Working

by Studs Terkel

  An offer came from a private school in the small town near the farmhouse she and Dare bought. “My salary would be cut at least half. We talked and talked and talked. He said, ‘I didn’t sit around in our apartment four nights a week for four years for nothing. Take the job. It’s what you want to do, for Christ’s sake. Jesus, take it.’ Dave convinced me.

  “When I was very little, I had a picture in my mind of how life was going to be. You go straight ahead until you curve slightly to the right, until you get to be about twenty-one. Of course, after college you got married, and there was nothing after that. Everything was fine. This is what happened to all the people I knew. Maybe a couple of them worked a little bit. You had children and then everything was dandy.

  “At Smith there were two thousand girls. This was during the Depression. There were no jobs. There was no vocational training. You could have taken education and taught, although it wasn’t very fashionable. You knew you were going to do something very nice. I was brought up to know there was nothing I couldn’t do. If I wanted to be President, I could be President. Nobody could beat me in anything. But I wasn’t particularly good in anything. I wasn’t a musician or a writer. No, I don’t remember having a talent for anything. There was no set pattern to my life. I sort of went along accidentally from thing to thing. Until Dave forced me into this decision . . .”

  I had never been behind a library desk in my life. At library school there is no practice teaching. It was another world. There was no pressure, nothing. There were books. The worst thing you could think of is whether the kids are gonna remember to unlock the library on Sundays so it’ll be open. Nobody behaved as if I’d never been in a library before. The kids were great. There hasn’t been a tense day since. A charmed life. Don’t miss the city, don’t miss the job, don’t miss the expense account (laughs), don’t miss any part of it.

  There was another reason I didn’t want to get stuck as a little lady receptionist, smiling and directing someone. I’d go out of my mind. On this job, you can use your mind. Things that are challenging. Find out what some of the new math phrases mean. Selecting books is a complicated matter. If you have thousands and thousands of dollars in your budget, it doesn’t make that much difference if you make a few mistakes. But we’re limited here. I must be very frugal.

  It’s one big room. We’re bursting now. Last week we had fifty-eight kids there and there are only seats for fifty-seven. It’s a tribute that they like to come there. It’s an agonizing night, though, when you have to go around shushing. It’s just too much. I’m old-fashioned. I think it has to be a quiet place.

  We don’t lock our doors here at the house. It never occurs to me. In the city, you would go to the subway and follow everybody and try to get a paper. Here I drive down to school and just make a turn at the corner and see the whole Appalachian spread out for miles and miles. And I’m ready to go to work.

  I feel free as a bird. I’m in a unique position because I’m the boss. I buy what I like. I initiate things. I can experiment with all kinds of things I think the kids might be interested in. Nobody interferes. For me, it’s no chore to go to work. I’m fortunate. Most people never get to do this at any time in their lives.

  My father was a mechanical engineer, hated every day of it. He couldn’t wait forty-six years, or whatever it was, until he retired. When we were little, we knew he loathed his job. One of the things he hated most was having to take customers out for dinners. He almost didn’t make it because he had a very bad heart attack a couple of months before retirement age. Fortunately, he lived for almost twenty years afterwards. He retired at sixty-five and started to live. He took guitar lessons, piano lessons, art lessons. He was in little theater productions. Work for him was something he hated. He went through the motions and did it very well. But he dreaded every minute of it.

  I assumed he became an engineer because his father was one. He attended the same university. His brother was an engineer too. It was just assumed. But it wasn’t for him. I have a sister who can’t wait until next December, ’cause she’s going to retire at a bank. She’s just hanging on. How terrible.

  I don’t think I could ever really retire. There’s not enough time.

  MARIO ANICHINI

  In the yard outside the shop are statues in marble and stone of saints, angels, and fountains. The spirit of Look Homeward, Angel and W. O. Gant hovers tempestuously. Yet, M. Anichini, artisan, has never been more relaxed. His son and colleague, Bob, interjects a contemporary note: “We also work in foam, fiberglass, polyurethanes . . .

  In Italy I was working in marble a little bit. I was a young kid. In Lucca, a young kid do this, do that. Little by little I learned. When I was about twenty I came to this country here. I couldn’t do anything like that, because of here we had a Depression. From ’27 year to ’55 I was a butcher. For twenty-eight years . . .

  I started to get a little ulcer in my stomach. I had sciatica. So I hadda quit. So I stay for one year, I don’t do nothing. But after, I feel I could do something. The plaster business, the tomb business. As soon as I started it, I started to feel better.

  BOB: He was about fifty-five years old when he started this business again. My mother thought he was losing his mind. But he insisted. Everybody from the area where he came from in Tuscany has a relative or somebody in the art business. You have Florence . . .

  There’s change a lot. We use rubber to make a mold now. We used to use some kind of glue. It was only good for about ten pieces. Now with a rubber mold we can make three hundred, four hundred pieces. In Italy you gotta go to school one year to make a mold. Before, I used to make one piece, stone or marble. Maybe you a millionaire and you want to make it your bust. Okay, how much you pay? Now nobody want to spend that much money. Over here I don’t see so much good stone to work with.

