My First Real Job, Summer 1958

Glenn and Marsha Drysdale were family friends. Mom and Dad got to know the couple through the Moose, and I often saw them at the lodge. I know very little about them, though Mom once said that Glenn had traveled the world in his younger days. They were ten or fifteen years older than my parents, and had no children that I ever heard about. They liked Don and me, maybe because we reminded them of the kids they never had. At any rate, we seemed to find favor with them and they found reason to bestow small blessing on the two of us.

We worked our way through college by painting houses in the summers, so they hired us to do their house. Another time they asked us to pick cherries from a tree that was laden with fruit. They owned a small machine shop on East Monroe Street, just west of the railroad tracks, and they asked me to work during the summer of 1958 - right after I got out of high school. I had worked for Mom and Dad since I was thirteen, but this one was my first real job - I got a pay check every Friday afternoon.

The shop was located in a one story building with four or five big “screw machines” sitting on a concrete floor. There were a few other smaller tools off to the side, drill presses mainly, but the big ones dominated the scene. They had a restroom, but no office that I remember. Glenn and Marsha were the owner/operators, and I was their only employee. My first day of work was also the first day I’d ever been in the shop. I use to pass it on the way to downtown when I lived on Lafountain, but had never much noticed it before. It also happened to be close to where brother Don had thrown the black boy over his shoulder ten years earlier.

Glenn was the master craftsman and he alone adjusted the machines for specific jobs. Metal rods were the raw material he fed to his machines. All kinds of things popped out the other end. The rods varied in diameter, the smallest being about half an inch, and the larger more than two inches. They measured ten or twelve feet long, and the big rods were real heavy. I found that out very soon as one of my first tasks was to unload a shipment and store the rods on metal racks. The steel rods were coated with a thin film of oil, making them difficult to grasp with leather gloves, and I had to be careful not to pinch a finger when laying them in. And I got dirty doing it.

Each machine could hold five or six bars. They were arranged in a circle, looking somewhat like a Gatling gun with ten foot barrels. The bars were fed into sharp tools that cut away pigtail shavings of unwanted metal. Glenn could program the machines to make a wide variety of products. I mainly remember two, because I put the final touches on them. One was a type of bearing made from the larger rods. Each bearing that Glenn made had two parts . An assembled bearing was similar to a wheel bearing, and looked somewhat like a doughnut with a hole in the middle. I would take the first part, a hollowed-out doughnut with the top missing, and fill it with a circular row of small ball-bearings. Then I’d set the other part, a cap like piece, on top and place it in the press, step on the foot pedal, and the two parts would be clipped together, each part rotating on the balls independent of the other. It was a revelation. So, that’s how things like that are made - neat!

The other piece was simpler. He made small aluminum nuts less that half an inch in diameter. Each nut had a smooth hole in the center. I sat at a drill press working a foot pedal, and a special bit cut threads in it. I found this job very satisfying as there was a certain rhythm to it. Glenn had a special device sitting on the press platform with a channel in which to thread the nuts. I could feed four or five nuts into it and then shove the lead nut under the drill, press the foot pedal, and the drill would descend.

After a while I discovered that if I pressed the pedal and held it down the drill bit would keep going up and down at a constant pace. I finally got the rhythm right and could sit there threading nuts as fast as the drill would work, but every once in a while the drill bit would miss the nut and break. The bits must have been expensive as Marsha thought I was breaking too many, but Glenn came up and said not to worry for I was drilling a lot more nuts per hour than anyone had ever been able to do. He said it was okay to break drill bits as long as I was being that productive.

I was making a dollar fifty an hour so I was expecting sixty dollars in my first check. I was shocked to see it was less. Something called Federal taxes was taken out and State taxes, and social security, and workers comp. Gee! Then I noticed that the gross pay was only fifty-two fifty. I ask Glenn about it and he pointed out that we worked Monday thru Friday, eight to four, with an hour off for lunch - that was seven hours a day, and only thirty-five a week. I said, “Oh”. I forgot that the lunch hour doesn’t count.
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