A Summer Job in a Lonely Upstairs Room
(It Happened at a Pet Milk Plant)
Screen 1 of 3When we were attending high school in Bowling Green, Kentucky, my brother and I were constantly in search of extra jobs, in order to supplement the small income our mother received from teaching. We would take almost any kind of part-time job we could find. Some were in the afternoons after school, others on Saturdays, holidays, and in the summers. State and federal regulations about employing minors were not very strict in the mid-1920's, and it was not at all uncommon for a business or industry to employ youths (mostly boys, of course) ranging in ages from ten to eighteen--for both part-time and full-time jobs.
In the late spring of 1926 when I was fourteen years old and had just completed my sophomore year of high school, I finally found a job for the coming summer, one to begin early in June and continue through late August. It was to be a full-time job at the local Pet Milk plant and would pay 25cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. I was very glad to have such a fine job which would pay so well--$15 a week, more than I had ever earned before.
I was so anxious to get the job I didn't even ask what I was to do or what the working hours would be. But I soon found out. Mr. Edwards, the manager of the plant, told me at the end of my interview to "report at 6:30 sharp Monday morning." I could tell he meant business by the way he emphasized "sharp."
So on the next Monday I arose quite early, ate a light breakfast, put the sandwich my mother had fixed into a paper sack and rode my trusty old bicycle about three miles to the plant, arriving there just before 6:30.
Since Mr. Edwards had made it clear that "only front-office employees use the front door," I went to the side door where I was met by the general foreman who told me to follow him "upstairs." We climbed a shaky wooden stairway with no handrail to a second floor room which was poorly lighted, dusty, and with but very little ventilation. In fact, there were no windows in the room at all, and of course it was not air-conditioned. The ventilation, such as it was, came from one four-bladed, slow-turning fan located at one end of this large room where I was to work. The foreman, trying to be congenial and encouraging, said the fan would bring air up through the stairwell from below. I didn't argue with him, but I had already noticed that the first floor of the plant was very hot and stuffy. So I thought to myself any air brought up from that area would be stale and already "used up."
(At that time there were no deductions of any kind earned; so I would actually have $15 take-home pay.)
The foreman then led me through a dark and narrow channel between two walls of cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling. Along the way he explained that these boxes contained the small cans into which the evaporated milk would be put. At about the middle of the room he stopped at a small open space which he called "the operator's station." A single light bulb hanging from the ceiling at the end of a crude electric cord shed just enough light on "the station" to reveal a stationary metal box open on both ends and supported waist high by four rather weak looking metal legs. One of the open ends of this box or frame faced the operator; the edges of the other open end were attached to a metal track leading down to the ground level of the building through a small opening in the wooden floor.
"Now your job, young man, is to keep that track full of cans all the time," my new boss explained. "As you can see, the cans will roll down the track after you transfer them from the cardboard boxes through this metal frame attached to the track." I was listening carefully to his instructions, because I had never seen anything like this before and was curious to find out how it all worked.
To demonstrate, he picked up a box of cans, opened the top, turned this opened end toward the fixed metal box and slowly pushed it forward so that the cans went inside the metal box and the cardboard box slid snugly to the outside. As he pushed, I saw the cans--one row at a time--coming out the other end of the metal box and dropping into the track.
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