Summer Jobs

I returned home to Nassau at the end of my freshman year at Syracuse University. Although I would continue to work part-time at my father’s tavern and gas station, I wanted a regular job. John Weaver, a high school classmate who lived in the Nassau Lake area, and I went to the Albany office of the New York State Labor Department, which operated an employment office where it matched employers with potential employees without fees.

 After checking in for a couple of days, we were offered a job at Latham Circle where the new Thunderbird Motel was being built. We were told that the pay was $1.90 per hour, which was not bad since the federal minimum wage had just been raised from seventy-five cents to one dollar per hour. The catch was that it would be hard labor work and that we had to be on the job by 5:30 in the morning. With no other prospects, we accepted the job and drove out to the job site the next morning. We were given pick-axes and shovels and started digging trenches for the foundation footers. The ground was heavy and stony and the work was much harder than we were used to. After the fourth day, John heard of another job opening that needed two temporary workers in addition to another college student who had been hired. The pay was less - $1.75 per hour, but the hours were regular and the work promised to be much easier. We quit the construction job, only to find out when we received our paycheck the following Friday that we were actually being paid $4.90 per hour. We tried to get rehired, but the jobs were taken. To this day I can never drive past the Thunderbird Motel without remembering that hard work.

Our new job was with the Gahagan Construction Corporation of New York City. Gahagan had been hired by the New York State Thruway Authority to complete a geophysical study of a small section of the “Berkshire Spur” that would connect the Thruway with the Massachusetts Turnpike. The particular section where we were going to work was near Chatham Center in Columbia County. The crew consisted of me, John, the other college student, and two full-time technicians from New York City. The baseline had already been marked out by a survey team, and this job was to determine the soil and bedrock conditions along that baseline. This was done by taking seismographic soundings. This was done by sending shock waves into the ground by exploding dynamite and recording the echoes using electronic sensors called geophones. The geophones were connected to a recording device in a laboratory mounted on a truck body. The resulting graph looked like a cardiogram. The soundings were made 220 feet along the baseline at a time. We would unroll two 110-foot-long cables, end to end along the baseline. A third cable connected the two cables with the instruments in the laboratory. The metal geophones, each a little smaller than a teacup, would be connected to the cables with connectors every ten feet. The shock waves were created by setting off three small dynamite charges simultaneously. I was selected to be in charge of planting the dynamite, something that I never told my parents until the summer was over. Each morning on our way to work, John and I stopped at a pull-off on Route 66 where the dynamite was stored. We had a key to a gate and another key to open the large metal storage box where the dynamite was kept. We would load a few sticks of dynamite and some blasting caps into the car and bring them to the job site. After work, we would return any dynamite and blasting caps that hadn’t been used back into the storage box.

John and the other student had the job of laying out the cables along the baseline and attaching the geophones. I used a steel crowbar near the ends of the cables and near where they met to punch a hole about 3 feet deep. I would run a wire from the laboratory to each hole and attach an electric blasting cap to the wire. I would cut the dynamite sticks in half, insert a blasting cap into the dynamite, push it into the hole, and then pack dirt back in. The technicians had explained that dynamite was actually quite safe unless triggered by a spark that was provided by the blasting cap. In fact, one could hold a match to the dynamite; it would burn but not explode. I carried dynamite and the blasting caps in my pockets.

We enjoyed the job. The work was not really hard and we weren’t rushed. There were many times when the technicians were doing their work, and we could just sit around, talk, and sometimes eat wild strawberries that we found.

One morning I screwed up. We had been given machetes to clear the path of any pricker bushes or wild raspberry vines that would prevent the cables from being laid straight. After the cables were laid I snipped at a vine with my machete and hit a cable. I didn’t completely sever it, but some of the wires inside were cut. The three of us had a quick conference and decided to say nothing. We went back to the laboratory where we would be safely away from the blast and waited. The warning horn was sounded, and the technicians detonated the dynamite. A couple of minutes later one of the technicians came out of the laboratory and traced one of the cables. He returned in a few minutes, looking grim. After he conferred with the other tactician, he said,  “Boys, someone cut the cable. I don’t know who did it, and I don’t care, but don’t let it happen again.” The technicians did not have a replacement cable with them, and they spent the rest of the day carefully splicing the cable together while we picked wild strawberries and wondered whether we would keep our jobs.

That job ended toward the end of June or the beginning of July. John got a job delivering ice cream that lasted him for the rest of the summer. George Reischuck, a neighbor and friend who was a year ahead of me in school, heard that Ft. Orange Paper Company in Castleton was hiring summer help. We went there and were hired.

