by Studs Terkel
There’s not the same fraternalism today. There was a pride. A fireman on a ship, he took a certain pride. Then, he was a truckdriver amongst truckdrivers. 99 He was proud of being a truckdriver, he wasn’t ashamed. Today it’s impersonal.
Oh, there was a certain amount of adventure to it. In 1933 I drove a trailer from New York to Pittsburgh. They didn’t have the roads they have today and the lights. You went over the Alleghany Mountains, you didn’t go through short cuts. You arrived at places where drivers always met. These roadhouses had logs and the driver would jot down who he was and where he came from. They would meet in Pittsburgh at four, five in the morning in a bar, and they had a party. Everybody got charged up and went to bed and then went back to work again. Everybody seemed to know each other.
He re-creates the conditions at sea before the birth of the National Maritime Union: eight men in a room, no doctor aboard, tensions, fights . . . As for the longshoreman’s lot, it was purgatory ashore: the shouldering of two-hundred-pound bags from one end of the dock to the other, hour after hour . . . “The only break was if you went to take a crap or five minutes to steal off a smoke.” At six dollars a day, “It was during the Depression and you were glad to get it. When the ship was loaded, you wasn’t workin’ no more—till you caught the next ship. You drove a taxi all day and came home with a quarter. I don’t leave you untouched. That’s a physical grind. If you don’t think sittin’ in a chair and bitin’ your nails to the elbows wasn’t physical . . .” (Laughs.)
Operatin’ a freight elevator doesn’t take too much imagination. Plenty opportunity to think. You think maybe I shoulda did this or I shoulda did that. But ah, what the hell, you don’t worry too much. After all, I recognize my limitations. Ninety percent of the freight elevators is automatic today. That’s the thing that’s going down with the gandy dancer. He’s gone too.
You have all kinds of problems, especially with the disgruntled. If the elevator isn’t there fast enough . . . there’s speed-up in everything. A truckdriver comes, he’s got a load, he wants to get rid of it, right? He’s in a hurry. You have to have a certain amount of patience to understand his problem. It’s not easy to be an elevator operator, because you get all kinds of abuse unless you understand why the other guy’s upset. He understands that you know it, then you become friends.
The boss gives the guy a bad time. He says, “Where the hell are ya hangin’ out?” Jesus Christ, the guy’s sittin’ there, he’s givin’ me a call, “Why the hell don’t you hurry up?” He says to his boss, “I had to wait for the elevator.” Then the elevator man becomes the guy who you can blame all your problems on. That’s the way it is.
Each boss on each floor—say I have twelve floors—seems to feel he’s the guy that pays the elevator’s wages. If there’s no heat in the buildin’, he gets the elevator man, “Where the hell’s the heat?” Or the water or the lights go out or the hallway gets dirty. He says, “Where the hell is the elevator? The hallway’s got no lights, my workers are gonna fall down.” He’s worried about his workers only so far as it affects his production, where his profits are involved. The elevator man, you’re young, you can be more demanding. But as you get older, it’s not so easy to be as demanding. Once you get white it’s not so easy to walk around and say you want a job. Soon as the snow gets on top of your head you ain’t wanted no more.
The elevator man is usually older, he’s on his way down. But he can out-survive the truckdriver. Because the truckdriver at forty, his kidneys are beginning to kick up or he’s got his whole prostate gland giving him a bad time. Forty, forty-five, many of them I know, they begin to get ulcers because of the pressures—the traffic cop, the lights, the speed-up . . .
Of course, there’s humiliations with the elevator man. There’s no measure of intelligence. It’s a simple job and you gotta survive. Now there’s limitations . . . Don’t think the elevator man just takes shit. He’s as abusive as the next guy. He got the chip there too. He knows the guy’s comin’ in and the guy’s gonna holler at him and he’s gonna holler back at the guy, right? What the hell, nobody’s mad, really. They call each other names, but that doesn’t mean nothin’. If you didn’t have that, you’d really blow, you’re finished.
