Hijinks in the Paint Factory

Many would say that the backbreaking, repetitive work in a grimy, overheated, dimly lit paint factory isn’t fun. These poor benighted souls were clearly not in my cohort of toilers on the four to midnight shift in the Cleveland, Ohio Glidden Paint factory in the summer of 1962. Since I was one of the lucky few to have been vouchsafed that opportunity, let me tell you of some of the hijinks that filled our days. I was just out of high school and I spent that glorious summer in the factory, dreading the impending drudgery of college.

We arrived just before 4:00 pm, clocked in and paid little attention as our shift boss read carefully and thoroughly, taking as much time as possible, the work orders that we were to fill. We then positioned the paint can filling machines under the proper paint tanks and adjusted them to fill pints, quarts or gallons as required. This took us until 5:00 pm when our supervisors left for the day.

Once alone, we rushed to the windows to ogle the secretaries leaving the administration building across the parking lot. For some of us, these lithe beauties represented our past. For me, a kid not yet eighteen, they represented an enticing future.

The Blue Box

I’ve got a little blue plastic box that holds some of the detritus of my life. It contains a jumble of small objects that, for some reason or other, I decided to keep and shove into the box. It’s about five inches by eight inches and about three inches tall. I have no idea where this box came from or how long I’ve had it, but it must have been around for many decades at least.

 The items in the box are fragments of memory, sometimes sharp edged, sometimes dulled beyond remembrance, of what I used to be and, in some cases, still am. They bring forth flashes of times otherwise lost to my memory. I’m surprised by some of the things I’ve found, amused by others and perplexed by many of them. Among the items are: