Working Class Hero: a serial novel(Chapter 2: An Academic Dialogue)

My father was a carpenter by day, bartender at night, but a union man to his death. Walter Reuther of the UAW was his one true hero. What inspired my Dad wasn’t just the benefits or wages that Reuther helped the working man acquire but the respect factories now needed to pay their workers. It wasn’t like the old days when workers slaved long hours for little pay under hideous conditions. Labor guaranteed a decent life.

Still, he desired I attend a good college and learn a worthy profession, even if only that of an elementary school teacher. I know he boasted with his buddies about his son going to Boston College with all those lawyer’s sons. That’s why he was so distraught when one night near the end of my sophomore year I announced I was quitting.

“Over my dead body.” he shouted.

“I don’t have to go if I don’t want to go.” I shouted back.

“I haven’t worked two jobs twenty years so you can be a good-for-nothing bum.”

“I’ll get myself a job”

“Oh, sure you will. And what kind of job can a college drop-out get himself.”

“I can always get a job at Waltham Mills.”

He laughed. “You wouldn’t last a week in the mills.”

“Tommy says they’re hiring night shift and he knows someone there, like a supervisor, who can get me in at $1.65 an hour.”

“You should go and talk to your uncle about the mills. He’s worked at Waltham Mills for twenty years. He can tell you what hell the mills are.”

“No more a hell than BC and all that phony academic crap.”

“You really don’t know how good you have it.”

“I never asked to have it good.”

“You’re going to throw away a full scholarship to Boston College and go to work in some dark hell hole.”

“You worked in the mills.”

“I worked in the bobbin shop in the mills and only because I had to. You don’t have to.

“There’s nothing wrong with working in the mills. It’s better than going to school and learning how to be some capitalistic pig.”

“Take your head out of your ass and look at the real world, Calvin.”

“What, so I can see a failure like yourself?”

“I might be a failure wise ass, but I never pissed away a scholarship.”

That conversation would continue in various permutations for three weeks. My mother chimed in, my uncle put in a word, and then my brother would take the lead, all orchestrated by my father. It never really stopped until my grades came in and any illusions my father may have had of my returning to school vanished like beer on a warm summer day. I had skipped my last two finals and of course failed those classes making my GPA no longer acceptable to the School of Education. I was a free man.

I whiled away the first few weeks taking a vacation, but after one too many confrontations with an angry family concerned about a lazy son, I got a job at Waltham Mills, working nights in the screen-print dye shop. The powdered pigments stained my clothes new colors every night, and glues and hydrochloric acids stung my eyes with acrid ghosts from working days gone by. Even the floors were layered with generations of muck and mire. My Dad was right; it really was a hell hole.

copyright Gregory Perry 2004


Chapter 1: Life Span

Next week's installment: our hero (remember this is fiction loosely based on some fact) starts his employment at Waltham Mills and begins his training in the art of work.