Dad's Stories: Early Jobs, or, not many people dig undertaking
Be warned, the end of this story might be genuinely disturbing to some folks.
Dad’s Stories: Jobs Before the Steel
Dad only rarely spoke of the jobs he had before he joined the Steel, but when he did, it could be memorable. The first job he got because of his mother -- he came home from school one day and was met at the door to be told, “Okay, you got enough of an education. Now you start working to help support the family, and you start tomorrow.”
The job basically consisted of being a gofer for a small local roofing company. Dad aside, the entire staff consisted of Poles. Really, really hard-drinking Poles. So much so that halfway through any given job they’d call for a beer break, go hit the nearest bar -- they seemed to know how to find every bar in Southeast Pennsylvania, they might get lost when driving to a job site, but they’d never fail to find the bar they wanted -- and then get pretty well blotto for the rest of the day. Meanwhile Dad would stay at the work site to make sure no one stole the tools or the truck.
Not that it stopped them from working! Indeed, Dad remembered seeing them walk along the edge of a roof, literally swaying in the wind, so much so that he was convinced they were about to plunge head-first onto the concrete below, but they managed to do the work as they promised. Then they drove home, stopped for a few more drinks on the way, and dropped Dad off with his mother. She finally yanked him from that job when she caught the Poles letting Dad drive the truck up to her place. As she told him, “I got no problem with them hitting the bottle in front of you, but I am not about to pay for that truck if you wreck it while one of them ought to be driving.”
Then came the next job, working for a local undertaker. Dad wasn’t any too eager for the job, being no fonder of corpses than many another person, but he was talked into it by his some of his buddies, who worked for the man.
“It’s a great job,” they told him. “The company never complains and the boss don’t care what you do so long as the work gets done.”
“Yeah,” Dad told them, “but how do I get the job? He’s got Mister Freddy (a local man they knew) working for him, and he’s not about to leave, and unless he leaves the mortician said he won’t hire me.”
“Let us worry about that,” his friends told him. As it turned out, they knew something about Mister Freddy. He was very superstitious, and deathly afraid of schpuks or ghosts. And the main mortuary was put into a building with lots of air vents, several of them leading outside. So Dad’s friends took him and snuck down to the building one dark night, stayed by the outside vents, and groaned into them all night long: “Oooohhhh, Mister Freddy! We’re dead and we don’t waaaant you here! If you don’t leeeeave we’ll pick up our bones and chase you! Ohhhhh! UuuUUUuuu!” And so forth and so on all night long.
And so the next morning when the undertaker showed up, he found a terrified and shaking Mister Freddy by the front door. “Why, Fred, what’s the matter with you? You act like you seen a ghost!”
“Ach, nein,” Mister Freddy said in a thick Dutchy accent, “but I heard them all night long! They said they’d get me if I didn’t quit! I’m leaving!”
“Fred, don’t be a fool! This is some kind of gag someone’s pulling…”
“It ain’t no gag and I’m going!” And with that Mister Freddy got his things together and hustled down the road. No sooner than he was gone, then Dad’s friends showed up with Dad in tow. “Gee, boss, shame about old Mister Freddy! But we got Hinkle here, and he wants work, and he ain’t scared of no schpuks…”
The undertaker gave them all a dirty look and finally said, “Dammit, I know you did this somehow! But anyone else I hire will probably end up getting chased off too until I do hire him.” He pointed at Dad and threw his hands up. “Okay, he’s hired! But believe me, sonny, you’ll work here!”
So Dad had the job but his troubles were just starting. One of his duties was to go and pick up after car accidents. This was when all the kids wanted to drag in their homemade jalopies, typically trying to get more and more speed out of engines at the expense of things like good brakes or other needless safety precautions. Add in teenaged testosterone and beer (supposedly illegal but winked at) and it was a recipe for disaster. Also nausea when you had to clean up the results, though Dad seemingly got used to that part soon enough. His life wasn’t the worst but he’d seen enough that mangled corpses were only shocking for a brief time.