  BOB: We used to sell statuary and fountains: a nymph holding a jug, pouring water. All of a sudden, with the ecology bit, people want to hear water running. In the city they want to be close to the country. So there’s a combination of art and nature. When we started, I was quite against if. Who’s going to buy a fountain? We put ’em indoors now as humidifiers. People are putting statues in their yards. There is such a demand for it we built a factory.

  I remember when I quit the butcher business, I was sick. When I started this business, I became better and better and I feel good and enjoy myself.

  BOB: For grave sites people in the old days wanted a certain statue, St. Anthony or St. Anne or something like that. We don’t have much call for saints these days, especially now with the Church . . .

  People will laugh. Every time they see me, they see me better and better. I used to work in the basement. They say, “You eat too much dust down there, and you getting better and better. Before you work in the butcher shop, very nice, very airy, everything, you used to be sick. How come?”

  BOB: My dad had another man that didn’t feel too well at what he was doing. He worked with my father in this—what he did as a kid, too—and he got healthy and fat and stuff like that. (Laughs.) My dad was an old man fifteen, twenty years ago. Today he’s a young man.

  FATHERS AND SONS

  GLENN STRIBLING

  A casual encounter on a plane; a casual remark: he and his wife are returning from a summer cruise. It was their first vacation in twenty-five years. He is forty-eight.

  He and his son are partners in the business: Glenn & Dave’s Complete Auto Repair. They run a Texaco service station in a fairly affluent community some thirty miles outside Cleveland. “There’s eight of us on the payroll, counting my son and I. Of course, the wife, she’s the bookkeeper.” There are three tow trucks.

  “Glenn & Dave’s is equipped to do all nature of repair work: everything from transmission, air conditioning, valves, all . . . everything. I refer to it as a garage because we do everything garages do.

  “We have been here four years.” He himself has been of it “steady” for twenty-nine years. “When I was a kid in high school I
worked at the Studebaker garage part-time for seven dollars a week. And I paid seven dollars a week board and room.” (Laughs.) It more or less runs in our family. My great-grandfather used to make spokes for automobiles back in Pennsylvania when they used wooden wheels. I have a brother, he’s a mechanic. I have another brother in California, he’s in the same business as I’m in. My dad, he was a steam engine repairman.

  “Another reason I went into this business: it’s Depression-proof. A good repairman will always have a job. Even though they’re making cars so they don’t last so long and people trade ’em in more often, there’s still gonna be people that have to know what they’re doing.”

  I work eight days a week. (Laughs.) My average weeks usually run to eighty, ninety hours. We get every other Sunday off, my son and I. Alternate, you know. Oh, I love it. There’s never a day long enough. We never get through. And that’s a good way to have it, ‘cause people rely on you and you rely on them, and it’s one big business. Sometimes they’re all three trucks goin’. All we sell is service, and if you can’t give service, you might as well give up.

  All our business has come to us from mouth to mouth. We’ve never run a big ad in the paper. That itself is a good sign that people are satisfied. Of course, there’s some people that nobody could satisfy. I’ve learned: Why let one person spoil your whole day?

  A new customer comes to town, he would say, “So-and-so, I met him on the train and he recommended you folks very highly.” Oh, we’ve had a lot of compliments where people, they say they’ve never had anything like that done to a car. They are real happy that we did point out things and do things. Preventive maintenance I call it.

  A man come in, we’d Xed his tires, sold him a set of shocks, repacked his wheel bearings, aligned his front, serviced his car—by service I mean lubricate, change oil, filter . . . But he had only one tail light working and didn’t know it. So we fixed that and he’ll be grateful for it. If it’s something big, a matter of a set of tires or if he needs a valve job, we call the customer and discuss it with him.

  Sometimes, but not very often, I’ve learned to relax. When I walk out of here I try to leave everything, ’cause we have a loud bell at home. If I’m out in the yard working, people call. They want to know about a car, maybe make a date for next week, or maybe there’s a car here that we’ve had and there’s a question on it. The night man will call me up at home. We have twenty-four-hour service, too, towing. My son and I, we take turns. So this phone is hooked up outside so you can hear it. And all the neighbors can hear it too. (Laughs.)

  Turn down calls? No, never. Well, if it’s some trucking outfit and they don’t have an account with us—they’re the worst risk there is. If they don’t have a credit card or if the person they’re delivering won’t vouch for them, there’s gotta be some sort of agreement on payment before we go out. Of course, if it’s a stranger, if it’s broke down, naturally we have the car.

  Sometimes if we’re busy, bad weather and this and that, why we won’t get any lunch, unless the wife runs uptown and grabs a sandwich. I usually go home, it varies anywhere between six thirty, seven, eight. Whatever the public demands. In the wintertime, my God, we don’t get out of here till nine. I have worked thirty-seven hours non-stop.

  I don’t do it for the money. People are in trouble and they call you and you feel obligated enough to go out there and straighten them out as much as you can. My wife tells me I take my business more serious than a doctor. Every now and then a competitor will come down and ask me to diagnose something. And I go ahead and do it. I’ll tell anybody anything I know if it’ll help him. That’s a good way to be. You might want a favor from them sometime. Live and let live.

