Working

by Studs Terkel

I believe I’m gonna have to stay here probably until I die. It’s not gonna be too bad for me because I been livin’ twelve years already in the cemetery. I’m still gonna be livin’ in the cemetery. (Laughs.) So that’s gonna be all right with me whenever I go. I think I may be buried here, it look like.

  BOOK NINE

  THE QUIZ KID AND THE CARPENTER

  BRUCE FLETCHER

  Nobody likes to grow old, but I’m afraid I grew old at a very early age. The years went by quickly when I was very young, and all too quickly in the years when I should have been having fun. I became a concerned old man at a very early age. I began to grow gray when I was twenty-one . . .

  He was one of the original Quiz Kids—first program, June, 1940. He was the youngest. “I was seven, going on eight.” He participated in the network program for three years, 1940 to 1943. He is thirty-nine years old.

  “My specialty was Greek mythology and natural history. These two subjects were what they asked me about on the show. At home I’d sit on the floor and go through the book and recite off the names of the birds. My Aunt Louise thought this was very great and very wonderful. So she called in the neighbors to have me perform. One of the neighbors called the newspapers and they came and photographed me and reported on me. I was considered a child prodigy.

  “After three years as one of the Quiz Kids, I was eleven and pretty obnoxious, I’m afraid. When you’re seven years old, these things are tolerable. When you’re eleven and becoming an adolescent, these things become intolerable. It was considered wise that I retire earlier than age fifteen, which was considered the graduation age for the Quiz Kids. I wondered what happened. From then on, I was just plain Bruce Fletcher.”

  My big ambition was to go to New York and Columbia University. When a Midwestern hick arrives in New York, you start at the bottom—and I did. I worked in a factory and was amused by the way it was run. Eight ’ the bell rang, all the machines started, and you started working like little machines yourself.

  I found a job at a very exclusive men’s club for the social register only. What amused me was something that existed far beyond its time: servants were treated as servants. I cleared twenty-nine dollars a week plus two meals. They were slip-cowish, and this hateful chef sought to give it to the employees. Things became so desperate that one of the servants went up to a club member with some sausage that you wouldn’t feed a puppy that was starving, and he said, “Here, you eat this.” Six months was a bellyful, I assure you.

  I liked the factory much better, aside from the money. I was glad to be a cog in the wheel. At least it wasn’t humiliating. I felt that I could just go through the day’s work, make enough money, oh, that I could go to the Met three times a week or Carnegie Hall, and I could more or less live my life properly when my time was my own.

  I was a young Columbia man while I worked in a cafeteria from 6:30 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. I was much respected by the management, even though I drove the people that I worked with insane, because I had standards they couldn’t cope with. I cannot stand laziness and neglect when I’m breaking my neck and somebody else is holding up the wall. I would scream bloody murder and carry on like a demon and a tyrant.

  Through Columbia,80 I got a job as a proofreader at one of the biggest law firms in New York. Whatever the case, the law firm brought me back to the fact that I was not just somebody’s scullery maid. The people either liked me very much or hated me with a purple passion. But I was respected. I’ve been respected on every job I ever had.

  It wore out my eyes, just like you had them grated on a grindstone. You have to read small print all day long and keep your eyes glued to it. Also, we had handwritten documents that the lawyers would send in. Some of their handwriting was like Egyptian hieroglyphics. We ran into ridiculous situations. If something went wrong, we would be blamed and heads would roll like cabbage stalks.

  I left under circumstances of considerable honor. I was given a farewell luncheon by half the staff of the law firm, meaning the lawyers themselves. I was asked to make a speech and I was much applauded.

  The most I made was seventy-five dollars a week. I consider making good money in this life where you can walk into a supermarket and you can fill up the grocery cart with everything you choose without having to add the prices of every item. This should have gone out in the thirties, when there was never enough money to go around. Ha ha. I did in New York what I do now. I add up the prices when I put things in the grocery cart to make sure that the purse matches the fancy.