But not everyone reacted quite so well. One night, Dad and the guys were called out to clean up after some poor fool who‘d tried dragging down the local Suicide Strip. When the car stopped, the driver didn’t. Right through the windshield and face-first into the street! You can guess what the results looked like. Well, by the time Dad and the guys showed up, the state troopers were on the scene, barriers were up, and the corpse was discreetly covered. And the usual gang of gawkers was there. This time many of them were other kids who’d wanted to see if their friend could really control his car when he hit 75 mph or so (needless to say he couldn’t).
One guy in particular was being obnoxious. He kept dancing around, asking, “What does he look like? Like something out of a horror comic? Does he still have a face? Does he? Does he?” Between the undertaker’s guys and the staties, everyone wanted to pop him one. Finally one old trooper couldn’t take it any more. He grabbed the kid by the scruff of his neck, dragged him over to the stretcher on which the corpse was lying, yanked the sheet down and shoved the live kid’s face right into the dead one’s saying, “THERE! That’s what he looks like! Now are you satisfied, you little bastard?”
Dad remembered the live kid as taking two steps back, looking very green, and then suddenly dropping to his knees and puking all over himself. He was still at it when the cops and meat wagon left.
However, Dad didn’t stay with the undertaker very long due to a mistake he made. One night one of his friends who’d helped him get the job asked Dad to cover for him so he could grab forty winks. The place was otherwise empty with everyone off on business of one sort or another. Dad was about to tell him not unless he wanted to sleep in one of the body lockers but then inspiration struck. They had just picked up a very fine casket for one of the “clients“, and two other guys would be by later to take it where the funeral would be held, which was some distance down the highway. Dad told his friend about the casket. The guy was wary at first but then laid down in it, announced that it was all ‘very comfortable’, and dropped off. Then a call came in. The coroner told Dad he needed him to go and run an errand. “It’ll just be a couple of minutes.” Dad shrugged and left.
You can probably guess what happened next. The drivers showed up while Dad was out. They took one look at the casket and put it in the back of their hearse and drove away with it. As they drove down the interstate, they began passing cigarettes (and apparently a beer) back and forth. The bumping of the car awakened the kid in the casket. He took it for granted that the guys knew he was alive and so said nothing. Soon, feeling quite merry, one of the men asked their “passenger”, “Hey, buddy, you want a smoke too?”
And the dude in the casket sat up and said, “Hey, if you’ve got one I’ll take it!”
Meanwhile back at the coroner everyone was wondering where the kid had gotten off too, and why the casket was gone, and why was the guy for the funeral still here when they got a phone call. It was from Dad’s friend. “Hey, boss? I’m out here in Fogelsville with the casket and hearse. The guys who were driving it? I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They asked me if I wanted a smoke and I said yes and the next thing I knew, they were running down the road and screaming that the dead were coming after them!” And when the coroner got the whole story from Dad, that was the end of that particular job.
Next and last before the Marine Corps reserve was the one job Dad always said later on sickened him. It was one delivering food to a state or county insane asylum -- and remember, this would have been the late 40’s. The guy who hired Dad loaded up the truck with sacks of potatoes and what not, drove out to the asylum (and it was not a short trip), and stopped by a chute leading down into the basement of the asylum. Dad looked down and saw several guys in poorly-kept clothes looking back up at him. None of them looked like the media stereotype “crazy” of the period, but all of them looked jumpy and poorly taken care of.
“Those are the screwies, kid,” Dad’s boss told him. “We slide the food down to them, they catch it and take it away.” And then, with a gleam in his eye, “Hey, you want to see something funny?”
Dad wondered about the smile but he needed the work and the pay, and it didn’t seem like a smart idea to offend the guy he was working for, so he just said, “Yes, sure.” The driver grinned and went to the truck. He carefully picked up a very heavy bag and made it look like it was something light, such as carrots or the like. Then he went to the chute and yelled down, “Hey, you screwies, wake up, here comes the first load and it’s light!” One of the patients knelt at the end of the chute, knees bent and arms out like a baseball fielder waiting for the ball.
And then the driver sent the heavy bag flying down the chute. It smacked right into the poor lunatic standing at the bottom, sending him head over heels. The driver laughed and slapped Dad on the back. “Hey, did you see that? Now I’ll do it again!” Then he called back down the chute, “Okay, that was a heavy one, but this time it’ll be a light one!” Then he grabbed another heavy bag and sent it flying down the chute. Only this time, the patient at the bottom dodged out of the way, letting the bag smack into the floor.
