CHAPTER 102: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET -- BLOWIN' IN THE WIND 1963

                  CHAPTER 102  RIOTS AND RE-DOS. 1963

The overtime I mentioned came from the Speedaumat conversion effort. I was working directly with the head of the Division, whose name now escapes me. He was boss over all of the mailroom, the print shop and some of the other service departments. He was taking an active role in this effort.  

It is amazing how in
technology the smaller always holds more. There were those 96 column Keypunch cards that held more than the 80 column cards on half the space. Now Addressograph had come up with smaller plates to hold as much as the larger ones. The Addressograph plates we used had all the names and addresses stored on an inch wide and three inches in length piece of metal. After cutting these plates you slid them into a metal frame. After that you ran them through the machine and printed yellow labels of about the same size. These labels slid into the top of the frame and  allowed you to read what was on the plate.

The Speedaumat plates were an inch or so shorter. They required no frame or label. You  could read the plate itself. You could also get more plates in a tray and more trays in the cabinets, which were cost savings right there. The only problem was we had to cut all new plates with the fifty thousand addresses we already had on file.

The plates had the name and address on the first four lines. On the fifth line was coding. The code told the region and district location of the addressee. In also had codes indicating what products were involved.

I would run the old plates onto galley sheets. Then I would cut new plates from these galleys. I would print out galleys of the new plates. The division manager would compare the two galleys and mark anything that need correcting. I would then cut a corrected plate. This was a job that took months.

He and I worked on this conversion through the spring. We were very near the end when the Postal Service issued a directive to corporations. It announced that something called the Zip code was going into effect for all mail beginning July 1, 1963. All addresses would contain a five-digit number to aid in postal sorting. Furthermore, it said there could be no coding after the Zip code.

Our coding was the last thing on the plate. Every plate we had done was now of no use. We had to begin anew.

The division manager had a heart attack.

Ron Paul was delighted.

I began cutting new plates.

On June 12 someone gunned down the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP in his  driveway. His name was Medgar Evers. His murder came in the middle of a growing movement for equal rights for Black people. Meanwhile, The authorities jailed Martin Luther King,  Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama that April. King had become the most notable of the civil rights spokespersons.
 

The ugly opposing image to those struggling for these rights came to the fore in May. Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Bull Connor, ordered the use of fire hoses and police dogs against Black demonstrators.  The images of  those attacks burned across TV screens  coast to coast. 

In August a crowd of 200,000 marched on Washington DC. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his  inspirational “I Have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial.

 On September 15, the day before Lois and my second wedding anniversary, there was a church bombing in Birmingham. This bombing killed Four little girls attending Sunday school at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

The years they will brand “the Love and Peace Decade” were beginning with death. By the time this decade ends, “The Death Decade” will seem more appropriate.

 

The Postal Service enacted The Zip Code on July 1 1963. Perhaps I should have taken it as a warning. But the set back to the project only delayed its completion. I got the plates finished and they rolled in the new Speedaumats and rolled out the old Addressographs. This wasn’t the only change in the Unit. They also rolled out Ron Paul. They gave him a lateral move to some other department in the company. We had a new Supervisor in the Unit… me.

Only they didn’t give me that title. I was designated Group Leader and promoted to a Level 5, not to the Level 6 Ron Paul had been. This is Corporate-think in action. The Speedaumats were more efficient and faster than the Addressographs thus the Unit Head’s duties were somehow less than a 6. Oh well, there was nothing I could do about this. I was in charge of the Unit and it was four more dollars a week. I was now making $64 a week.

Lois was working in Central Billing and still making more than me. She made $68 a week now. But she was pregnant.

Lois was up and down in mood, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary, not that I had anything to compare with her mood swings. Still, I counted it as normal and perhaps the hormonal changes that came with pregnancy, once it was establish that she was. We all assumed her bouts of illness were attributable to the pregnancy, and perhaps a growing sleep problem she had developed as well.

She was beginning to complain about the neighbors. She viewed them with a certain amount of suspicion, especially the Andrews, I could not fathom her dislike of these people. My only real experience with Frank Andrews was a bit embarrassing, but hardly hostile

In really began as a simple gesture of neighborliness. The neighbors on our west side were Hispanic. The husband was Frank Andrews, but I forget the first names of his wife and two children, a boy and girl. I know Andrews doesn’t sound very Hispanic. Maybe he wasn’t and just his wife was. It “don’t make no never mind”, as my Grandmother used to say. The husband had observed me with a guitar when we moved in.

 I really don’t know what possessed me to purchase the
instrument.. I had not done well learning the clarinet because it required fingering with both hands. Why then a guitar that took all your fingers? On top of that, because of my hearing problem I had a horrendous time trying to tune it. When I moved into General Warren Village I had yet to learn how to play it.