The Ft. Orange Paper Company was located in Castleton, New York, a few miles south of Rensselaer and Albany. Its plant was near the Hudson River and consisted of a paper-making facility, a printing plant, and the company’s offices. The paper that it manufactured was really light cardboard, the kind used in small food boxes, tissue boxes, etc. The main ingredient was old magazines and newsprint, and truckloads of it were delivered for this recycling. George and I were employed in the printing plant.

The factory was very busy that summer, and it worked three shifts. Cardboard manufactured in the mill was cut into large sheets, probably four feet square. Pallets of the cardboard would be fed into large color printing presses where the designs for boxes would be printed and the outlines of the boxes scored. It was a marvelous process, as the sheets would go from one pallet through the press and be precisely loaded on a second pallet. Once printed and scored, “strippers” (employees with jackhammers with sharp blades) would trim the boxes and discard the selvage. The flat boxes would be moved to the shipping area and ultimately packaged for transport to the end-user.

Although Ft. Orange had several customers for whom it manufactured boxes, I only remember three: Chiclets boxes that held 2 Chiclets for vending machines, Hartz Mountain birdseed boxes, and Knox Gelatin boxes.

George and I started out on the day shift, working on Knox Gelatin boxes. These boxes, about the size of today’s Jello boxes, were brought to us on pallets. We had workstations across from each other, sort of like a partner’s desk. A pallet of Knox boxes would be placed on one side of both of us, and an empty pallet on the other side. Although the strippers had removed the selvage, there were 2 parts of the boxes that were scored, but too small to be removed with the jackhammers. One was a slot about 2 inches long and about 1/4 inch wide. The other was an area shaped like one-half of an arrowhead. Our job was to pick up a handful of the boxes, place them in a special wooden jig that had similarly shaped holes in the bottom, and then knock out those scored pieces with a mallet and slender chisel. It was tedious work, but not particularly hard. We were pretty much left alone after we showed competence in the work, and we could talk as we worked. After a few days, George was taken off that job and given other duties. I was left to continue with the Knox boxes.  They had a picture of a cow in the center of a circle, and most of the box was greenish-yellow. With George on another job, I had no one to talk to, and I developed a rhythm; pick up a handful of boxes, put them in the jig, hammer the slot and the half arrow, put them on the other pallet, and start over again. After I had been doing this for a couple of days, the shop foreman came to me and asked if I knew how many boxes I had finished that shift. I told him that I didn’t keep track, but apparently, he did. He said that I had done approximately 22,000 boxes so far and that the previous record for a complete shift was a little over 18,000 boxes. He said, “You’re going back to college in a little while, but management will expect the regular guys to keep up that production.” He said that he was going to mark my day’s work at 16,000 boxes and that I should “go read some magazines.” I went to the large shed where the magazines and papers awaiting recycling were stored and read magazines. After that, whenever I worked on the Knox boxes, I would punch 15,000 or so and then go and read magazines for the rest of my shift.

After a while, George and I were put on the evening shift, midnight to 8 am. That worked out well for us. We would go swimming in the Valatiekill near Castleton in the late afternoon and usually stop at a bar in Castleton to shoot darts, have a sandwich, and a couple of beers before going to work. (The legal age for alcohol was still 18 at the time). 

One of my chores on that shift was to move pallets to and from the presses and to and from the stripping areas. Battery-operated hand trucks were used to move the pallets.  The base would fit under a pallet and jack it just slightly off the floor. The worker would then lead the hand truck with a long handle, as the electric motor powered wheels. One evening I made a 90-degree turn too fast and approximately 50,000 penny Chiclet boxes fell off the pallet and fanned out over the floor.  No one got too excited about anything that happened on the night shift.  Many of the regular employees would catch a couple of hours of sleep during their shift since none of the higher management worked then.

Eventually, George and I were assigned to feed cardboard into a big four-color press that was printing Hartz Mountain Bird Seed Food boxes. We would together lift a stack of blank sheets of cardboard into the press. The sheets would then be lifted, one by one, into the press by a mechanical arm that grabbed each sheet, and moved it into the press. We became a little sloppy in feeding the press, and as a result, the mechanical arm once picked up two or three sheets instead of just one. The extra thickness of the multiple sheets of cardboard jammed the press and misaligned the plates. It took a couple of days to get the press running properly again since a repairman had to be brought in from the printing press factory to get it printing properly again.  The job at Ft. Orange ended just before Labor Day weekend when I returned to college.  Years later the company went into bankruptcy.

