Savage To the Mill and Back

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 979-8-3509-0195-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

'To the Mill and Back' offers a poignant journey through the dwindling textile industry of the late 20th century, viewed through the lens of two young workers who form a mentor/student relationship, amidst the backdrop of societal and industrial changes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Savage, Bill

Leseproben

2: YOU’RE IN THE MILL BIZ NOW

“Holy Cow! The Giants won again!”

In the very late summer of 1951, the amazing National League pennant race between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had baseball fans all over the country excited.

For a now-twenty-year-old Giants fan fresh from a stint making coffee for sergeants and doing other essential military tasks in Korea, a good pennant race in September was just the way to celebrate his return home.

A few years in the Army had made him more sure of himself than he had been in 1948, but there was still something about knocking on doors and looking for jobs that didn’t work quite well for him. He still had no interest in working with his father in the garage, and while his time in the service had helped him mature quite a bit, he still didn’t have anything close to a marketable skill. They weren’t looking for coffee makers, soup ladlers, or latrine-scrubbers back in the coal-town-turned-factory-town where he was born.

If he’d had a resume, the only two things on it would have been his Army record and that summer he’d spent working as a bobbin boy at the Blake Silk Mill. Granted, his time in the Army had given him some of that walking-around money he’d lacked in 1948. But he still needed a steady job if he wanted to get a car, and to maybe even move out of his parents’ house in a few months.

He was a veteran, but in many ways, he was still a boy. He spent about two weeks looking for work, but couldn’t find any. He walked back up and down the hills again, past the ribbons of houses on which the paint had started to peel just a bit more.

And so, one morning, he trudged up the hill to the place where he’d spent that summer cleaning bobbins, and watching George and Maggie try to bully their way to the top. There wasn’t much else he could do; he walked up the hill to see if he could become one of the boys again. A bobbin boy.

He walked into the same office into which he’d walked those summers before, and he didn’t recognize the women there. The old ones had been replaced, voluntarily or otherwise. So as he had done a few years before, he just asked this 1951 receptionist for a job application, and she handed him one on a clipboard, with a pencil on a string tied to it.

Except for filling in that he’d worked at Blake in the summer of 1948, and his affirmative answer to whether he was a veteran, the responses were virtually identical to the ones he’d given back then. He gave the application to the woman, who took it and looked it over.

“Oh, so you’ve worked here before?” she said. “Let me see if they want to talk to you now.”

She took the application to a man he seemed to remember from his previous stint at the mill; the man was some sort of big deal with the company, the type of office-dwelling fellow you might never meet if you spent thirty years working on the mill floor. That man looked it over, and then two other men entered the office from the door that led to and from the mill floor.

He immediately recognized Artie; except for a few extra pounds around the waistline, the foreman hadn’t changed much. Artie looked at the application, nodded his head, looked out to the waiting room and waved to the former bobbin boy, who returned the wave.

The other man was in his forties, and he was wearing what looked to be a white laboratory coat. And that wasn’t the only thing that made this man different. This man had an air about him that he had never seen anywhere in this building before. He was used to the guys in the blue work clothes, or the fellows in the white, short-sleeved Manhattan shirts. But what was a man in a lab coat doing at Blake Silk Mill? And talking to Artie, no less?

The three men began talking. The former bobbin boy couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could tell from the body language of the three men that the fellow in the lab coat was … well, he was pissed off!

The receptionist could hear it all, though:

“Artie, this guy just dropped off this application,” said the big deal. “You know him?”

“Yeah,” said Artie. “Worked here one summer. Bobbin boy. Lemme see …”

Artie looked over the application.

“Hey … he’s a vet now!”

The man in the lab coat tugged at his tie, his expression tightening.

“Well, we don’t really need nobody right now,” Artie said.

The man in the lab arched his eyebrows, his face getting red.