One day, Frank saw me outside and sauntered over.

“I see you have a guitar,” he said.

“Yeah, but I really don’t play.” 

“That’s all right,” He pointed up the street.  “I play guitar and got this friend up the street does as well. We get together each week, every Thursday. Why don’t you join us this week?”

“Thank, but I don’t play very well.”  I waved a hand dismissedly as I said it. (“Don’t play very well?” Truth be told, I barely played at all. I could plink the strings.) 

He wouldn’t take no for an answer, assuming I was only being modest.  

“Ahh, don’t worry about that,” He said. We’re all amateurs. Just for fun. Nobody’s gonna hear us.”

So I agreed like the fool I was.  

The next Thursday he met me at my door and we walked up the street together, he carrying a nice guitar case, me with mine slung over my shoulder like a sack of flour. With my lack of ability on the instrument, it may as well have been a sack of floor. We sat there and strummed the strings and Frank suddenly stopped, looked at me, and said:

“You really don’t know how to play, do you?”

I never had another guitar get together with those two guys. Andrews was quite polite and all about it, but I was feeling pretty silly as I slunk out of there and went home.

I did eventually teach myself how to play the instrument -- sort of.

Meanwhile Lois was also becoming more frustrated with what she considered our isolation. Even though now she had her driver’s license, she continued to be very reliant on me taking us anywhere. 

Looking back on those early years of our marriage I am rather stunned by how dependent we had become on my parents. Although Lois will say today that my folks did nothing for us, except criticize, my own opinion is we had become quite the leeches. We were constantly running to my folks or they were coming to do for us. The single month of March is a good example.

On March Second we were at my parents around 1:00 PM, where we went into Pottstown with my grandmother. We came back from town and ate supper there

 We were back to my parents around noon and had lunch, then returned in the evening of the 12^th for dinner.

March 16 we came up, but they weren’t home.

We arrived at noon, just at lunchtime. on March 17 and then my Dad took us all on a 35 mile ride above Harrisburg to show how ice had broken along the Susquehanna River. It had piled up and torn down houses and cabin walls along the road. I’m pretty sure we stopped for dinner on the way home and I’m pretty sure Dad treated.

We brought my grandmother up to our place on the 19^th and she stayed over until March 20.

 I sort of reciprocated on the morning of March 21. I was in Bucktown during the morning to rake their grounds, but I was also freeloading by getting some cement blocks to take home. (Later on, in the fall, my dad and Mr. Heaney would spend a day at our home using those cement blocks to lay a walk behind our house.) Lois and I returned by 4:00 in the afternoon for supper and then went with mom and grandmother’s Married Couples club in Philadelphia to see the Cinerama movie, “How the West was Won”, a film that probably did better showing the vistas in widescreen that the multi-star cast did with the plot.

By the end of the month I was bringing my burnable trash up to dispose of and on the 27^th my grandmother was mending Lois clothes. I took Lois into Philly to the doctor on the 29^th (we still didn’t know what was going on with her) and the next day we were back to my parents in the evening.

This type of thing went on for the next three months and beyond, actually. We had been doing this since our wedding and we would continue so for at least a couple more years, with the added feature of sponging money off my parents regularly in the year ahead.

 Dave Claypoole had told me on a number of occasions that I should consider college. He was attending Temple University in the evenings and explained that I could do the same. I could enter classes as a non-matriculating student. I wouldn’t need to take the SATs or anything. Atlantic even offered a tuition refund program. I never knew college was possible for someone like me. No one ever told me about such things as evening college. I decide to give it a shot.

I registered at Temple University for the Summer Session. I signed up for one course, Sociology 101: Introduction. I believed this would give me an indication if I could do college work or not. I thought Sociology would be a good subject for a writer to know. I began attending a two-hour class three evenings a week.

 I found the course interesting and stimulating. We had to study four other books besides the main text, all squeezed into the shortened summer session. Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society edited by Eric and Mary Josephson was the most fascinating one to me. The book touched me in a personal way.

Oddly, the confessions of a mugger that were told within those pages imbued me with a habit that stayed with me. I stopped shining my shoes. The mugger told how he selected his victims. He would look at the shoes. If a man came by with dusty and scoffed shoes, he would pass him up, figuring he was probably down on his luck and didn’t have much of value. If a man walked into his path with well shined shoes, then that was a man of means and he would be the man mugged. 

I got an A for the course. On the last day the professor approached
me as I was leaving. He asked me what my plans were.

I explained I had just taken the course to find out if I could do college work.

He told me, “If what you did here is a sample of what you can do, then you definitely should continue in college.”

I took him at his word and I registered for four courses in the coming fall semester.

By June of 1963, one would say my life was still on the ascendant. I had just gotten a promotion and now I was getting my college education. Everything was going very well indeed.

Except Lois was pregnant.