Every worker looks down at the other. Let’s say he’s a guy who’s on top of the skyscraper and he’s tossin’ these things and he’s walkin’ out on the beam: I’m number one. Here, boy. I’m makin’ the biggest buildin’. He’s proud, right? The truckdriver that drives the big trailer in and out and backs it into . . . he’s got a certain pride. And he looks down. Now the guy who sweeps the floor in one of the shops, the elevator man can look over him, he’s a little bit lower. (Laughs.) Each one has their guy . . . But what pride is there in lookin’ down?
The guy that opens the door, could he have pride? Even the elevator man has pride. But the guy that opens the door for the rich man and holds the umbrella on his head, it’s a little more harder for him to take pride in it.
You have to understand the worker in this society. This is a society of profit, right? But in the socialist society the elevator man could be an honored person, too, just the same as the highest person. Because they don’t get there unless the elevator man lets them up . . .
I believe socialism is gonna be the future. I believed that fifty years ago and I believe that today. I never lost my doubts which way the human race is gonna go. The capitalists are puttin’ together cars, it’s socialized, the production. But the means of returns are not socialized. It goes into a few, but it’s produced by the many. You see the results in the workers around you. Some of ’em are broken at thirty, at forty, some of ’em at fifty.
If you could live your life over . . . ?
It’s been so busy I’ve never really thought, Oh, I’d love to be this. But I never dreamt of being boss. I tried to influence the drivers to get better conditions for themselves. I participated as one of the leaders of the two biggest teamster strikes in the history of New York—1938 and 1947. In ‘38 we tied up the entire city of New York. We won conditions for the drivers, but I never enjoyed those conditions. Immediately following I was never able to get a job any more.100 That’s the way it went, but I don’t regret it. I’m proud of the fact that the drivers got those things. I don’t begrudge ’em. I wish they’d got ’em sooner, that’s all.
Only a few of ‘em enjoy it. That’s the sad part of it. It’s the same in medicine, same in everything. The wealthy, the ruling crowds, they enjoy all the things that workers produce. They’re greedy, they’re just like animals. I’ve seen dogs that they have just filled themselves and they couldn’t eat another bite, but they would not tolerate another animal comin’ near the food. The human animals, too, some of ’em are the same. No matter how much they have, they wouldn’t part with any of it and they wouldn’t let nobody else get it if they could help it.
I’m proud of my sons. They have principles and they have courage. We mustn’t put a stigma around a uniform. A postman delivers mail, and he can be a very kindly man and you have lots of respect for him. So why shouldn’t we respect a policeman or a fireman? But he must be the kind of man that justifies the respect of the people, that’s all.
POSTSCRIPT: “I have a piece of land in New Jersey and now my boys are building their places on it for their children. I run up there on Friday and get the place tidied up. I like farmin’. I like to grow it and I like to eat it better. (Laughs.) When you get your corn, you never taste corn like that in the store. And you have your big red tomatoes come in and cabbage, and make sauerkraut. In the fall you can tomatoes and you can string beans and you make grape jelly and blackberry jelly. Now I put a pond in and I had fish put in, and now wild birds come, and ducks and geese and swans and pheasant and all that. Deer come down and they drink out of the pond . . .
“Oh yeah, I work like hell on that. I work harder than I work on my elevator. Of course, you take pride. I go around to the fairs and I make comparisons of my vegetables with the others. I feel mine are ju
st as good. Oh, I love it. I would have liked that—if I had been a boy. But I was city-bred. The children and the grandchildren are going up there and we have a hell of a good time.” (Laughs.)
BOB PATRICK
Harold’s son. He is thirty-three, married, and has a child. He has been a member of the city police force for six years. For the past three years he has been an emergency service patrolman.
