of work, something more physical, with less stress where I wouldn't take worry or work home with me. I found it as a stock person at Chico's, a ladies fashion boutique in Greenville.

That job lasted 4 1/4 years and then I was hired away to another store and another stock position.

This job is in the new wing of the large Christiana Mall. How long will it last? Who knows? Will I go to another building someday to work? To tell the truth, I hope not. I hope this is my last stop in the work-a-day world.

Time will tell.