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..

Good Friday, Good Fireday

"Let's burn the evidence. . ."

Good Friday, April 12, 1963. A mixed sun-and-cloud day, very windy with flashes of light and shadow, where you felt warm in your jacket one moment and chilly the next. I was standing in a 10-acre field with John Lane and his younger brother. The field separated a residential section from a highway and the shopping mall. John and I were almost 11, playing one of our kid adventures with John's nine-year-old younger brother. We had packed lunches of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and cookies.

When we had  finished our sack lunches, John produced a book of matches and said, "Let's burn the evidence." We crumpled the paper bags and tried to light them. Because it was windy, it took several matches to get the paper bags to catch and they did eventually. Our plan was to burn the bags and then crush them out by stomping on them. It seemed like a good idea . . .

But it didn't work.

Because it was pretty dry for an April day and very windy and new brush hadn't yet sprouted in the field, so the field was mostly made up of the dry brittle grasses that had died in winter. A few flames caught these grasses and they leaped onto other grasses---it was incredible how fast it happened, and we continued to try stomping on the flames, but the flames grew larger and kept spreading.

I wrote about this day many years later, and it was a fairly accurate impression of the trauma. . .

Like some mutation grafted onto itself, the fire grew, a long serpent spine of flame crackling over the brittle grasses. It devoured the remaining dead wood and stalks and seed pods anticipating spring warmth. It was a huge hot whisper, an arid bellows. It rolled a swath through the meadow and headed for the woods, flakes of ash eddying in the coils of smoke. We ran. Fire reached the picket fence, lapping into the wood, crawling up the slats until sections collapsed in rectangles of hectic flames. It streamed towards the backyards and houses beyond the fence, a charred crunching fanning out with violent bursts of orange, green and yellow, blooms of thick black smoke choking off the day. Where were the firemen? Hadn’t anyone called yet? We had to escaped and ran, and took refuge in a woods nearly a mile from the scene. We finally heard the alarms and knew they were meant for us. In the woods we prayed for forgiveness. The fire would find us, its creators, and destroy us. We would burn to death as punishment for what we had done, or at the least be caught and sent to jail. It was Good Friday, a dark day, the darkest day in the Christian calendar, and we had done a terrible thing and God was punishing us. We saw Him in the changeable April sky, and his accusing presence filled us with terror and guilt. He judged us in a loud, condemning voice: YOU HAVE PLAYED WITH FIRE AND LOOK AT THE EVIL YOU HAVE DONE! YOU ARE TRULY SONS OF THE DEVIL AND I WILL PUNISH YOU!

In the woods we prayed. We cowered and shook and our hearts were pounding and there were knots in our throats. What if someone accidentally died in the fire? And why had this crime become enlarged by it being Good Friday? We should have never gone out in the first place. Some of the Catholic kids that we knew had not been allowed out of their houses after Mass; their parents were making them stay in and fast and pray for the entire afternoon (lucky for them!) And instead of acknowledging Jesus Christ's death on the cross, we were destroying property, acres of it. Even if our crime was unintentional, and even if we weren't going to be caught (perhaps no one had seen us, and the three of us made a pact never to confess or tell anyone) we would never escape the judgment of God. He had watched us burn down that field.

We hid in the woods until late afternoon, and then decided to risk heading back to our homes and facing whatever awaited us. I split off from John Lane and his younger brother, and as I approached within two blocks of my house I saw some neighborhood kids standing on the corner and talking. The kids had just gotten back from watching this fire over in the fields. Their talk was animated as they described the many fire trucks and firemen who fought the blaze. The fire had consumed the entire field, and had taken considerable time to get under control because of the wind, and of course it had drawn a crowd. I asked if anyone had seen who started the fire, but no one had been seen. The kids asked me where I'd been. Still amazed at my luck, I told them I'd been playing in the woods all afternoon. I felt extremely relieved and grateful that no one had been hurt (I'd imagined horrors much worse), but I was also shocked by these kids. They had been entertained by the fire, they had enjoyed watching this conflagration a few blocks from their home, and I realized I would have felt that way too had I been with them and ignorant about fire, but I would never feel that way again; fire would never be something separate from me, would never be a voyeuristic carnival of disaster, but something to be feared and respected. I knew I wouldn't sleep later. I was sick with fear and guilt, and the whole day for me had been a sad tragedy, which in the Christian calendar it was. Thank God no one had been hurt, but I still was accountable and so were my friends. We were pyromaniacs. We had caused unnecessary human peril.. If caught I would certainly face juvenile court and sentencing.  