  During the years 1960 to 1968, he was on the west coast and in Texas. He worked as an announcer for three different radio stations, favoring classical music. With his collection of ten thousand phonograph records, he made tapes for broadcasts. One job “consumed me day and night for a year and a half. Those were the happiest times of my life.”

  “Since coming back to Chicago in 1968 I have considered myself in retirement. At thirty-six I was no longer young. People hire people at age twenty. They don’t hire people age thirty-six. Oh, I’ve felt old since my twenties.”

  I now work in a greenhouse, where we grow nothing but roses. You walk in there and the peace and quiet engulfs you. Privacy is such that you don’t even see the people you work with for hours on end. It is not always pretty. Roses have to have manure put around their roots. So I get my rubber gloves and there I go. Some of the work is rather heavy.

  The money isn’t good. The heat in the summer almost kills me. Because there you are under a glass roof where everything is magnified. There’s almost no ventilation, and I am literally drenching with perspiration by the time the day is over and done with. But at least I don’t have somebody sneak up behind you and scream in your ear abuse. I had enough of that.

  The reason I like this job is because my mind is at ease all day long, without any tensions or pressures. Physically it keeps me on my toes. I’m a little bit harder and tougher than I was. I’m on my feet all day. I have an employer who’s the best one I ever had in my life. There has never been the slightest disagreement, which is a miracle. Everyone says, “Bruce is hard to get along with.” Bruce is not difficult to get along with if I had intelligent people to work with, where people are not after me or picking on me for that and that and another thing.

  I tend to concentrate so much on what I’m doing. That’s why I scare very easily. If anyone comes up behind me and speaks to me very suddenly when I’m at work, I’m concentrating so thoroughly I nearly jump through the roof.

  I start at seven fifteen in the morning, and the first thing I do is cut roses. They have to be cut early in the morning. The important thing is to cut them so that they’re rather tightly closed. Bees and butterflies don’t last very long because there’s no nectar and pollen. We cut the roses when they’re so tightly closed that they can’t get at them. If they’re kept in refrigeration and in water with the stems trimmed properly, they’ll be fresh a week later.

  Of course, there’s always the telephone. That is a big problem. The greenhouses extend what seem to be miles from the telephone, but you can always hear it, even at a distance. It means a great big long run to get it, and pray that they won’t hang up before you can answer it. That usually means orders to be taken. Sometimes the day gets too much and I feel I want to die on the spot.

  When the day is over I go to the library. If it’s a night of operas or concerts, I time myself accordingly. I always do as I did in New York. Unless I had to go stand in the standing room line at the Met, which meant getting there right after work, I’d go home, take a nap, so that I won’t fall asleep at the performance. And then come back and get as much sleep as I possibly can. The day isn’t complete unless I fall asleep with the reading light on and a book in my hand.

  I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. It would be much more convenient if I had cancer and passed away and say, “Oh, how tragic,” and I could have the peace of the grave. I don’t know. I’d love to be back in radio, in the classical music business. I blossomed forth like th
e roses in the greenhouse . . . I was in my own kind of work.

  Peace and quiet and privacy have meant a great deal to me in the years since I made my escape. I didn’t feel free as one of the Quiz Kids. Reporters and photographers poking you and knocking you around and asking ridiculous questions. As a child you can’t cope with these things. I was exploited. I can’t forgive those who exploited me.

  I would have preferred to grow up in my own particular fashion. Had I grown up as others did, I would have come out a much better person. In school, if I would fail to answer a question, the teacher would lean forward and say in front of the class, “All right! Just because you were one of the Quiz Kids doesn’t mean that you’re a smart pupil in my class.” I wish it had never happened.

  (Softly) But we were unique at the time. The Depression was over. America was the haven and all good things were here. And I was the youngest of the Quiz Kids. Of course, I’m a has-been. The Quiz Kids itself has been a has-been. But it brought forth something that was not a has-been. It achieved history, and that is where I’m proud to have been a part of it. (Laughs.) Ah, the time of retirement has come and I’m in it! I’m in it!