“Emergency service is like a rescue squad. You respond to any call, any incident: a man under a train, trapped in an auto, bridge jumpers, psychos, guys that murdered people and barricaded themselves in. We go in and get these people out. It is sometimes a little too exciting. I felt like I wasn’t gonna come home on two incidents.”
He finished among the highest in his class at the police academy, though he was “eleven years out of high school.” Most of his colleagues were twenty-one, twenty-two. “I always wanted to be with the city. I felt that was the best job in the world. If I wasn’t a cop, see, I don’t think I could be anything else. Oh, maybe a truckdriver.”
I got assigned to foot patrolman in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I never knew where Bedford-Stuyvesant was. I heard it was a low, poverty-stricken area, and it was a name that people feared. It’s black. Something like Harlem, even worse. Harlem was where colored people actually grew up. But Bedford-Stuyvesant is where colored people migrated from Harlem or from North Carolina. They were a tougher class of people.
Myself and two friends from the neighborhood went there. We packed a lunch because we never really ventured outside the neighborhood. We met that morning about six ’. We had to be in roll call by eight. We got there a quarter after six. We couldn’t believe it was so close. We laughed like hell because this is our neighborhood, more or less. We were like on the outskirts of our precinct. It was only ten minutes from my house.
When we got our orders, everybody said, “Oh wow, forget it.” One guy thought he was going there, we had to chase him up three stories to tell him we’re only kidding. He was ready to turn in his badge. Great fear, that was a danger area.
I was scared. Most people at Bedford-Stuyvesant were unemployed, mostly welfare, and they more or less didn’t care too much for the police. The tour I feared most was four to twelve on a Friday or Saturday night. I’m not a drinker, I never drank, but I’d stop off at a bar over here and have a few beers just to get keyed up enough to put up with the problems we knew we were gonna come up against.
I would argue face to face with these people that I knew had their problems, too. But it’s hard to use selective enforcement with ’em. Then get off at midnight and still feel nervous about it. And go for another few drinks and go home and I’d fall right to sleep. Two or three beers and I would calm down and feel like a husband again with the family at home.
I rode with a colored guy quite a few times. They would put you in a radio car and you’d be working with an old-timer. One of the calls we went on was a baby in convulsions, stopped breathing. The elevator was out of order and we ran up eight flights of stairs. This was a colored baby. It was blue. I had taken the baby from the aunt and my partner and I rushed down the stairs with the mother. In the radio car I gave the baby mouth to mouth resuscitation. The baby had regurgitated and started breathing again. The doctor at the hospital said whatever it was, we had gotten it up.
The sergeant wanted to write it up because of the problem we were having in the area. For a white cop doin’ what I did. But I didn’t want it. I said I would do it for anybody, regardless of black or white. They wrote it up and gave me a citation. The guys from the precinct was kidding me that I was now integrated. The mother had said she was willing to even change the baby’s name to Robert after what I did.
The guy I worked with had more time on the job than I did. When we went on a family dispute, he would do all the talking. I got the impression that they were more aggressive than we were, the people we were tryin’ to settle the dispute with. A husband and wife fight or a boyfriend and a husband. Most of the time you have to separate ’em. “You take the wife into the room and I’ll take the husband into the other room.” I looked up to my partner on the way he settled disputes. It was very quick and he knew what he was doing.
I’ve been shot. The only thing I haven’t been in Bedford-Stuyvesant is stabbed. I’ve been spit at. I’ve been hit with bottles, rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, cherry bombs in my eye . . . I’ve gotten in disputes where I’ve had 10-13s called on me. That would be to assist the patrolman on the corner. Called by black people to help me against other black people.
After three years at Bedford-Stuyvesant he was assigned to the emergency service patrol. “Our truck is a $55,000 truck and it’s maybe $150,000 in equipment. We have shotguns, we have sniper rifles, we have tear gas, bullet-proof vests, we have nets for jumpers, we have Morrissey belts for the patrolman to hold himself in when he goes up on a bridge, we have Kelly tools to pry out trapped people, we give oxygen . . .”
