February 28, 2012

The aged moss, a gentle mist, a dry martini---I wish I had been sophisticated enough to do that, but I was just a college kid, more often than not out of my depth, even when I didn’t realize it. But the quest for sophistication was never-ending in those days, at least for me. I was acutely aware of class, even though I didn’t know how to talk about it. It had something to with style, I was certain. I had learned that from my dad, in whose mind “class” meant “classy;” there was nothing socio-economic about it for him, not even the question of whether he could afford it or not.

My dad loved clothes and cars and nice shoes and he had wonderful taste. He just didn’t have much money and so his version of life as compromise usually meant the problem of paying the rent after the new sport coat had been bought. The worst story I know about him and clothes involves my college money and before I tell it to you, you have to promise to forgive him. I did. I don’t think my mother did, not for a while anyway.

In the summer of 1958 I was getting ready to go off to college. The summer before that, I had served an apprenticeship with my dad in the glass factory. He was forty then, a veteran of the Second World War, who had turned down a commission and the GI Bill’s education benefits to get back to his job in the glass factory. By 1957 he was beginning to feel the consequences of those decisions. The job he had, industrial glass cutting, no longer exists, all the men so employed having long since been replaced by machines. It was a physically hard job and mentally exhausting. It was also dangerous. A glass cutter worked in an open stall roughly ten by eight feet “square.” In front of him was a waist-high table about eight feet long and almost two yards deep, covered in green felt. A rule ran the length of its near and far edges. To start the day carters brought a stack of ten to twenty plate glass sheets, each roughly ninety by forty inches, and stood them on end along the wall of the stall to the right of a right-handed cutter. On the table would be a sheet of paper with the orders for the day. The company might want 100 “lights” of glass 9 x 12 and 50  of 10x14 and so on. The cutter’s job was to extract from the raw sheets the sizes and quantities of the order. Besides the obvious visual imagination called for, the job required a kind of judgment that only experience could provide: each sheet of raw glass was flawed by stones left unmelted in the furnaces and blisters caused by an uneven draw. The cutter had to find those specific lights around and between the blisters and stones pitting the glass he was given. A very small stone here or one blister there might pass but the inspector, who came around regularly throughout the day, could reject some or all of a pack of ten lights, a fate called “rammycacking.” Since the cutter was paid on a piecework basis, he could ill afford a half-morning’s work thrown into the scrap bin at the left of his stall to be taken back to the furnaces and melted down.

This mental strain, the constant demands of instinct and judgment, was made more burdensome by the physical strain.  Glass is heavy and a sheet of glass 90 by 40 is very heavy. The cutter would turn to his right, facing the stacked glass and take one sheet in his hands, about halfway up its length. He would lift the sheet and turn to face the table, the glass between him and the table edge. He would then turn the sheet ninety degrees to the right so that his hands were at the top and bottom of the now horizontal sheet. Lifting with his bottom hand, his right, and loosening the fingers of his left hand at the top of the sheet, he would then flip the sheet of glass into the air ever so slightly so that it would fall exactly flat on the felt top of the table. From there he could begin to cut.

Most cutters were wounded men. Everyone I knew had scars on their hands, faces, or arms. Some has lost an eye, a finger or two, a couple of toes. There was safety equipment but not everyone wore it and in my father’s day men of the generation prior to his had worked without much gear at all, through the Depression and the war and some even before that. The trade had come to America in the late 19^th century with Belgian glass makers and most older cutters had names like Desire and Hermes and LaBenne. Since this was a guild trade, most entered by serving apprenticeships with their fathers or brothers or uncles. A few, like my father, had been “adopted” by single men with no families. The man who took my father in had lost a hand to the glass and worked with a two-fingered metal claw that was fitted with rubber tips. A safety-conscious cutter wore a thick leather apron that covered him from his chest to just below his knees. He wore steel-toed work shoes, thick leather gloves, and padded cotton sleeves set with steel grommets that reached and covered his shoulders. Most wore a cap of some kind. You can imagine how hot this outfit was in the summertime. That we lived in Louisiana that summer made it even worse. That is why some of the younger cutters worked stark naked beneath the equipment. Walking down the workroom past the stalls where the men faced their tables and turned their backs on the world was quite an experience.