  NICK LINDSAY

  Though he lives in Goshen, Indiana, he considers his birthplace “home”—Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina. At forty-four, he is the father of ten children; the eldest, a girl twenty-six, and the youngest, a boy one and a half years old.

  He is a carpenter as well as a poet, who reads and chants his works on college campuses and at coffeehouses. “This is one of the few times in my life I had made a living at anything but carpentry. Lindsays have been carpenters from right on back to 1755. Every once in a while, one of ’em’ll shoot off and be a doctor or a preacher or something.81 Generally they’ve been carpenter-preachers, carpenter-farmers, carpenter-storekeepers, carpenters right on. A man, if he describes himself, will use a verb. What you do, that’s what you are. I would say I’m a carpenter.

  “I started workin’ steady at it when I was thirteen. I picked up a hammer and went to drive in nails. One man I learned a lot from was a janitor, who didn’t risk the ebb and flow of the carpentry trade. You can learn a lot from books about things like this—how nails work, different kinds of wood.”

  He dropped out of high school. “It’s a good way to go. Take what you can stand and don’t take any more than that. It’s what God put the tongue in your mouth for. If it don’t taste right, you spit it out.”

  Let me tell you where the grief bites you so much. Who are you working for? If you’re going to eat, you are working for the man who pays you some kind of wage. That won’t be a poor man. The man who’s got a big family and who’s needing a house, you’re not building a house for him. The only man you’re working for is the man who could get along without it. You’re putting a roof on the man who’s got enough to pay your wage.

  You see over yonder, shack need a roof. Over here you’re building a sixty-thousand-dollar house for a man who maybe doesn’t have any children. He’s not hurting and it doesn’t mean much. It’s a prestige house. He’s gonna up-man, he’s gonna be one-up on his neighbor, having something fancier. It’s kind of into that machine. It’s a real pleasure to work on it, don’t get me wrong. Using your hand is just a delight in the paneling, in the good woods. It smells good and they shape well with the plane. Those woods are filled with the whole creative mystery of things. Each wood has its own spirit. Driving nails, yeah, your spirit will break against that.

  What’s gonna happen to what you made? You work like you were kneeling down. You go into Riverside Church in New York and there’s no space between the pews to kneel. (Laughs.) If you try to kneel down in that church, you break your nose on the pew in front. A bunch of churches are like that. Who kneels down in that church? I’ll tell you who kneels. The man kneels who’s settin’ the toilets in the restrooms. He’s got to kneel, that’s part of his work. The man who nails the pews on the floor, he had to kneel down. The man who put the receptacles in the walls that turn that I-don’t-know-how-many horsepower organ they got in that Riverside Church—that thing’ll blow you halfway to heaven right away, pow!—the man who was putting the wire in that thing, he kneeled down. Any work, you kneel down—it’s a kind of worship. It’s part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. It’s necessary. If you don’t breathe, you’re dead. It’s kind of a sacrament, too.

  One nice thing about the crafts. You work two hours at a time. There’s a ritual to it. It’s break time. Then two hours more and it’s dinner time. All those are very good times. Ten minutes is a pretty short time, but it’s good not to push too hard. All of a sudden it comes up break time, just like a friend knocking at the door that’s unexpected. It’s a time of swapping tales. What you’re really doing is setting the stage for your work.

  A craftsman’s life is nothin’ but compromise. Look at your tile here. That’s craftsman’s work, not art work. Craftsmanship demands that you work repeating a pattern to very close tolerances. You’re laying this tile here within a sixteenth. It ought to be within a sixty-fourth of a true ninety degree angle. Theoretically it should be perfect. It shouldn’t be any sixty-fourth, it should be oo tolerance. Just altogether straight on, see? Do we ever do it? No. Look at that parquet stuff you got around here. It’s pretty, but those corners. The man has compromised. He said that’ll have to do.

