Did We Talk Funny?

My father, who feared and hated unions –he had been an owner almost all his life– warned us to look out for union men when we got to New York.

Brother Dave and I were planning to drive a straight-bed truck to Brooklyn from Charlotte, N.C., to pick up a slitter scorer for Dave’s box shop, Queen City Container Inc.

When we got to “the bridge” into New York City, Dad said, Teamsters would stop our truck and tell us to move over or go home — non-union drivers weren’t allowed in New York.

Of course, we didn’t pay any attention to that gobbledygook.

We drove into Brooklyn without incident, to the plant where the slitter scorer, an exceedingly heavy piece of equipment, was waiting on the dock, ready to be loaded.

We wanted them to load it right away so we could head home, and that’s when the trouble started. The forklift drivers wouldn’t load it at all because they were union and we weren’t. They only loaded trucks driven by Teamsters. Dad had the details wrong, but he was partly right about those union boys.

I always wondered how they knew.

Could it have been because we talked funny, because we were from the South?  Were we working too hard to suit them?  Not hard enough?

This is a slitter scorer and weigh a bunch.
This is a slitter scorer.  It weighed a bunch.

Anyway, a management guy jumped on an enormous fork lift, picked up the slitter scorer, and loaded it before things got out of hand and he had a wildcat strike to deal with.

When he rolled the fork lift, with Dave’s machine in its arms, off the dock onto the bed of our truck, the boards in the bed of the truck moaned and creaked like they were going to break. And I heard someone ask, “You think he’s gonna fall though?”

He didn’t.

Minutes later, we were on the way back to North Carolina. And, no, there was still no trouble at “the bridge.”

Coming Monday: Things That Use To Be

Smarts Win

Brother Dave said he knew a hippie who could beat me assembling partitions, beat me like that proverbial rented mule. But that won’t true. Nobody I ever saw could beat me at assembling partitions, especially a hippie.

The fact that I hadn’t made any partitions in 25 years, since my wife, Donna, and I moved to Knightdale, N.C., from Charlotte in 1971, really didn’t matter. Give me a few days, I’d be just as fast as ever.

King Quad
King Quad

Dave was telling me about this hippie because, in 1996, I started making partitions again, driving on weekends to Queen City Container, his box shop in  Charlotte.  I needed the extra money. Dave and I had decided to buy an ATV, a King Quad, to ride up at Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina, and an ATV was a luxury I couldn’t afford. 

But it was all just a bunch of talk, on his part and mine, because I was never going to get to go head to head with this guy.

And then, one Saturday afternoon, in walked the hippie. I knew who he was right off — he had rings in his pierced ears. I had been back at it, assembling partitions, for several weekends and had regained my old form.  And on this day, I was already warmed up, rolling, ready to show him who was who.

You know where this is going, don’t you. He did beat me, badly.  And he didn’t even know we were racing.

When I knocked off work I stood nearby and watched him for a few minutes.  I was surprised. He wasn’t beating me at my own game — he had a different, faster, way of putting partitions together.  I asked him about that. Instead of copying the way other people made them, he told me, he had spent a whole day trying to figure out the best way.

He wasn’t just faster than me, he was smarter.

NOTE: For another partition assembling story, see “Motivating With Money,” posted on Dec. 1, 2017

Coming Friday: Pretty Woman