The field was also the locus for a half dozen other stories, a few of which may follow later in this blog. But some time in the 1970s the big field was turned into yet another mall as rampant development and mercantilism blanketed much of the county, destroying the scant open land that remained, concrete spreading like . . . like . . . an out of control fire.
 

 

pre-digital

In the mid 1970s I was living in a large house in Portland Oregon with a group of friends. Five or six of us lived there permanently, but at any time there were as many as 10 people crashing on the couch, or porch, or in the attic, and there were other friends who had their own places but came over to hang out with us. This was near the dawning of the digital age and mass electronic consumption, but at this point in time no one had ever even heard of a PC. There was no cable internet, satellite TV, iPods, iPhones, cell phones, Xbox-64, Blackberries, Pay Per View, TiVo, On Demand, DVD Players, Flash Drives, BlueRay, Netflix.... We had 1 TV set in the entire house, and a couple stereos that played vinyl of course. It all sounds so quaint 35 years later, but we listened to radio and albums at night around the fireplace. We had a ping-pong table that we used religiously, and every couple weeks on Saturday night the ping-pong table would be converted to a poker table. On summer evenings we often played volleyball and drank beer . . . or we played music on the front porch and drank beer . . . or we drank beer . . .

The TV set belonged to my friend Mark and was located in his bedroom instead of a shared communal location, which was actually preferable.to some of us literary anti-vidiots and emerging Luddites. Mark liked to watch TV until late at night and he didn't mind other people stopping in to watch a show as long as he wasn't sleeping. I usually skipped viewing on weeknights but occasionally I may have been visiting, or eating a late dinner and confess to watching -- yes -- "Welcome Back Kotter" or later in the evening, "The Rockford Files" or "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" but I usually didn't stick around for more than an hour or so.

But weekends were something else, more of a social event.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7S_XWuKpHc

On Saturday night we would watch "Saturday Night Live," which was only in its second season at the time, and felt like revolutionary television. A group of us would gather in Mark's room sitting on extra chairs or the foot of his bed, drinking 3.2 beer (Olympia, Bohemian -- no one touched Rainier), smoking cigarettes or maybe a joint or two if someone had pot. In this same year, we saw an episode in which Paul Simon hosted and his guest was George Harrison. Simon and Harrison played some of their songs as a duet and that was quite wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P88kd3coahE&feature=related

And it's interesting that the first clip above with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin is discussing nuclear power plants in light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and how these events have mandated the U.S nuclear power industry reexamine the safety of its earlier power plants.

Funny, that point-counterpoint parody was actually a segment that appeared at the end of "60 Minutes" with the liberal, Shana Alexander, and the conservative, James Kirkpatrick. On Sunday nights, after we had ordered pizza or picked up Chinese food, my friends and I would sit in Mark's room again and often watch "60 Minutes" Afterwards we'd usually go for a long walk, or work in the vegetable garden, and then later on, at 9:00 we'd settle down again in the TV room to watch "Masterpiece Theater" usually "Upstairs-Downstairs"  I may not have watched any other shows with my friends for the rest of the week, but Saturday and Sunday nights in 1976 and early 1977 had become something of a ritual.