The driver yelled back down, “Hey, you were supposed to try and catch it!” And one of the patients responded, “We’re crazy, not stupid!”
Well, Dad and the driver soon had the truck unloaded. The driver then told Dad, “We have to go inside and get some paperwork signed. That’s where they pay us too. You want to come along or do you trust me for it?” Dad had already learned how trustworthy some people could be, and so he said, “I’d rather go along.” Besides, he was curious. What did an insane asylum look like inside?
As he told me decades later, he was sorry he ever learned.
He didn’t hear yelling or screaming inside, but he did see a lot of weeping. One old woman with stringy hair and tattered robes was leaning against the wall, just sobbing as though her heart was broken. Patients were just wandering around, many of them looking like they were empty inside with what Dad called “dead eyes“, as though something had scooped everything out of them. One wretchedly skinny old man was tied down on a stretcher, crying and pleading for help incoherently. When Dad passed by, he said later that you could smell the feces and the sour smell of untreated sores. Indeed, the whole place stank of unwashed flesh and uncleaned toilets. He said he saw people wander by with crap and urine running down their legs, making a kind of whimpering noise, and no one did anything. He also swore that he passed by what looked like iron barred cell doors built over stone chambers that contained screaming patients who were flinging themselves around wildly, to the point of injuring themselves. When Dad asked why someone didn’t stop them, the driver have him a “Why bother? Besides, they’ll just operate on them soon and it’ll be okay.”
“Operate?”
“Yeah,” the driver said, making a poking motion at his eyes. “You know, operate. That calms ‘em right down.”
Dad didn’t remember very many specifics afterwards beyond what he reluctantly told me above. The next thing he remembers is the truck pulling up in front of his house and the driver giving him his money and saying, “So, should I expect to find you here tomorrow?”
“No,” Dad said, “not ever.”
The driver looked disappointed but said, “Look, kid, if it’s what you saw, don’t worry about it. It used to bother me too, but after a few trips you don’t even notice it any more.”
“I can guess,” Dad said, “and that’s why I don’t want to go back.”
It was after this that Dad went to the Marine Corps reserve, but that’s another story.
Dad’s Stories: Jobs Before the Steel
Dad only rarely spoke of the jobs he had before he joined the Steel, but when he did, it could be memorable. The first job he got because of his mother -- he came home from school one day and was met at the door to be told, “Okay, you got enough of an education. Now you start working to help support the family, and you start tomorrow.”
The job basically consisted of being a gofer for a small local roofing company. Dad aside, the entire staff consisted of Poles. Really, really hard-drinking Poles. So much so that halfway through any given job they’d call for a beer break, go hit the nearest bar -- they seemed to know how to find every bar in Southeast Pennsylvania, they might get lost when driving to a job site, but they’d never fail to find the bar they wanted -- and then get pretty well blotto for the rest of the day. Meanwhile Dad would stay at the work site to make sure no one stole the tools or the truck.
Not that it stopped them from working! Indeed, Dad remembered seeing them walk along the edge of a roof, literally swaying in the wind, so much so that he was convinced they were about to plunge head-first onto the concrete below, but they managed to do the work as they promised. Then they drove home, stopped for a few more drinks on the way, and dropped Dad off with his mother. She finally yanked him from that job when she caught the Poles letting Dad drive the truck up to her place. As she told him, “I got no problem with them hitting the bottle in front of you, but I am not about to pay for that truck if you wreck it while one of them ought to be driving.”
Then came the next job, working for a local undertaker. Dad wasn’t any too eager for the job, being no fonder of corpses than many another person, but he was talked into it by his some of his buddies, who worked for the man.
“It’s a great job,” they told him. “The company never complains and the boss don’t care what you do so long as the work gets done.”
“Yeah,” Dad told them, “but how do I get the job? He’s got Mister Freddy (a local man they knew) working for him, and he’s not about to leave, and unless he leaves the mortician said he won’t hire me.”
