I had three summer jobs during the sixties, and two were so bad that I'd just as

soon not discuss them. One, however, was a great job that I had in the summer of

'65.

Hutzler's Department Store was getting ready to open a store in a county

outside of Baltimore. They had a warehouse in the heart of the city in an old

three story building. It was there, in the summer of '65, that they stocked

their merchandise for the autumn opening at their new location.

I can't recall how I found out that they were hiring stock boys at that

warehouse. I do remember the interview process being a breeze. The foreman doing

the interviews checked my pulse to see if I had one, then hired me.

I started work in the early part of July, eight in the morning 'till five at

night with a one hour break for lunch. They put me on the second floor with

another guy around my age who'd been there for a couple of weeks.

As I soon discovered, it was a lucky break landing on the second floor. The

first floor was a madhouse of activity. All the bosses worked on that floor, as

well as many clerk types sorting and separating merchandise. There was a lot of

yelling on that floor, due to a lethal mix of pissed-off supervisors and

incompetent employees. The second floor, by comparison, was a quiet slice of

Eden.

My job was to assist the other guy in stacking and inventorying boxes that came

up on a freight elevator. We would get anywhere from twenty to a hundred boxes a

day. The normal daily average was around fifty. The guy I worked with had the

counting and stacking down to a science. On an average, we worked maybe two or

three hours a day.

He also had been crafty enough to stack some of the box piles with secret

entrances and small caves. I found out my first day there, when he disappeared

for short intervals, that he was using the caves for napping.

The third floor was also used for counting and stacking boxes. They would send

the smaller boxes up there. The reason for the smaller boxes were that three

teenaged girls worked that floor.

Of course, being guys, we were thrilled that girls were working on the floor

above us. We would sometimes trek up there and do some innocent flirting. But

more often than not, we would sneak up there and scare them. Or we would hide

behind boxes and engage them in rubber band battles. Those were innocent times.

At lunchtime, we would walk to the building next door where they had a snack

room. One unique feature of this area was a separate long narrow room.  This

room was dark and had a long line of comfortable lounge chairs of different

sizes and shapes running down its left wall. A tired worker would simply pick an

unoccupied chair and catch a nap. A couple of minutes before the end of the

hour, someone would open the door and flicker the lights to alert us. Many a day

I'd quickly chow down my bagged lunch to grab an available chair.

The second floor of the warehouse was also long and narrow. We would stack the

boxes on both sides of the floor, leaving a walkway down its center. At the end

of the floor was a small stairway that connected our floor with the first. Next

to the stairway was the freight elevator.

At some point, after we'd been there a few weeks, my co-worker and I began to

get restless. I mean one can only take so many naps in the course of a day.

We had a container on wheels that we used to transport boxes on our floor. It

was around four feet across and five feet long. It was open at the top with

canvas sides. One day, out of sheer boredom, we decided to give each other rides

in it. We would start at the far end of the hallway. One of us would get in the

container and the other would give the container a running push and a good spin.

The person in the canvas cart would fly down the aisle, bouncing off the boxes

on its perimeters, until finally coming to rest at the far end by the staircase.

 

Such fun was this ride that the word somehow filtered down to some of the

teenaged employees on the first floor. Soon, on any given day, there was a line

of kids waiting their turn on the beast.

As luck would have it, tragedy eventually reared its ugly head. We had put a

first floor kid into the container. My second floor buddy gave the wheeled

contraption a particularly vicious spin. The youngster swiftly sped down the

corridor, careening of the boxes. His speed was such that he barely slowed down

at the corridor's end. He angled off one last box stack then proceeded to bounce

down the stairs to the busy first floor. The guys on our floor witnessed this

event in awestruck horror, then we scattered. The first floorers to other parts

of the building, my friend and I to our caves.

We found out later that the teenager was shook up, but otherwise fine. In fact,

he had the presence of mind to tell the first floor bosses that he had fallen

into the container while helping us with some unloading near the steps. Needless

to say, the rides stopped after that.

Towards the end of August, the first floor bosses got everybody together and

told us that, starting the next day, we'd be loading boxes into trucks for

transport to the new store. If memory serves, just about all the young

employees, myself included, quit on the spot. It certainly was fun while it

lasted.