I came home at the end of my sophomore year at Syracuse University.  One evening, shortly after my return, I told my parents that I was meeting two high school friends, Bob Stewart and John Weaver and that I would be home by 10:00 p.m.  After I met Bob and John, we went to a bar in Rensselaer where we drank some beer and started shooting darts.  We were having a good time, and before we knew it, it was after 1:00 a.m. and the bar was closing, so we left.  

When I got home, I was surprised to see that the lights were still on in Jack's Place, and I went in to see why.  Both of my parents were there, and my father was on the telephone.  They had been calling my friends' parents, the State Police, and were getting ready to call hospitals since they were sure that something terrible had happened.  My explanation infuriated my father, and he announced that from then on, I would have to be home by 10:00 p.m. or I would have to move out of the house.

The next day I drove over to Camp Nassau, a children's boarding summer camp about five miles from home.  Camp Nassau was owned by the Krouner family and formerly had been a summer vacation destination, known as Krouners' Hotel, which had catered to Jewish families, mainly from New York City. The facility was about ten miles from Albany.  The Krouners knew my family, and their daughter, Risa, had been in kindergarten and first grade with me at the Nassau Elementary School before they moved to Albany. [Camp Nassau was initially operated by Ben Becker. The following year he re-established Camp Nassau in Guilderland, Albany County, and the Krouner family continued the original facility as Camp Schodack.)

I saw Lou Krouner and asked if he had any job openings, thinking that perhaps I could get a job as a counselor.  There were no counselor jobs open, but Lou asked if I would want to work doing such things as driving the van to Albany to pick up groceries, pick up campers at the bus or train station, and mow the lawns with a tractor.  I don't recall the wages, but the job included room and board.  I bunked with the counselors and went to social events. I had my own car there, and some evenings I would drive into Albany with some camp counselors and pick up submarine sandwiches at Mike's Subs on Central Avenue and State Street. Sometimes I would take the naive counselors on a tour of Green Street or Dongan in Avenue, Albany's notorious red-light district, where the ladies of the night would approach the car with their propositions or call out from windows with invites such as, "Come up and let me fuck your big cock."  

It was an enjoyable summer.  I would occasionally stop at home and see my parents. When the camp was over shortly before the fall semester started, I came home and observed the 10:00 p.m. curfew.

Following my junior year at college, I didn't get a job.  I was required to go to the Army ROTC summer camp at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, for six weeks, which made a summer job opportunity impractical.  Instead, before and after the ROTC camp I worked in Jack's Place just as I had done during summer vacations when I was in public school.

Growing Tomatos in Florida

My uncle Eddie was a full-time farmer. A bachelor for most of his life, he didn't own a home. Most years, he boarded with my uncle Max or with my uncle Harry during the vegetable growing season in upstate New York. Eddie didn't like winter, and at the end of the farming season, he usually drove his gray Hudson pickup truck to Florida.

Vegetable farming, or "truck farming" as it was generally known, did not require a great deal of equipment. The typical crops were corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and various types of summer and winter squash. The primary piece of equipment was a tractor equipped with a plow to till the soil, a harrow or disc to break up the plowed soil, cultivators to destroy weeds growing in the rows, and a trailer to haul bags of fertilizer and hand tools throughout the fields and to bring the ripe produce to a central point. A lot of the work was manual labor: cutting the weeds away from each growing plant with a long-handled hoe.  

During late 1951 Eddie decided to try growing tomatoes in south Florida. The timing was perfect for him. The growing season for tomatoes didn't start until the growing season in upstate New York ended, and it was over in time for Eddie to return to New York. He shipped his equipment to Florida and rented a modest field near Homestead, south of Miami, where he successfully grew a tomato crop.

The following summer, he spoke enthusiastically about Florida farming to my father and convinced him that he should join him in a larger tomato growing venture during the coming winter growing season. 

Note Marking Periods 3 & 4

My parents would usually close their tavern for a winter vacation in Florida. The vacations had been limited when my sisters were in high school because they objected to missing classes, but once they both went to college and I was the only public school student, the vacation periods lengthened. I didn't particularly mind missing some school. Although the school administration objected to my leaving school for a time, my father told them that he and my mother were going to Florida, and did they expect them to leave me home alone?  While I was away, they marked my report card "on vacation" for the time I was gone. Only one teacher, Miss Bennett, the mathematics teacher, penalized me by not letting me return to geometry because she thought that I had missed too much while on vacation.

My parents and I drove to Florida at the start of Christmas vacation in 1952 to join Eddie in the tomato farming venture. My father rented rooms (possibly an efficiency apartment) at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive near 8th Street in Miami Beach. The Beacon Hotel was in an area that primarily hosted Jewish families but is now in the heart of the tony "South Beach."