“Let us worry about that,” his friends told him. As it turned out, they knew something about Mister Freddy. He was very superstitious, and deathly afraid of schpuks or ghosts. And the main mortuary was put into a building with lots of air vents, several of them leading outside. So Dad’s friends took him and snuck down to the building one dark night, stayed by the outside vents, and groaned into them all night long: “Oooohhhh, Mister Freddy! We’re dead and we don’t waaaant you here! If you don’t leeeeave we’ll pick up our bones and chase you! Ohhhhh! UuuUUUuuu!” And so forth and so on all night long.
And so the next morning when the undertaker showed up, he found a terrified and shaking Mister Freddy by the front door. “Why, Fred, what’s the matter with you? You act like you seen a ghost!”
“Ach, nein,” Mister Freddy said in a thick Dutchy accent, “but I heard them all night long! They said they’d get me if I didn’t quit! I’m leaving!”
“Fred, don’t be a fool! This is some kind of gag someone’s pulling…”
“It ain’t no gag and I’m going!” And with that Mister Freddy got his things together and hustled down the road. No sooner than he was gone, then Dad’s friends showed up with Dad in tow. “Gee, boss, shame about old Mister Freddy! But we got Hinkle here, and he wants work, and he ain’t scared of no schpuks…”
The undertaker gave them all a dirty look and finally said, “Dammit, I know you did this somehow! But anyone else I hire will probably end up getting chased off too until I do hire him.” He pointed at Dad and threw his hands up. “Okay, he’s hired! But believe me, sonny, you’ll work here!”
So Dad had the job but his troubles were just starting. One of his duties was to go and pick up after car accidents. This was when all the kids wanted to drag in their homemade jalopies, typically trying to get more and more speed out of engines at the expense of things like good brakes or other needless safety precautions. Add in teenaged testosterone and beer (supposedly illegal but winked at) and it was a recipe for disaster. Also nausea when you had to clean up the results, though Dad seemingly got used to that part soon enough. His life wasn’t the worst but he’d seen enough that mangled corpses were only shocking for a brief time.
But not everyone reacted quite so well. One night, Dad and the guys were called out to clean up after some poor fool who‘d tried dragging down the local Suicide Strip. When the car stopped, the driver didn’t. Right through the windshield and face-first into the street! You can guess what the results looked like. Well, by the time Dad and the guys showed up, the state troopers were on the scene, barriers were up, and the corpse was discreetly covered. And the usual gang of gawkers was there. This time many of them were other kids who’d wanted to see if their friend could really control his car when he hit 75 mph or so (needless to say he couldn’t).
One guy in particular was being obnoxious. He kept dancing around, asking, “What does he look like? Like something out of a horror comic? Does he still have a face? Does he? Does he?” Between the undertaker’s guys and the staties, everyone wanted to pop him one. Finally one old trooper couldn’t take it any more. He grabbed the kid by the scruff of his neck, dragged him over to the stretcher on which the corpse was lying, yanked the sheet down and shoved the live kid’s face right into the dead one’s saying, “THERE! That’s what he looks like! Now are you satisfied, you little bastard?”
Dad remembered the live kid as taking two steps back, looking very green, and then suddenly dropping to his knees and puking all over himself. He was still at it when the cops and meat wagon left.
However, Dad didn’t stay with the undertaker very long due to a mistake he made. One night one of his friends who’d helped him get the job asked Dad to cover for him so he could grab forty winks. The place was otherwise empty with everyone off on business of one sort or another. Dad was about to tell him not unless he wanted to sleep in one of the body lockers but then inspiration struck. They had just picked up a very fine casket for one of the “clients“, and two other guys would be by later to take it where the funeral would be held, which was some distance down the highway. Dad told his friend about the casket. The guy was wary at first but then laid down in it, announced that it was all ‘very comfortable’, and dropped off. Then a call came in. The coroner told Dad he needed him to go and run an errand. “It’ll just be a couple of minutes.” Dad shrugged and left.
You can probably guess what happened next. The drivers showed up while Dad was out. They took one look at the casket and put it in the back of their hearse and drove away with it. As they drove down the interstate, they began passing cigarettes (and apparently a beer) back and forth. The bumping of the car awakened the kid in the casket. He took it for granted that the guys knew he was alive and so said nothing. Soon, feeling quite merry, one of the men asked their “passenger”, “Hey, buddy, you want a smoke too?”
And the dude in the casket sat up and said, “Hey, if you’ve got one I’ll take it!”
