By Ed Staskus
When I got out of high school finding a job in Cleveland, Ohio was easy as pie as long as it was the most thankless job known to man, work like grit blasting, jackhammering, and tearing off roofs. None of it was a bed of roses, not that anybody ever said it was going to be. It was more like a crown of thorns with the only salvation at the end of the day being the end of the day.
The good thing about grit blasting was that the work was indoors, in an all-metal room out of the sun and rain. The bad thing about it was being in an all-metal room in a haze of abrasive dust hoping the blast hose wouldn’t bust a gut. The work room measured 20 feet wide by 50 feet long by 15 feet tall. It was all business, no windows, no distractions, and no escape.
The metal finishing shop was in Brook Park near Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Starting time was 7:30 AM, no ifs ands or buts. God forbid I miss my bus. They did shot-peening, deburring, and metal polishing. I only did one thing. I blasted an assortment of metal things, most of them incomprehensible to me, with steel grit or crushed glass. Sometimes, if the object was small, I worked at a sandblasting cabinet. It had a foot operated control valve.
I wore a thick canvas long-sleeved blast suit, gloves with gauntlets, and steel-toed safety boots. When I was ready, the last thing I put on was an air-fed metal helmet with a shawl protector. My boss was adamant that I go slow, never stopping at one spot with my blaster, keeping the same pace, which was a crawl. I had no problem with that since I could barely move in my protective suit.
The shop was noisy, dusty, and dingy from front to back, although when we got finished with whatever thing we had been working on it looked new. After three months, though, I felt like I was down for the count and quit in the middle of my shift. I took a bus to Edgewater Park, stripped off my shirt, and lay on the sand in the sun the rest of the day.
I didn’t think jackhammering could be worse than grit blasting. I was wrong. It was worse. It was like hanging on to a prehistoric woodpecker. The pneumatic t-shaped jackhammer weighed a hundred pounds and was loud. When it got revved up it sounded louder than a jet engine. I was given Willson earmuffs to save my hearing. I didn’t wear them my first five minutes on the job. After the first five minutes I never took them off.
Charles King, an engineer who built the original motorized carriage in the United States in 1896, created the first air-powered jackhammer for the mining industry. Miners had labored for ages in old hat fashion, breaking rock with sledgehammers. The jackhammer was a groundbreaking invention for them. Jackhammers are percussive tools. They pound rock and concrete with thousands of hits a minute. Once it’s been broken into small pieces it’s time to move on to the next slab. For basic breaking I used a basic point bit. The old hands, who were built like fire hydrants, used a flat bit for better control.
We sprayed the concrete with water to keep the dust down. We wore face masks. Since shrapnel wasn’t an unusual happening, I wore heavy-duty pants and a long-sleeved shirt. I still had my steel-toed boots. There was no steep learning curve. Even though I was young and fit, I took breaks all the time. The shock waves were too much to stand. Whole-body vibration is fun and games for only so long. At times I wished for an earthquake to do the work for me.
The old hands knew the score but still complained about fatigue, headaches, and lower back pain. They sometimes took five to lay down flat on their backs on the ground. It was hard work controlling the heavy tool. We rotated on and off. Everybody said jackhammers were better than sledgehammers in the hot sun, but it struck me as making a fine distinction to no purpose. I didn’t last long. I was neither strong nor sizable enough for the work. After my last day I went home to my apartment and slept for a day-and-a half. My lumpy mattress felt like a bed of roses.
It was still summer, so I signed on with a roofing company. There was no steep learning curve. I was dragooned to be one of the guys who tore roofs off. It sounded easy enough but it was hard to do. I didn’t know it was the most physically demanding contractor work of all time. I didn’t know it was the fourth most dangerous job in the country, either.
“It’s hard work and it can be a risk,” the boss said. “You need to be proud of what you do. It’s good stuff.”
The other guys ignored the boss. They said don’t climb ladders with your hands in your pockets. I showed them my hands. “Don’t slide down ladders,” one of the men said showing me his hands. “It might have splinters.” They said don’t slip when topside. I said I would watch out for that. They said don’t touch wires and get electrocuted. I agreed to watch out for that, too. They claimed the company was a storm chaser, even though we never worked during storms. I found out what it meant soon enough.
If it was 90 degrees on the street, it was 900 degrees on the roof. If it was a dark-colored or metal roof, it was even hotter. After I got a sunburn my first day, I wore sunscreen and a baseball cap as a matter of course. I got heat rash and learned to never wear jeans or dark-colored clothing. I got heat cramps and learned to drink gallons of water.
There were two of us at the bottom of the totem pole. We were responsible for cleaning up. The rolling magnetic sweeper was my favorite. Sweeping for loose nails and screws was incredibly easy and meant the end of the job was at hand. The pay was good, but I didn’t like going up and down ladders. Once I got on the roof, I settled down, but ladders made me jumpy. I finally had enough of them and called in sick. I stayed sick until the office manager stopped calling me.
Summer started to drift away after Labor Day. I applied for work at the nearby Collinwood Rail Yards and was hired as a temporary for as long as they needed me. The railroad yard and diesel terminal had been there for about one hundred years, after a machine shop and roundhouse were originally built to repair locomotives. Miles of stock yard rail was laid for freight trains coming and going. By 1930 there 120-some miles of track handling 2,000 cars daily. During World War Two the Collinwood Yards became one of the major switching and repair facilities for the New York Central, and after that for Penn Central.