  They just kind of hustle you a little bit. The compromise with the material that’s going on all the time. That makes for a lot of headache and grief. Like lately, we finished a house. Well, it’s not yet done. Cedar siding, that’s material that’s got knots in it. That’s part of the charm. But it’s a real headache if the knots falls out. You hit one of those boards with your hammer sometime and it turns into a piece of Swiss cheese. So you’re gonna drill those knots, a million knots, back in. (Laughs.) It’s sweet smelling wood. You’ve got a six-foot piece of a ten-foot board. Throwing away four feet of that fancy wood? Whatcha gonna do with that four feet? A splice, scuff it, try to make an invisible joint, and use it? Yes or no? You compromise with the material. Save it? Burn it? It’s in your mind all the time. Oh sure, the wood is sacred. It took a long time to grow that. It’s like a blood sacrifice. It’s consummation. That wood is not going to go anywhere else after that.

  When I started in, it was like European carpentering. But now, all that’s pretty well on the run. You make your joints simply, you get pre-hung doors, you have machine-fitted cabinet work, and you build your house to fit these factory-produced units. The change has been toward quickness. An ordinary American can buy himself some kind of a house because we can build it cheap. So again, your heart is torn. It’s good and not so good.

  Sometimes it has to do with how much wage he’s getting. The more wage he’s getting, the more skill he can exercise. You’re gonna hire me? I’m gonna hang your door. Suppose you pay me five dollars an hour. I’m gonna have to hang that door fast. ’Cause if I don’t hang that door fast, you’re gonna run out of money before I get it hung. No man can hurry and hang it right.

  I don’t think there’s less pride in craftsmanship. I don’t know about pride. Do you take pride in embracing a woman? You don’t take pride in that. You take delight in it. There may be less delight. If you can build a house cheap and really get it to a man that needs it, that’s kind of a social satisfaction for you. At the same time, you wish you could have done a fancier job, a more unique kind of a job.

  But every once in a while there’s stuff that comes in on you. All of a sudden something falls into place. Suppose you’re driving an eight-penny galvanized finishing nail into this siding. Your whole universe is rolled onto the head of that nail. Each lick is sufficient to justify your life. You say, “Okay, I’m not trying to get this nail out of the way so I can get onto something important. There’s nothing more important. It’s right there.” And it goes—pow! It’s not getting that nail in that’s in your mind. It’s hitting it—hitting it square, hitting it straight.
Getting it now. That one lick.

  If you see a carpenter that’s alive to his work, you’ll notice that about the way he hits a nail. He’s not going (imitates machine gun rat-tat-tat-tat) —trying to get the nail down and out of the way so he can hurry up and get another one. Although he may be working fast, each lick is like a separate person that he’s hitting with his hammer. It’s like as though there’s a separate friend of his that one moment. And when he gets out of it, here comes another one. Unique, all by itself. Pow! But you gotta stop before you get that nail in, you know? That’s fine work. Hold the hammer back, and just that last lick, don’t hit it with your hammer, hit it with a punch so you won’t leave a hammer mark. Rhythm.

  I worked at an H-bomb plant in South Carolina. My work was building forms. I don’t think the end product bothered me so much, ’cause Judgment Day is not a thing . . . (Trails off.) It doesn’t hang heavy on my heart. It might be that I should be persuaded it was inappropriate . . .

  They got that big old reactor works with the heavy water and all that. This heavy equipment runs there day and night, just one right after another, going forty miles an hour, digging that big old hole halfway to hell. They build themselves a highway down there, just to dig that hole.

  Now you’re gonna have to build you a building, concrete and steel. You ship in a ready-mixed plant just for that building. A pump on the hill. It starts pumping concrete into the hole. It’s near about time for the carpenters. We’re building forms for the first floor of that thing. I was the twenty-four-hundredth-and-some-odd carpenter hired at the beginning. That’s how big it was. There was three thousand laborers. Each time we built one of these reactors there would be a whole town to support it. We built a dozen or so towns in this one county.