During this "Dark Ages" I recall a conversation with a friend in which I had said that we shouldn't be at the mercy of network programming---what they made us watch---and that in the future you would simply be able to choose and order the movies or programs you wanted to see on television at any time. It was hardly a brilliant prediction: Early cable service was in the offing and thousands, maybe millions of folks were already sharing my wish. But the fact that the choices were so confined and narrow unintentionally led most of us to some positive, non-isolated moments worth mentioning here.

Unwitting Runners

It's an odd segue from the Rands into this next post.

In the 8th and 9th grades I used to hang out with my friends at the local mall, smoking cigarettes, swearing, and being a general public nuisance. We were punks.

There was a dry cleaners in one corner of the mall where we could gather and smoke free of adult reprobation. A woman named Miriam managed the store and she had a part-time helper, a 20-year-old college student named Kate. Kate was an additional reason to hang out there, just like these pressed suits and shirts are hanging. You could bum cigarettes off of Kate. She always kept a pack of Marlboros by the register.

I'm not sure why Miriam and Kate tolerated a gang of teenage boys. We smoked and pushed and slapped each other, and briefly we pitched pennies in front of the store, which the ladies put an end to, and often when a customer entered the store we were asked politely to leave. I guess when there weren't any customers, Miriam and Kate were bored so our presence might have provided some diversion until they lost patience and we moved on.

One day Mrs. Rand entered the store to drop off some dry cleaning. She didn't recognize me, and I doubted she would have recognized me, or at the least she didn't acknowledge me, which was different than seeing her next door. Miriam waited on Mrs. Rand and after Mrs. Rand had left, I asked Miriam if she knew Mrs. Rand.

"A very nice woman," Miriam said.

"Nice?" I proceeded to run down a list of what I perceived had been Mrs. Rand's atrocities, including the story of the baseball and other scoldings, and the general coldness for a neighbor. Miriam seemed unfazed.

"Well, I only know her as a regular customer," she said. "and she has always been extremely polite and generous, and we talk and we're on friendly terms."

Miriam's husband, Francis, sometimes visited. He was a fastidiously dressed dapper man with a pencil thin mustache, not unlike Mrs. Rand's husband. Miriam's husband Francis wore homburgs and drove an elegant car and for some reason he enjoyed seeing me and my friends maybe because they didn't have children of their own. Miriam would suggest that we sit in the car with Francis, and after chatting a few minutes, Francis would say, "I have an errand for you boys." "Sure" "You know Johnny D'Amato at the bowling alley?" "Sure," we would say. At the opposite end of the mall was a bowling alley and pool hall and Johnny was manager. We would often clean lanes and score sheets for him, and empty ashtrays, and Johnny would let us play some games of pool even though we were underage. Francis took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote some numbers down on the slip of paper. "Here," he said "when you head over to the bowling alley, give this to Johnny." "Sure," my friends and I said, "we'll go right away." and I think Francis may have said something about us being good kids but it wasn't particularly relevant.

Johnny D'Amato seemed a little annoyed when we entered the bowling alley. Apparently someone was there to investigate underage kids in the billiards room.  In fact, you weren't supposed to be in the billiard room watching older guys play (and I should add these players were almost right out of "The Hustler"). So playing pool was out for the moment, but when we handed Johnny the paper from Francis his face lit up and he pretended that we knew what the paper was all about even though we didn't. Then, before he stepped away, he told us we could have a free game of bowling.

So the punks were running numbers, or we were perhaps one link in the chain. Perhaps Johnny was going to bring the slip of paper somewhere else or make a phone call. This was the mid-sixties, and even though the numbers game was a fairly innocuous activity, it was still managed by organized crime. There was no legalized gambling in the United States except in Las Vegas, and state-run lotteries were still a few years away. It almost seems quaint from this vantage think of picking daily numbers as being illegal, but then 30-40 years earlier drinking alcohol was illegal throughout the nation, and there are still vestiges of those laws today in dry towns and dry counties.

Francis was older and a nice man and Miriam's husband. We were just saving him a little leg work. No one seemed to mind.