Fifty to seventy-five percent of our calls are for oxygen. I had people that were pronounced DOA by a doctor—dead on arrival. We have resuscitated them. I had brought him back. The man had lived for eight hours after I had brought him back. The doctor was flabbergasted. He had written letters on it and thought we were the greatest rescue team in New York City. We give oxygen until the arrival of the ambulance. Most of the time we beat the ambulance.
We set up a net for jumpers. We caught a person jumping from twenty-three stories in Manhattan. It musta looked like a postage stamp to him. We caught a girl from a high school four stories high. If it saves one life, it’s worth it, this net.
A young man was out on a ledge on a six-story building. He was a mental patient. We try to get a close friend to talk to him, a girl friend, a priest, a guy from the old baseball team . . . Then you start talkin’ to him. You talk to him as long as you can. A lot of times they kid and laugh with you—until you get too close. Then they’ll tell you, “Stop right where you are or I’ll jump.” You try to be his friend. Sometimes you take off the police shirt to make him believe you’re just a citizen. A lot of people don’t like the uniform.
You straddle the wall. You use a Morrissey belt, tie it around with a line your partner holds. Sometimes you jump from a ledge and come right up in front of the jumper to trap him. But a lot of times they’ll jump if they spot you. You try to be as cautious as possible. It’s a life . . .
Sometimes you have eleven jobs in one night. I had to shoot a vicious dog in the street. The kids would curse me for doin’ it. The dog was foaming at the mouth and snapping at everybody. We come behind him and put three bullets in his head. You want to get the kids outa there. He sees the cop shooting a dog, he’s not gonna like the cop.
We get some terrible collisions. The cars are absolutly like accordians. The first week we had a head-on collision on a parkway. I was just passing by when it happened and we jumped out. There were parents in there and a girl and a boy about six years old. I carried the girl out. She had no face. Then we carried out the parents. The father had lived until we jacked him out and he had collapsed. The whole family was DOA. It happens twenty-four hours a day. If emergency’s gonna be like this, I’d rather go back to Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The next day I read in the papers they were both boys, but had mod haircuts. You look across the breakfast table and see your son. My wife plenty times asked me, “How can you do that? How can you go under a train with a person that’s severed the legs off, come home and eat breakfast, and feel . . . ?” That’s what I’m waiting for: when I can go home and not feel anything for my family. See, I have to feel.
A patrolman will call you for a guy that’s DOA for a month. He hanged himself. I’m cuttin’ him down. You’re dancing to get out of the way of the maggots. I caught myself dancing in the middle of the livingroom, trying to get a ring off a DOA for a month, while the maggots are jumping all over my pants. I just put the damn pants on, brand-new, dry cleaned. I go back to the precinct and still itch and jump in the shower.
One time we had a guy trapped between the platform and the train. His body was below, his head was above. He was talking to the doctor. He had a couple of kids home. In order to get him out we had to use a Z-bar, to jack the train away from the platform. The doctor said, “The minute you jack this train away from the platform, he’s gonna go.” He was talkin’ and smokin’ with us for about fifteen minutes. The minute we jacked, he was gone. (Snaps fingers.) I couldn’t believe I could snuff out life, just like that. We just jacked this thing away and his life. And to give him a cigarette before it happened was even worse.
While you’re en route to the job, to build yourself up, you say, This is part of the job that has to be done. Somebody’s gotta do it. After this, there couldn’t be nothing worse. No other job’s gonna be as bad as this one. And another job comes up worse. Eventually you get used to what you’re doin’.
Homicides are bad. I seen the medical examiner put his finger into seventeen knife wounds. I was holding the porto-light so he could see where his finger was going. Knuckle deep. And telling me, “It’s hit the bone, the bullet here, the knife wound through the neck.” I figure I’ve seen too much. Jeez, this is not for me. You wouldn’t believe it. Maybe I don’t believe it. Maybe it didn’t hit me yet.