Missed Opportunities (or were they?)

For a long time there was only one telephone company---Bell Telephone---and to land a job with them was akin to striking the mother-lode.

I applied for a job with Bell-Tel some time in late 1976 after returning from a month-and-a-half of picking fruit in Hood River Oregon and Yakima Washington, and I recall that omnipresent logo -- on the building, in the lobby, on the stationery, and in the indoctrination film I was forced to watch. At the end of a brief interview, the job boiled down to this: You would have to work as a phone operator for for your first two years with the company (not great, but OK), and phone operators were required to work all shifts, seven days a week, including holidays (you mean I might have to work Christmas? Or 4th of July? Or Thanksgiving?) Yes, you may have to work those holidays, but you will be paid double your hourly wage.

So I declined employment with Bell-Tel because I really wasn't mature enough at the age of 24 to make a serious lifestyle change. Eventually I would come to see the wisdom of working long hours, of sacrificing time for money, and of saving while you were young---but by then I was no longer young. In the absence of any one profession in which to grow and have a "career," it made sense to work 60- or 70-hour weeks while you were able to, and earn time-and-a-half, or double-time pay, pay which you had no opportunity or chance to spend. But hey, I thought I could always try again with Bell-Tel and other large U.S. companies (IBM, GM, GE, etc.), and once you managed to get your foot in the door, you would be set for life . . . and we all know how that turned out . . . I had similar delusions when I'd begun working for a large pharmaceutical firm in the '80s.

I had another offer to make lots of money when I was living again in north Jersey a few years later. The job was with a printing firm, and again it meant working seven days a week in pre-press, stripping negatives and making plates with lots of overtime as the dangling carrot, but even by my late 20's I still wasn't interested in sacrificing all that time. And I already had a 40-hour week job as an editor, and while the editor only paid a fraction of what the printing gig would have paid, I was pretty much doing what I enjoyed and didn't want to give that up. But I do wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I'd had the maturity and discipline to have taken one of those jobs. For instance, I might have settled down earlier---married, bought a house, had kids earlier. I would have had some material success at a younger age, but then Bell-Tel was broken up, and the printing company folded, and the printing industry overall declined and was not the field to be employed in, and the skills I would have picked up in either company would not have been marketable, would have been pretty much useless, like the typesetting and copy editing skills I had which kept me employed through much of the 80's. So who really knows, things might have turned out roughly the same either way, and by not opting to work all those free hours in my 20's, I at least had more of my 20's to enjoy.

Freeway Cars and Trucks

In late 1978 I was out of a job again after the CETA-funded program I'd been working on ran out of funding. At that time, being 26, and having picked up career skills that I thought might allow me to work in magazine publishing, I no longer embraced the idea of being unemployed. Two or three years earlier I would have found some marginal way of supporting myself, like doing yard work, or picking fruit in the Hood River Valley, or selling flowers on the streets of downtown Portland, but those options no longer seemed viable. I had changed.

While looking for a new job on a magazine or local newspaper, I registered with Manpower. Everyone's heard of Manpower, and I figured I might be contacted for a temporary assignment so I'd have some cash coming in. And Manpower did contact me! I was to work a three-day job, from 6:00AM to 9:00AM each day, and I would use my own car. I was supposed to park at a designated lookout point on I-80 North and count traffic.

What were they thinking?

I was provided with two clickers, a pad and a couple pencils.  The clickers had a crude plastic tumbler that counted off a number every time you pressed a metal tab with your thumb. Because I was right-handed, the clicker in my left hand was for counting trucks, and the clicker in my right hand was for cars. From the top of the hour you worked a 15-minute interval and then stopped for 5 minutes, and then at 20 past the hour you started again for another 15 minutes, so that you ended up with 3 counting sessions per hour with 3 breaks of 5 minutes each. At the beginning of your break, you were supposed to write down the numbers from your clickers on to the pad and then reset the counters. The purpose was to monitor traffic volume because a hospital was situated close to the highway and the EPA believed there may have been a pollution risk to the patients. In 1978, late 1978,  it was hard to imagine that there wasn't equipment to count traffic---you know, those leaden boxes that the Highway and Safety Department leaves on the shoulder of the road. And I believe the equipment was available, but maybe it had malfunctioned and the people running the study couldn't get a replacement soon enough. They needed a human car counter, and so they called me.