Shortly after we arrived, Eddie drove my father and me down to Homestead. It was strictly a farming country, a few years before the Air Force constructed the large Homestead AFB. The farmland was perfectly flat, with gravel or crushed white rock farm roads dividing the fields. There were ditches along the roads that always had a few inches of water in them. The fields were bare, as Eddie had arranged for them to be plowed and harrowed prior to planting. Unlike tomato growing in New York, where the farmers usually purchased small plants from greenhouses to get a higher-priced early crop, the procedure in Homestead was to harrow a stretch of soil along a road and sow the tomato seeds. When the fields were ready for planting, young plants were simply dug up from the roadside and replanted in the fields.

My father and I were probably the only active farmers living in Miami Beach. We dressed in our farm clothes most mornings and headed south in my father's 1947 Buick Roadmaster. We usually stopped at a diner in Coral Gables for breakfast and then met Eddie in the fields.  

One of the interesting aspects of farming in Homestead was natural irrigation. The water table was just below the deep topsoil. Some nocturnal soft-shelled land crabs moved into the fields during the summer when it was too hot and too wet to farm. Tomato farmers couldn't co-exist with the crabs because they would damage the plants. Accordingly, the first job that my father and I had was to poison the crabs. Eddie produced jars of an orange paste that contained poison and glowed in the dark. For a couple of days, my father and I walked the fields. Whenever we saw a crab's hole, we would put a dab of the poison paste on a wooden match-sized piece of dried reed and place it next to the hole. The crabs would find it at night, dine on it, and die. After the crab poisoning was completed, we had to stay away for a few days because the stench of the rotting crabs was too onerous.

When the time was suitable for planting, Eddie marked the rows by driving his tractor back and forth with a cultivator's tooth on either side down at the proper distance to separate the rows of tomatoes. It was at this point that the migrant laborers appeared. Our farm was not large enough to employ its own laborers, who required housing, transportation, and other amenities of life. Instead, Eddie subcontracted laborers as needed from a large grower with whom he had become friendly. Eddie was actually a social person. When not working, he was a dapper dresser with a pencil-thin mustache. He was very active in the Masons and became a Shriner. I believe that it was his Masonic contacts that provided the entre to the Homestead farming community.

Migrant labor in south Florida was quite different in the pre-Castro days. The migrant laborers were from Cuba, not Mexico, as is the case today. On the field, they were managed by a Black foreman who spoke enough Spanish to give directions. There was a chain of command: Eddie and my father would give directions to the Black foreman, who in turn would give directions to the Cuban workers. I was only about fourteen at the time and was too young and inexperienced in tomato farming to give directions. Although from time to time, I would drive the tractor to cultivate the tomato plants, I was given the chore of killing snakes. The ditches were home to snakes, and their actual or perceived presence was unnerving to the workers. Eddie equipped me with a double-barrel 20 gauge shotgun and a supply of cartridges containing lead birdshot. I would patrol the fields along the ditches and shoot snakes when I saw them, although most were black snakes not known to be poisonous. Perhaps, some were moccasins, but I didn't differentiate. If I was a snake, I shot it. One day I approached a foreman who was sitting under a tree having lunch. I noticed a snake in the tree above him, and without warning, I raised the shotgun and fired both barrels into the tree. I don't know if he was more frightened by seeing a white teenager suddenly point and fire a shotgun in his direction, or by the pieces of snake that rained down from the tree next to him.  

We didn't have to go to the fields on a day-to-day basis. As the crops grew, Eddie pretty much ran the show himself, and sometimes my father would go there by himself while my mother and I remained at the hotel or at the beach. My father's roots were in farming, and I think he enjoyed just being in the fields and talking with his brother.  

We had a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. It was a great radio in its time because it was both AC and battery-powered. It had several short wave frequency bands as well as the usual AM frequency. My father used to tune in some weather stations, and one day he learned of some severe weather system in the Caribbean but was thought to be heading towards Florida. Winter is not hurricane season in Florida, and the forecast was unusual. The possibility of a big storm was not even in the news media, which devoted most of the weather news to winter storms in the north, probably as an incentive to keep tourists in town. 

After some discussions, my father and Eddie sold the crop "on the field" at a discounted price to a local packing house. They received a check that they quickly cashed. Eddie loaded up his equipment and headed north. A couple of days later a massive rainstorm flooded the Homestead area farmlands and caused widespread destruction to the ripening crops. Eddie decided to quit Florida farming while he was ahead and restricted farming to upstate New York.