Some Kind of Neighbors

The Rands were our closest neighbors -- closest physically. The house I grew up in was separated from their house by a 10-foot-wide walkway divided by a privacy fence. We rarely saw the Rands and never spoke with them. Mr. Rand was almost non-existent. I think he drove a Lincoln Continental and was impeccably dressed in well-tailored suits. Mrs. Rand wore elegant dresses and jewelry as if she were an advertisement for Saks. There was a single child, a daughter, who was considerably older than me. Early on, I'd seen a school bus drop her off from Catholic school, filled with girls in white blouses and pleated blue-gray plaid skirts. Then the daughter must have gone away to college because I didn't see the school bus anymore. Mrs. Rand was the only one that seemed to live in the house most of the time.

On the other side of the Rand's house was a field where my friends and I would play baseball. Like most kids aged 7-10, we shouted and made noise, and occasionally the ball would roll onto Mrs. Rand's lawn and one of us would have to retrieve it. Her house had an enclosed patio, and one time someone hit a ground ball hard and fast, and the ball smacked the aluminum siding of this enclosed patio. I ran to fetch the ball and as I neared the patio, Mrs. Rand stepped out and glared at me. She was likely in her 40s, and austere looking, with a considerable amount of makeup. I was terrified of her. She didn't say a word, but still glaring at me, she picked up the ball and carried it inside her house. End of game. Some of the kids hollered at Mrs. Rand once she was inside. We considered getting another ball but also decided on playing somewhere else.

The Rand house was quiet and dark nearly all the time. However, on a few summer nights, when the windows were open and I could see the pale bluish light from their black-and-white television, I heard some ugly fights between Mrs. Rand and her daughter. I assumed the daughter was home from college but I didn't see her around that often . . . A raging battle with vicious arguing and screaming about things I didn't understand. Tears, brittle objects being thrown, crashing. No one argued in my family, and though there were verbally and physically abusive parents in my neighborhood, the recipients of that abuse were often my friends or other kids my age who were too young and small to talk back to their parents. This was different. The daughter was lashing out at her mother with greater vehemence and anger than the other way around, and she seemed so unhappy. I also felt that, no matter how wicked Mrs. Rand may have appeared by taking our baseball, she didn't deserve that much hatred from her child.

I could not understand the Rand family. The didn't even seem like a family, not in the conventional sense that I was used to, like other families in my neighborhood with Mom and Dad and kids, and maybe a grandparent or two. Even if some of your neighbors weren't particularly social, they still waved in greeting to you, and most of them could manage a smile. But not the Rands. My parents tried explaining to me that the Rands had likely been city dwellers previously and did not necessarily interact with their neighbors because some city neighborhoods were more anonymous and impersonal, which paradoxically soon became true of most second-generation suburbs where the homes were more spread out. It seemed as though my block and neighborhood, and the larger part of Wayward, was typical of the working class city or factory town neighborhoods, once removed, where you did interact with your neighbors because almost everyone was doing the same thing: the men went off to work each day at the mill, or factory, or defense plant; the kids walked to school and played in the park after school; the mothers were home and often talking with one another. Today that would be called the same demographic. But the Rands were more in step with the future, because few, if any neighborhoods are as homogeneous anymore as mine was in the 50s and 60s. Most neighborhoods these days are more diverse, and your neighbors may be of an entirely different profession and leading an entirely lifestyle than you.

The Rands moved when I was almost out of high school. I think Mrs. Rand may have moved back to the city. It wasn't clear if her husband or daughter were in the picture anymore. By then a new house had been built on the empty lot or field where we had tried playing baseball. The new family that moved in couldn't have been more different from the Rands: Proles with five kids and a loudmouthed grandma who was always shouting and swearing at the kids. I soon missed all the years it had been mostly quiet on that side of my house where my bedroom was, and I began to think maybe the Rands had not been so bad as neighbors after all, because they kept to themselves and you hardly knew they were there . . . Be careful what you wish for . . .