Traffic was light and easy to record between 6:00 AM and 7:00 AM, mostly trucks at that hour. But between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM I was clicking away like a fool, a perverse and frenetic Morse code. At first I tried to be honest with the numbers, but, hmm... no one was watching me, and I quickly learned that I could extend my 5-minute breaks by averaging how many cars/trucks passed in a minute and then accounting for the half hour in which that minute occurred. It was a little tricky because during the first half hour (6:00 - 6:30) more trucks than cars were counted, but in the final half hour, cars outnumbered trucks approximately 12:1.

The best part of this easy but absurdly demeaning work was that I was treated to watching the sunrise every morning for three days in a row. It was still dark when I arrived at my post to count cars, but in the next couple hours I would study the world as it gradually filled with light, observe the nearly imperceptible changes of shades in twilight, the creeping certainty of dawn and the miracle of each daybreak. What more could one ask for than to witness the beginning of each day? I would bring a thermos of tea or buy coffee. On my 5-minute breaks I'd drink the tea or coffee and read "The Magic Mountain" which usually prolonged the breaks by a few minutes and I'd have to compensate as mentioned for the missed cars and trucks.

And by the time I finished each day, I had already done a little work, gotten a little money, and I still had the whole day ahead of me. When Manpower gave me my next assignment---a dreary bank job downtown checking stacks of computer printouts for a programming bug and numerical errata---I asked them if they still needed anyone to count cars . . . and trucks . . .

Bicycle Inspection

It was always the Monday or Tuesday following Easter. You had to ride your bicycle to the nearest school and have it inspected by the police, and then you had to take a short riding test, and if you passed the police would affix a tin license plate around the steering column of your bicycle.


I cannot specifically recall when kids were no longer required to have an annual bicycle inspection, but I'm pretty certain this ritual faded out sometime in the mid-to-late 60s if not sooner.

It may have disappeared, like other civic duties of the time, from a lack of cooperation from families and/or the bureaucratic strain. When I was growing up a number of these organized civic activities existed, and town residents, families, were expected to comply, mostly for reasons of public health and safety. I suspect this model of civic responsibility was largely left over from World War II and the first decade of the Cold War. The great polio vaccine was one of these activities, and on a lesser scale the fire house held dog and cat vaccinations for rabies, and there were collective safety programs, and the aforementioned bicycle inspections. At school we all watched astronauts fly into space, and we were also indoctrinated about The Enemy. We had all learned early on that Communism was The Enemy and Khrushchev was The Enemy and that Communists didn't believe in God or Freedom. But mostly we wanted to play our 45s, or listen to transistor radios, or watch Soupy Sales on TV.

One bicycle inspection year I had to stand before the police lieutenant for an oral quiz. I must have been eight or nine years old. The lieutenant was a tall, large and menacing crew cut figure with sharp eyes and a gun and bullets and badges and all kinds of medals and metal clinking and jingling on his starched uniform. The ultimate authority figure. The only equally frightening authority figure was the school principal. Anyway, I had taken the road test---a quick execution around a painted figure-8---and then the brake test, which was to pedal fast and then stop on a dime. (It is worth noting that back then no one wore helmets for bicycles or motorcycles). I was terrified of the police lieutenant, and as I was seated on my bike, he crouched down and asked: "How many can you ride on a bicycle at one time?" I sensed a trick question, but didn't know the right answer. After all, I often rode with two, or even three kids on a bicycle, and while I suspected it was wrong, riding this way didn't strike me as an evil or criminal act. So I took a safe guess and answered "two" which certainly seemed innocuous compared with "three" or "four"

The lieutenant's face turned to stone. "One!" he thundered. "Never, never ride a bicycle with more than one person! Riding double is against the law! And you can get killed or get someone else killed! Do you want that to happen? Do you understand? Now . . . " and the lieutenant asked me the question once more, and the second time I got it right..