“Don’t keep up with that shit, Artie!” the man in the lab coat said. “You keep pulling that on me when you know …”

“Now just a minute!” said the big deal. He tried to put his arm on the man in the lab coat, but the man just brushed it aside.

“You two oughta know that you don’t wanna keep pushing me!”

Artie and the big deal seemed flustered. The man in the lab coat pointed out toward the hallway, where he got his first look at the former bobbin boy.

It looked like something out of the Army, with a couple of smarmy captains about to get reamed out by a big-shot colonel.

“I’ve been coming out here for six months now, and I’ve been telling all of you what needs to be done around here,” the man in the lab coat said. “But I can’t keep coming out here! I have other assignments, other places to go. I’ve been telling you all this time that I need to train somebody to do what I do … I don’t know what else I have to do to get through to all of you!”

Artie rubbed his forehead while the big deal put his hand to his mouth.

“You two … all of the so-called big shots around here … you all know that I can have this place shut down, don’t you?” the man in the lab coat continued. “You want hundreds of people out of work? You want that in the newspapers?”

Artie turned as if he had no reply. The big deal just shrugged. The man in the lab coat went on:

“You know I can’t hang around Blake forever. I need somebody to teach this job to. If I can’t teach somebody here to do it, then … well, listen … If I can’t get somebody to teach this job to, then it won’t be long before Blake is the laughing stock of this industry. You’ll never keep up with all the changes, and you’ll be out of business so fast you won’t know what hit you. You think you can go on forever the way you have been? There are a lot of people out there who would be glad to take every scrap of business you have … and they will all have people doing the same job as me. And you won’t have anybody!”

The man in the lab coat turned and looked back out toward the hallway. He pointed at the one-time bobbin boy.

“You see that kid out there? I could train that kid to do this job, and in a couple of weeks, before you guys knew what was happening, that kid would know more about the operation here than the two of you put together. You’d be crawling on your knees asking that kid what to do next!”

Artie and the big deal looked at each other.

“That kid?” Artie said. “I don’t know … I was thinkin’ about that fellow George?”

“George???” the man in the lab coat bellowed. “You mean that brown-nosing punk you sent up a couple of weeks ago? I wouldn’t let him open a soda bottle in my room, much less work with any of the stuff I have up there. You want this place going up in smoke like Hiroshima? No, keep that jerk-off away from me.”

The big deal wrote something on his note pad. The man in the lab coat pointed at the bobbin boy again.

“No, let’s use that kid! You said he worked here before, right? You said he’s a vet? He’s gotta have some smarts, doesn’t he? I want you two to bring that kid in, give him a job for a while, and then once I’m ready in a week or two, I’ll start breaking him in, training him to take over for me.”

Artie nodded his head. The big deal whispered something to Artie, turned and walked away.

“Okay!” Artie said. “We’ll let him go back to the bobbins for a week, and then … well, if he’s still here … he’s all yours!”

“Good deal!” said the man in the lab coat, who then followed the big deal out of the office.

On the other side of the glass, the bobbin boy couldn’t hear any of this, and he wondered if he should leave. He started to go toward the door when he noticed Artie rushing out toward the hallway.

“Hey kid!” Artie said as he emerged through the door. “Where ya headed?”

“Just gonna go home,” he said. “I figured you guys didn’t remember me.”

“Sure we do!” Artie said. “We was just talkin’ about you in there! Been overseas, eh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But now I kinda need a job!”

“Well,” Artie said, “I can’t offer much … things been kinda slow here, ya know? But we … we could bring you back for your old job … at least to start.”

“You mean … to be a bobbin boy?”

“Yeah.”

He thought about it for a moment. Had he spent that time in Korea to come back here and be a bobbin boy again? Not really. But nobody else was offering him a job. And at least he knew how to do this one.

He wondered if George and Maggie were still up there. He didn’t relish the thought of dealing with them again. On the other hand, he was older, maybe wiser, now. He figured he could handle whatever they tried to...