Meanwhile back at the coroner everyone was wondering where the kid had gotten off too, and why the casket was gone, and why was the guy for the funeral still here when they got a phone call. It was from Dad’s friend. “Hey, boss? I’m out here in Fogelsville with the casket and hearse. The guys who were driving it? I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They asked me if I wanted a smoke and I said yes and the next thing I knew, they were running down the road and screaming that the dead were coming after them!” And when the coroner got the whole story from Dad, that was the end of that particular job.
Next and last before the Marine Corps reserve was the one job Dad always said later on sickened him. It was one delivering food to a state or county insane asylum -- and remember, this would have been the late 40’s. The guy who hired Dad loaded up the truck with sacks of potatoes and what not, drove out to the asylum (and it was not a short trip), and stopped by a chute leading down into the basement of the asylum. Dad looked down and saw several guys in poorly-kept clothes looking back up at him. None of them looked like the media stereotype “crazy” of the period, but all of them looked jumpy and poorly taken care of.
“Those are the screwies, kid,” Dad’s boss told him. “We slide the food down to them, they catch it and take it away.” And then, with a gleam in his eye, “Hey, you want to see something funny?”
Dad wondered about the smile but he needed the work and the pay, and it didn’t seem like a smart idea to offend the guy he was working for, so he just said, “Yes, sure.” The driver grinned and went to the truck. He carefully picked up a very heavy bag and made it look like it was something light, such as carrots or the like. Then he went to the chute and yelled down, “Hey, you screwies, wake up, here comes the first load and it’s light!” One of the patients knelt at the end of the chute, knees bent and arms out like a baseball fielder waiting for the ball.
And then the driver sent the heavy bag flying down the chute. It smacked right into the poor lunatic standing at the bottom, sending him head over heels. The driver laughed and slapped Dad on the back. “Hey, did you see that? Now I’ll do it again!” Then he called back down the chute, “Okay, that was a heavy one, but this time it’ll be a light one!” Then he grabbed another heavy bag and sent it flying down the chute. Only this time, the patient at the bottom dodged out of the way, letting the bag smack into the floor.
The driver yelled back down, “Hey, you were supposed to try and catch it!” And one of the patients responded, “We’re crazy, not stupid!”
Well, Dad and the driver soon had the truck unloaded. The driver then told Dad, “We have to go inside and get some paperwork signed. That’s where they pay us too. You want to come along or do you trust me for it?” Dad had already learned how trustworthy some people could be, and so he said, “I’d rather go along.” Besides, he was curious. What did an insane asylum look like inside?
As he told me decades later, he was sorry he ever learned.
He didn’t hear yelling or screaming inside, but he did see a lot of weeping. One old woman with stringy hair and tattered robes was leaning against the wall, just sobbing as though her heart was broken. Patients were just wandering around, many of them looking like they were empty inside with what Dad called “dead eyes“, as though something had scooped everything out of them. One wretchedly skinny old man was tied down on a stretcher, crying and pleading for help incoherently. When Dad passed by, he said later that you could smell the feces and the sour smell of untreated sores. Indeed, the whole place stank of unwashed flesh and uncleaned toilets. He said he saw people wander by with crap and urine running down their legs, making a kind of whimpering noise, and no one did anything. He also swore that he passed by what looked like iron barred cell doors built over stone chambers that contained screaming patients who were flinging themselves around wildly, to the point of injuring themselves. When Dad asked why someone didn’t stop them, the driver have him a “Why bother? Besides, they’ll just operate on them soon and it’ll be okay.”
“Operate?”
“Yeah,” the driver said, making a poking motion at his eyes. “You know, operate. That calms ‘em right down.”
Dad didn’t remember very many specifics afterwards beyond what he reluctantly told me above. The next thing he remembers is the truck pulling up in front of his house and the driver giving him his money and saying, “So, should I expect to find you here tomorrow?”
“No,” Dad said, “not ever.”
The driver looked disappointed but said, “Look, kid, if it’s what you saw, don’t worry about it. It used to bother me too, but after a few trips you don’t even notice it any more.”
“I can guess,” Dad said, “and that’s why I don’t want to go back.”
It was after this that Dad went to the Marine Corps reserve, but that’s another story.