  You get irritated a lot of times, but you keep it within yourself. You can’t be too eccentric. You gotta be the same. Customers like people the same all the time. Another thing I noticed: the fact that I got gray hair, that helps in business. Even though my son’s in with me and we have capable men working for us, they always want to talk to Glenn. They respect me and what I tell ’em.

  If I’m tensed up and there’ll be somebody pull in on the driveway, ring all the bells, park right in front of the door, then go in and use the washroom—those kind of people are the most inconsiderate kind of people there is. If you’re out there in the back, say you’re repacking wheel bearings. Your hands are full of grease. In order to go out in that drive, you have to clean your hands. And all the customer wanted to know was where the courtroom is. When I travel, if I want information, I’ll park out on the apron. Sometimes we have as high as fifty, sixty people a day in here for information. They pull up, ring all the bells . . . You can imagine how much time it takes if you go out fifty, sixty times and you don’t pump gas. I call’em IWW: Information, wind, and water. It’s worse the last four years we’ve been here. People don’t care. They don’t think of us. All they think of is themself.

  Oh, I lose my temper sometimes. You wouldn’t be a red-blooded American if you wouldn’t, would you? At the same time you’re dealing with the public. You have to control yourself. Like I say, people like an even-tempered person. When I do lose my temper, the wife, she can’t get over it. She says, “Glenn, I don’t know how you can blow your stack at one person and then five minutes later you’re tellin’ him a joke.” I don’t hold grudges. Why hold a grudge? Let people know what you think, express your opinion, and then forget it. Of course, you don’t forget, you just don’t keep harpin’ on it.

  In the summertime, when I get home I don’t even go in the house. I grab a garden tool and go out and work till dark. I have a small garden—lettuce, onions, small vegetables. By the time you’re on your feet all day you’re ready to relax, watch television, sometimes have a fire in the fireplace. At social gatherings, if somebody’s in the same business, we compare notes. If we run into something that’s a time saver, we usually exchange. But not too much. Because who likes to talk shop?

  There’s a few good mechanics left. Most of ‘em in this day and age, all they are is parts replacers. This is a new trend. You need an air conditioner, you don’t repair ’em any more. You can get exchange units, factory guaranteed and much cheaper, much faster. People don’t want to lay up their car long enough to get it fixed. If they can’t look out and see their car in the driveway, they feel like they’ve lost something. They get nervous. It’s very seldom people will overhaul a car. They’ll trade it in instead.

  This is something hard to find any more, a really good, conscientious worker. When the whistle blows, they’re all washed up, ready to go before they’re punched out. You don’t get a guy who’ll stay two or three hours later, just to get a job done.

  Take my son, Dave. Say a person’s car broke down. It’s on a Sunday or a Saturday night. Maybe it would take an hour to fix. Why, I’ll go ahead and fix it. Dave’s the type that’ll say, “Leave it sit till Monday.” I put myself in the other guy’s boots and I’ll go ahead and fix his car, because time don’t mean that much to me. Consequently we got a lot of good customers. Last winter we had a snowstorm. People wanted some snow tires. I put ’em on. He’s a steady customer now. He just sold his house for $265,000.

  When we took this last cruise, my customers told me Dave did a terrific job. “Before, we didn’t think much of him. But he did a really good job this last time.” I guess compared to the average young person Dave is above average as far as being conscientious. Although he does sleep in the morning. Today’s Wednesday? Nine o‘clock this morning. It was ten o’clock yesterday morning. He’s supposed to be here at seven. Rather than argue and fight about it, I just forget it.

  Another thing I trained myself: I know the address and phone number of all the places we do business with and a lot of our customers. I never even look in the phone book. (Dave had just made a phone call after leafing through the directory.) If he asked me, I coulda told him.

  DAVE STRIBLING

  He is twenty-three, married, and has two baby children. He has been working with his father
“more or less since I was twelve years old. It’s one of those deals where the son does carry on the family tradition.

  “I actually worked full-time when I was in junior high school. School was a bore. But when you stop and look back at it you wish to hell you’d done a lot more. I wanted to go get that fast buck. Some people are fortunate to make it overnight. My dad and I had a few quarrels and I quit him. I used to work down at Chrysler while I was in high school. I worked at least eight hours a day. That was great. You don’t work Saturdays and you don’t work Sundays. Then I came back and worked for my dad.”

  How would I describe myself? Mixed up really. (Laughs.) I like my work. (Sighs.) But I wish I hadn’t started that early. I wish I would have tried another trade, actually. At my age I could quit this. I could always come back. But I’m pretty deep now. If I were to walk out, it would be pretty bad. (Laughs.) I don’t think I’ll change my occupation, really.

  I think I’da tried to be an architect or, hell, maybe even a real top-notch good salesman. Or maybe even a farmer. It’s hard to say. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. You turn around and there’s an attorney. It makes you feel different. You work during the day and you’re dirty from this and that. The majority of the people overlook the fact as long as you’re established and this and that. They don’t really care what your occupation is as long as you’re a pretty good citizen.