Yesterday I was cleaning up the storage area in our barn while looking for old pictures of my brother for the folks working on the memory book for his 50th high school reunion. I opened a plastic container and found something that I thought was lost about ten years ago.
It was a journal that myself and a few of my co-workers kept at the Jasper Novelty Furniture company, a furniture manufacturing company. . Just before the New Year of 1963, I happened to be in the Home Outfitters in Loogootee and I picked up a calendar published by Frigidaire. It was one of those kind that have small boxes fro recording daily stuff. I took it to work with me to keep track of the hours I worked because at the time, our regular work week was 45 hours with an additional 14 hours available and we were expected to work those as well.
Anyway, there were four people at our workstation. (Incidentally, it wasn’t called a workstation then. It didn’t have name. It was just where we worked.) We ran a gluespreader that glued tops on table frames. Three of us were regulars; myself at age 22, a big german guy named Lee Kratzer** and a young guy like myself named Murray Striker**. Lee was the lead guy on our machine and the only one of us married; his wife was named Shirley and he loved her dearly although he was in trouble with her every day. Lee was in his early 30’s, a big beer drinker and tough as nails. Had Archie Bunker been around, Lee would have made him look like Mother Teresa. He was legendary in Jasper for his toughness but deep down, he was a kind man who would do anything for anyone.
Murray was our resident ladies man and big man on campus. He was the antithesis of me and I secretly loved it when he ended up with egg on his face. Many of the entries in the journal reflect his prowess with the women. He had the constitution of a horse and on many a morning when I went to pick him for work at 6:15, he would just be getting home. A nap on the twenty mile trip to the factory and a 5 minute session of vomiting out the back window of the factory usually made him as frisky and fresh as a puppy. **Names have been changed.
Our fourth member was usually a ‘floater’; a person who who would work a few days on our machine and then move on somewhere else.
As it happened, we recorded our hours on this calendar but then we also began to record other happenings around the place as well. Anyone of us could add entries to the book and it wasn’t very long before we were filling up those little boxes with tiny script and I ended up with a record of my life for that year. Most of the entries are inane and boring unless you know the story behind them. I look at some of the entries today and laugh out loud at the memory.
For example, here are the entries for April 23rd.
Lee sick – half drunk- never again.
We could probably have had a stamp made for this entry because it showed up in one form or another on a regular basis.
Gordie misses work, goes to big funeral in Gary, Indiana. Shafty works in his place.
The funeral I went to was for my forty four year old cousin who had a heart attack while getting ready for the wedding of his daughter (or maybe it was his niece). ISince I was one of the few drivers in the family, I had to drive my mom and a couple of her sisters up there for the services. Shafty was another big german guy with a wry sense of humor and a fear of girls even worse than me.
Striker gets letter to appear in court over his drivers license.
Murray was one of a half dozen crazy drivers in Loogootee at the time. It seemed as if the police were always chasing him down. He drove a fairly new thunderbird that was the only car I ever saw with a record player between the two seats. It was mounted on springs but still, the needle was constantly jumping around and scratching the 45’s. the only size that it would play. It was also a nuisance when it came to parking for a little heavy petting with his date for the evening. (I’ll explain ‘heavy petting’ in some later missive.)
Shafty runs water over in trough.
One of my duties was cleaning the trough that fed glue to the machine. It was quite an intricate operation and Shafty made a big mess of it. It made me feel important as well as valuable to the company that was paying me a dollar and five cents an hour to do this work.
Elmer chews Burris out.
Elmer was the general foreman who loved to hear the stories of Striker’s conquests. Burris was a screw off of the Eddie Haskell kind. He wanted to be a member of our gluespreader gang but Lee didn’t care for him.
An entry in mid January:
Old Black freezes up.
Old Black was a 1949 chevy that Murray, myself and a guy named Jim bought to get us to work every day. None of us wanted to drive our good cars to Jasper so we found Old Black somewhere. We took turns driving although we normally drove Murray’s shift for him. On this particular day, it was colder than beejeezus and the car froze up in the sub zero weather. I don’t remember who drove that day but it was a blessing because the heater in Old Black only worked about half the time making the thirty minute trip unbearable.
Another day, another entry.
Lee goes to Bert’s tavern after him and Shirley have fight. Comes to work with knot on head.
An entry in mid April reads like this
Gordie goes to Calumet, meets hot girl from Indianapolis.
The Calumet was a dance hall in Jasper and the hot girl was Susie who had came to Loogootee to visit a friend who attended Dental assisting school with her. Most Saturday entries following that one read “Gordie goes to Naptown.”
I could go on and on with this but as I said before, most of the entries are boring unless you were there. I do think with a little creative fiction added in, it would make a nice book.