Once the cutter faced the glass on the table, the game was on. The cutting tool was an industrial diamond set to the precise angle in the tip of a cartridge held in a beveling clamp at the end of a small rod. The length of the rod and the swiveling clamp allowed the cutter to set the right attitude of his draw down the glass, from the far edge of the table toward him at the near edge. And so it went, for eight hours a day: lift, turn, turn, flip, measure, cut, pray for the best. Radios played, men sang, told jokes and stories, cursed the inspector. This was the world I wanted to enter.

It took some arguing on my part to convince my father to take me on, as he had done both his younger brothers in the past, but many of the sons of my father’s friends were starting, boys I knew from high school and from years of company softball games and picnics. It was almost a rite of passage, I suppose. My father eventually gave in and one morning in June of 1957, union card in my pocket, badge on my ball cap, apprenticeship book in hand, I walked with my father through the factory gates. I have to tell you that I loved it, for all the boyish-mannish reasons you can think of. I loved watching my father work. He was a patient teacher by example and instruction. He was well-thought of by his comrades and moved with ease through the factory. We sweated through the summer together and as school approached I asked him how the apprenticeship worked in the school year. Only then did he tell me that I would not be coming back. He had let me work with him because he knew it was necessary for my growing up, but he said it was not necessary that he deceive me. He told me that he knew I thought glass cutting was a good job but he wanted me to know that it was not.  Piece work pay for a dangerous job was the worst kind of life. The job was seasonal, as well, a fact that I had understood as we moved around the country year after year, from factory to factory, chasing open furnaces and unfilled orders, but I had no idea what that meant financially, he said. I remembered nights we had slipped out of town a car length ahead of the landlord—or the sheriff, probably. There had been a few flush periods, a few months at a time. Once we had owned a house, but once we had lived in a three-room shack with no hot water and a bathroom shared with the people next door. I don’t know if my father thought of himself as a happy man, a fortunate man. He seemed so to me. But by many measures his life was hard and worrisome and unrewarding. Whatever was the case, he did not want any of it for me. “You’re going to college,” he said.

So, you can see that that next summer, of ’58, was as much the end of something for my father as it was a beginning for me. Even if he didn’t understand “class” the way Marx or Veblen did, I think he knew that something fundamental was changing in our lives. It was as if our roles had suddenly reversed. Growing up I followed him, or wanted to, everywhere. He sang, I sang; he played sports, I played sports; he told stories, I told stories; he cut glass, I cut glass. Whatever he did, I tried; whatever he loved, I loved. Then, there we were at that fork in the road, the one boys and their dads come to. It wasn’t just that we had to go in different directions; it was harsher than that. He would continue up a road that I was no longer allowed to travel, the one he had come up, had ushered his brothers along, shared with other men and boys. I had to watch him go on without me, to wonder if he would miss me.

Then again, he couldn’t come with me, either. Truth be told, I didn’t want him along; I was ready to go by then, hungry for more books and ideas. I wasn’t embarrassed by him or angry at him; I was just becoming aware that I was not him; not any more (I was wrong, of course, but that insight was several decades in coming.) In turn, he had to watch me go along a way he only vaguely understood, into a world the superficial dimensions of which he glimpsed but whose particulars were invisible to him. It had been he who insisted I had to go there but I am not sure he understood, as I certainly didn’t, how separate the two roads would be. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean we were estranged or unable to talk to one another or disaffected this way or that, but that summer it became clearer and clearer that each of us was being left behind. For me, it was a time of promise and I was a little scared and a little self absorbed. Maybe with a bit of distance from my own excitement I might have seen what was happening to my dad, but I was only seventeen, so I’ll let myself off the hook. Even now I can only imagine what he was feeling. So, I was surprised when it happened, and bewildered.