My formal job description was Extra Clerk. I thought it meant a cushy office job. What it actually meant was I had to work wherever they wanted me to, filling in when somebody was sick or on vacation. I found out soon enough that nobody in any office ever got sick or went on vacation.
A warehouse had been built near the roundhouse. There was a smaller storehouse with two offices next to it. The front office was for whoever wanted to sit around in it. The back office was for my boss. I worked for him even when I was working for somebody else. He was Isaiah Wood, a short older man who always wore an Irish scally cap indoors and outdoors, rain or shine. He was a rabble rouser for the Nation of Islam. He always had stacks of their newspaper “Muhammed Speaks” on the floor. When it became “Bilalian News” he piled up stacks of those.
He sold them to African Americans who worked in the yard. They trooped in, plunked down their dough, and walked out with the newspaper in a coat pocket. Nobody who was white ever trooped in and plunked down anything. Isaiah Wood was disliked by every white man in the Collinwood Yards to whom I let out what a dismal dead-end I was stuck in.
He had a poster on the wall of the Nation of Islam kingpin Elijah Muhammed wearing sunglasses and a funny hat with stars and crescent moons emblazoned on it. The poster quoted the kingpin. “If you think the white man isn’t the devil like I have taught you, then bring me your devil and I will show you that the white man has no equal.” Whenever I had to go into his office the poster was right behind him so it was right in my face.
He liked to say things like, “Whenever you look at a black man you are looking at God.” Then he would tell Wally and me that there were two or three gondalas with rail wheels on them that needed unloading. He tried to make it sound like orders from the mouth of God, speaking low and slow.
Ozor Benko was known as Wally. Nobody ever called him Ozor or even Ozzie. Everybody called him Wally. He was shorter and older than Isaiah. He had been married for almost fifty years. His wife put together his lunch pail of sandwiches, apples, oranges, and grapes. The sandwiches were always Hungarian since he and his wife were Hungarian. He especially liked black bread smeared with cream cheese and topped with black cherry jam.
Wally and I worked together. Every morning at 7 AM we collected wood from broken pallets and built a bonfire. Some days the fire was as big as Isaiah’s hatred of white folks. We stood around it once it got roaring and warmed ourselves up when it was a cold morning. Anybody passing by was welcome to take a spot. Whenever we had to unload a gondola in bad weather, we made sure to have a 55-gallon steel drum nearby with a fire going in it. We thawed our hands and dried our gloves there.
When we were unloading rail wheels the two of us stood in the gondola with a crane on a flat car at hand. The crane operator swung his block to us, one of us wrote a number on the wheel with a thick yellow crayon, while the other one attached a sling to the wheel. The crane lifted it, setting it down in a row of them, and swung back to us. It wasn’t hard work, except when it was cold snowy slippery. There wasn’t as much snow that winter as there would be a few years later, but it was icy enough.
Wally started taking days off when his wife got sick. I didn’t mind because another Extra Clerk like me, who was about my age, filled in. One week Wally didn’t come to work at all. At the end of the next week Isaiah told me Wally’s wife had died and he would be taking a few weeks off. When he came back, he looked terrible. He started going to one of the bars just outside the yard for lunch, eating pickled eggs, greasy sandwiches, and swigging bottles of P.O.C. Even still, he lost weight, getting thinner. His clothes hung loose on him. His skin got gray and cadaverous.
He died two months later. He missed his wife so much he didn’t want to go on living. He had a heart attack and died on his sofa watching “Sanford and Son” on a portable TV. We thought he died of a broken heart. Isaiah didn’t say much, although he went to Wally’s funeral.
When spring came, I was assigned to be a tracker in the switching yard. I was given a clipboard and a pocketful of pencils. Boxcars, flat cars, and gondolas were busted up a cut and sorted by railway company, loaded or unloaded, destination, car type, and whether they needed repairs. The black snakes hauling coal, unloading across the street, weren’t on my beat. I walked miles a day every day, noting and writing it all down and delivering the paperwork to an office in the shadow of the terminal.
I discovered small beat-up shacks tucked into shadows where workmen hung out, making hay, killing time, reading the daily papers, listening to the radio, playing cards, and drinking. A lot of drinking went on in the yard and at the bars on East 152nd St. just outside the main entry gate. Even more drinking happened on payday, when many men cashed their checks at the bars and drank part of it before their wives could get their hands on what was left.
By the beginning of summer, I was out of a job. Conrail was taking over, cutting costs, and laying workers off. When the 1970s rolled over Conrail closed the diesel locomotive repair facilities and sold off most of the rail yard. By that time, I didn’t care. I had squirreled away the hard cash I made and gone back to college so I could make my way. My father was a fan of higher education.
He had been a miner in Sudbury, Ontario in the 1950s until he finally saw the light. We emigrated to the United States where he worked days and studied nights at Western Reserve University, graduating with a degree in accounting. He was determined to work with his head and not his hands.
Everybody said I had my father’s looks, but we didn’t always look at things the same way. He had a bad habit of threatening me with the ways of the world, with what was out there. He was from the Old World and had survived World War Two, on the wrong end of the stick for most of it. Even though he and I didn’t routinely see eye to eye, after a year of punching the working stiff’s time clock, I started thinking he might be on to something about working with your head. I thought I would have to put my thinking cap on.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.
“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus
“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books
“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction
Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP
Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.