Craig Bennett : FIRST JOB

by Craig Bennett

My first job was at the Inter-Boro Press, the humble weekly newspaper that used to serve Spring City and Royersford. Its offices were in an ancient two-story building at the main intersection of Spring City, just at the foot of the bridge across the long-defunct and dried-up Schuylkill Navigation Canal. Directly aside of this was a comparably ancient and even more decrepit wooden structure where a wizened old man sold newspapers, chewing gum, candy, and cigars. Part of my job was to go over there sometimes on hot summer afternoons and buy sodas for the linotype operators to drink while they worked. The rest of my job was to empty the trash cans, burn the trash out back in the small cinder lot by the canal bank, sweep the bare wooden floors—and sort leads and slugs.

Leads and slugs were small bars of metal a few inches long that varied slightly in length and thickness. They were used somehow in spacing the words and letters so that they would come out justified on either side of the column as the linotype operators set them up on the galleys or whatever it was they set them up on. The whole process was a mystery in which I had no interest whatever. The linotype machines had probably been installed sometime in the previous century, and the few employees who operated them were old, round-shouldered men in heavy denim aprons who hunched over their keyboards and squinted at them through wire-rimmed glasses as they tapped out the text that would appear in neat, regular columns in the paper’s next edition. They looked as if they never went outside and had been doing nothing but running those machines since the day they were installed.

I was thirteen. My mother worked as a part-time cashier in a little neighborhood grocery store that had acquired a reputation for selling good meat. People came from all over town to buy their meat there, and she became acquainted with a broad cross-section of the town’s residents, including the editor of the local newspaper. As nearly as I can recall, he mentioned to her one day that he was looking for a kid to do some minor chores a couple of afternoons a week for so much an hour. Exactly how I became that kid has long since been lost to posterity. But somehow, I did.

And my parents were ecstatic. As children of the Great Depression, they had learned through the difficult and uncertain circumstances of their own youth that the highest and noblest calling of one’s life here on Earth was to earn an honest buck any way you could any time you had the opportunity. That their own son should finally be able to don the harness and traces of paid labor was a source of unending pride and gratitude for them. For me, it was the bane of my youthful existence.

Emptying the trash cans, sweeping the floor, and running next door for a few bottles of soda didn’t take up much of my time on the job at all. What did was sorting those accursed leads and slugs. This task was performed in a corner of the main composing room that was partitioned off in such a manner that about all that I could see in front of me was the partition itself and the opposite wall at the end of it. There was a window near the corner, so at least I had something to look at besides the cracked and unpainted plaster of the walls. A wooden desk-like assembly was placed there with a tilted surface and a ledge at the bottom to hold the trays of leads and slugs that were to be sorted. I stood in front of it and measured them one-by-one, arranging them in either ascending or descending order in their tray. When one tray was finished, I set it aside and picked up the next one.

It was every bit as interesting as filling a salt shaker by dropping salt crystals one at a time through the holes in the lid. As a formative experience, it undoubtedly represents the earliest beginnings of my serious intent to seek a career as a tramp, a hobo, a knight of the road, or whatever term out of that same general bag might have a less pejorative connotation than “vagrant.”

If this was the wonderful world of work that my parents praised to the skies, I wanted no part of it. I would walk home from school dreading that the newspaper would have called and left a message with my mom that they wanted me to come down and work for a couple of hours. In the summertime I tried to leave the house and head for parts unknown during the afternoons when the paper was most likely to call. I began to question whether mere money could actually be worth subjecting oneself to a lifetime of such tedium and drudgery. I’m sure that my parents hoped that I would somehow realize what a wonderful opportunity I had been granted and that I would develop a passion for some kind of paid labor that would still permit me to retain my sanity through adulthood. Instead, it was having precisely the opposite effect.

The only bright spot in the whole dismal enterprise was getting paid. Not because I needed the money, but because I got to see Lisa, the secretary who doled out my meager compensation from an oversized brown envelope labeled “petty cash.”

Lisa was a dish. I don’t know how old Lisa was, but she had to be at least old enough to have graduated from high school, though not much more than that. She was old enough, however, to appear to a thirteen-year-old boy as the very epitome of mature beauty, seductiveness, and worldly sophistication. After she handed me my dollar-and-a-half, or whatever it was that I had earned with my labors, I stuffed it into my pants pocket, walked out the door, and made my way homeward as my head swam with lurid fantasies of passionate romance and unrestrained debauchery.

But that was a long time ago. Unfortunately, I was unable to fulfill my dream of avoiding the yoke of gainful employment and living my adult life as do the lilies of the field. But at least, after a year or so of working for the newspaper, I didn’t have to sort any more leads and slugs. I joined the junior high school band, and they practiced after school. That pretty much eliminated the opportunity for earning any more money during regular business hours. Thank God.

And in the fullness of time, my days in harness came to an end. I retired. I’m finally able to recapture my lost youth and do—or not do—pretty much whatever I please whenever I please. It’s been great. In fact, I’ve discovered that I was apparently born to be retired. It is indeed my true calling.

*Craig H. Bennett, author of More things in Heaven and Earth and Nights on the Mountain, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most book stores

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