CHAPTER 120. WELDING BUBBLEGUM AND MY MARRIAGE 1969
I had told no one, outside of ARCo management of course, that I had quit my job. I didn’t tell my parents until May 5, which was long after the fact. I had resigned back in February, not long after the ski trip to Big Vanilla. I offered to remain until the end of May, but once I gave my notice they saw no reason for me to stay around past March 31. So all during April when my folks thought I was going in to Philadelphia to my job, I was really going into Drexel Hill. I still had the key to 1030 Cobbs.
wouldn’t be there. Neither would her father. He left very early for work since he had to drive to North Wales every day, which took him a good hour each way. He worked for Leeds & Northrup assembling electronic testing equipment. Lois’ grandmother was ailing and staying with her aunt. At any rate, the house was empty between 8:00 AM and 4:00 in the afternoon.
I would enter the house around 8:30 and set up my typewriter on the living room coffee table. I spent much of the day working on a novel, but sometimes I would go into Philadelphia and make the
rounds, looking for places needing a writer or maybe just taking in the women downtown. Mary Quant on right, her’s short skirt, named the mini skirt in 1962, had grown shorter by an inch or two every year since. By 1969 women were wearing what they called the micro-mini. There was now a better show on the streets of Philly than in those girlie magazines I use to lift from Charles’ Newsstand. Even Lois was in to them; although in reality, most of her was out of them. (See photo of Lois left.)
get over. I liked both Mary Ann and Janice as persons and we had some fun times together, but I didn’t have any deep down feelings for either one. There was no physical stuff going on between us, other than some kissing and hand holding. I never had sex with those women, and I can say that without trying to twist my syntax in the Bill Clinton manner. In March I started to court Lois, ask her on dates. I couldn’t get her out of my mind and I couldn’t stay away from her.
When I left ARCo I was forced to sell my stock in their credit plan. I had more than $10,000 worth by then, which would be enough to fund me for a whole year, but hardly forever. I needed some sort of supplemental income. I took a part time job, four hours a night, five days a week, at Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corporation in Havertown.
Philadelphia Gum had been founded in 1948 by a man named
Edward Fenimore, a former University of Pennsylvania professor and a vice-president of Bowman Gum Company. Philadelphia Gum started producing single bite bubble gum called “Swell”, which sold for a penny each piece. It soon added to its line “El Bubble”, a brown candy cigar that sold for five cents. By the time I arrived on the scene they were quite successful and putting out a number of bubble gum packets containing trading cards. In 1967 they acquire the license to produce trading cards of National Football League players. This put them in direct competition with Topps, who had the contract for the American Football League. They also put out Dark Shadows Trading cards and Marvel Comic Super Hero Stickers. The company was acquired by Tootsie Roll Industries in 2004 and the Havertown Building was torn down and replaced with the Havertown YMCA.
I described my work to Joe Rubio in a letter on April 24.
“There is a big barrel of sugar and a sack of corn starch, and a large empty barrel between them. I put two scopes of sugar to one scope of corn starch in a sifter and I sift this into the large barrel. I have blisters on both hands already from doing that. It is a very big sifter. Then I load a large bin with this mix and put it on top of a machine for the woman operator to load. I then take a full bin from under the machine, where part of the unused mix comes out, re-sift this into the mix with some more corn starch. I have to get the sugar from a storeroom and the corn starch from a warehouse section when I run out. The sugar is in barrels weighting a ton each and I walk them off a skid and into place…”
I would come home every night looking like a haunt, a ghost, covered with the sifted flour head to toe. There was more to the job. Every so often a bell would ring. When it did I dropped the sifter and hurried to an opening, about the size of a half door, in the far wall. A conveyer belt came up to the opening from the kitchen on the lower floor. Spaced out on the belt were wats of just cooked bubble gum. They looked like chewed wads from the Jolly Green Giant. My job now became Was Slinger.
I would grab the end of the first huge wad and I would sling it up and onto the top of the bazooka-type gum maker. The machine was quite large. An operator actually sat atop it so it reminded you of a piece of farm equipment, such as a combine. The difference was this machine didn’t move anywhere. It was quite stationary and consisted of this long, twisting tubing, like some immense metal intestine that grew narrower and narrower as it coiled about the machine. Atop the beast, the operator would use an enormous paddle to press the newly made wad into this hopper, force it to be ingested then digested through the winding metal tube. It would eventually come out the other end as three inch, paper-wrapped sticks of bubble gum.
My job was to sling those wads from the conveyer to the machine top where the operator could then ram them down the beast’s throat.
I did this for a couple weeks and then I got promoted to Bubble Gum Welder.
time I was covered in powdered sugar, which certainly tasted better than flour and corn starch. I also had a distorted cheek because my mouth was full of bubble gum. One of the perks of the job was all the gum you could chew.
I was back on a machine. It looked like a worktable, something like an Addressograph to tell the truth. I stood to one side and these eight foot trays would be rolled up at one end. There were several heavy boards going up and down each side of these trays upon which were long rounded ropes of bubble gum. I would grab the first of these ropes and pull it across the top of my table and then feed it down through a tube at the other end. Something in there would begin pulling the rope along and a blade would snip off about an inch of the end. This would fall into a bunch of metal fingers that wrapped the piece and then drop on to a conveyor belt that carried the bite-sized gums through openings in the wall into the inspection and packing room.
My job was simple, keep the ropes moving. In the middle of the table were two blades and hot plate. As the first end of rope reached the table center I would already be pulling a second rope down. Snip-snip, I hit a foot pedal, the blades cut the ends off both ropes. I then pressed both ends into the hot plate, got them warm and squeezed the two ends together, thus welding them into one continuous rope. When the cart became empty it was quickly replaced by another and I welded on until the end of my shift. By then it was 11:00 PM.
This was surprising tiring work, but I was free to write all day and I got to binge on bubble gum. What a mess I was going home afterwards, though, just a big cloud of white powder.
Since he left, Joe Rubio and I continued a regular correspondence, much as I had nine years earlier with Ronald Tipton. Joe’s two main concerns were how the bowling team was doing and whether Lois and I were making progress on getting back together. We were both busy, but in much different ways. On April 17 he wrote he was stuck in Infantry and been sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for additional training. He told about everywhere they went included wearing the full field backpack. He then wrote:
“To make matters worse the barracks we’re in must be the oldest they could find, they don’t look like they’ve been used for years.”
These were the same gripes Ronald had when he did his basic at Fort Dix.
I wrote back to Joe on April 23, telling him Frank McBride, one of the men we both had worked with at ARCo told John Laven his being sent to Fort Dix probably meant Joe wouldn’t go to Vietnam. “Fort Dix isn’t set up to train for Vietnam fighting.
Boy, Frank was wrong and Joe did go to Vietnam.
On night I did come to my parent’s home for supper and it shocked everyone because I had Lois with me. I took her home and stayed the night.
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