After OCS graduation, the guys had a couple of weeks or more each before The Basic School began, so many were dispersing to parts of the country where they came from to be with family and friends. Darwin Newlin was headed back to Southern California as was I. At least the two of us and possibly a couple more, booked a United Airlines DC-10 flight from Dulles to LAX. I imagine we took the same cab to the airport.
The flight was uneventful and either my sister or my mom must have picked me up at the airport to take me home to South Gate once again and my familiar room at 8940 Cypress Ave. I don't even remember how many days passed before I was back working at the A.U. Morse warehouse job in LA at 2463 Hunter Street, a block or two from that famous bridge on East Olympic Blvd., over the L.A. River where so many movie and TV commercials are made, whose back entrance lay under the shadows of the Santa Monica Freeway.
I know I felt a bit embarrassed that my Marine career had ended so quickly and that I had returned with a college degree but no honor. Worse, they had all gotten together and bought me an electric shaver to take along to OCS upon my departure. Now I was back, and the shaver had not lasted very long before it stopped working--it must have been a Remington. Not that that was why it stopped working. But I had owned Remingtons before and never had one quit like that.
I went back to working in the warehouse, pulling rolls of wallpaper and wrapping up and labeling the package for shipment to wallpaper and paint stores all over Southern California when the UPS driver arrived to haul them off in the afternoon. I still helped unload the semi-tractor trailer once a week from the manufacturing plant in Ohio. Still listened to KLOS FM radio on so many sunny days and cloudy days.
I don't even recall how many weeks or even months this routine went on before I felt I needed a change, any change. The company had hired a nice looking guy around my age to work in the office, taking orders over the phone from the salesmen (who included my dad and his friend, Bill Barber, and two older gentlemen) or from the paint stores directly. When I first started working there the summer after high school, with my dad getting me the job, all of the office workers were women, including Faith David, one of the few names I remember. But Julien had managed the warehouse after Joe was let go, the Italian guy who had a bookie and always bet the horses over the warehouse phone every morning, who regaled us with stories of his days in the Marines in WWII, or his tales of the several women he bedded over the years, even though he was then married, and who drove an ancient, faded green Dodge Cranbrook to work. And after his stint as warehouse manager, Julien had moved to the office to take orders, finally becoming a salesman like my father, visiting the various wallpaper and paint stores in his assigned district after the oldest salesman retired, whose name might have been Larry (the other might have been Chuck).
I finally decided to ask to be moved into the office to work, just something different after more than five years in the warehouse. The move was granted, but it was possibly a mistake on my part to have asked. The female office manager, an older woman whose sweet daughter I once briefly dated and taken to see the L.A. premiere of THE LION IN WINTER, had retired. She was replaced by a middle-aged guy who had been a corpsman in the Army and talked about the new T.V. series, M*A*S*H, confirming from experience how realistic it was. On some level I absolutely knew he was gay. My primitive gaydar went off even when I still worked in the warehouse when he was first hired.
I always felt some resentment or negative vibe regarding this office manager. I am sure he was heavily closeted, living at home with his mother, and he could be rather snarky at times. I am not sure he liked me, and I am not sure I really trusted him. And I would have reason not to, eventually.
There had always been a divide between the warehouse workers and the office workers. I liked all of the women who worked the phones except the time Faith took offense to a joke I made (which I do not believe was sexist or anything remotely offensive in any way), and she shockingly stomped on my foot, really hard. It hurt like hell. She was a very tall, very big woman, much bigger and taller than I, making the stomp seriously painful. To this day I am surprised that she did not break any bones in my foot with the sturdy heel of her large shoe.
We used to get two ten-minute breaks, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, in addition to our half-hour lunch break. After a few years, I negotiated with the manager of the whole facility to give us 15 minutes during the morning as long as we did not take advantage. I remember I used to sometimes bring a book and read on my short breaks, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV was one I poured through during college. Took me forever to finish.
I made $1.35 an hour when I first started (slightly above the $1.25 minimum wage I had earned at the South Gate Rod and Gun Club as a trap boy in high school), and I may have gotten up to $1.65 an hour at some point a few years later while still in college. So maybe it was the pay, but most of the warehouse workers were Hispanic and poor or sometimes even white and poor. Like me in my first summer, most had to take the bus to work. One Hispanic guy was really nice and we'd chat now and then--he knew and loved music and talked about enjoying Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo A La Turk". At some point he said he needed to borrow $5, which was a lot to me in those days. But I loaned it to him because I figured it was a dire need. The next day he showed up obviously drunk, working at a job he probably did not like but with no future since he only had a high school diploma and no training of any kind. He was fired and I never got my $5 back. I just felt sorry for him and his situation. Another Hispanic guy who had a family, a wife and daughter, I was told died a few years later after the owners moved the warehouse and office to Orange County, a much easier commute for my dad in Garden Grove and Bill Barber in the city of Orange. That employee was in his late 30's or early 40's.
My dad retired from A.U. Morse several years later, soon working part time, just to get out of the house, at the Anaheim Convention Center and, later, Knott's Berry Farm as one of the old characters who inhabited the grounds and chatted up the visitors. He seemed to be well liked by those who knew him when he worked at the Farm, and his fellow employees said kind things about him in the employee newsletter after he died in 2002.
Since I was often years, even decades, younger than almost any of the others who either worked in the warehouse or the office from 1967 through 1973, I doubt if anyone I worked with then is still alive today. Dad was 81 when he died in 2002, and the others were often much closer to his age than mine, Julien and Faith and so many others--whose names have gotten so covered over in the dust of years gone by that I no longer remember--are surely gone. But I see their faces still, and the smiles and the laughs we sometimes shared, the birthdays we celebrated or the anniversaries we noted. Or even the conflicts we sometimes got into over that small speaker on the main pole in the warehouse that the office workers used to call out to us when they wanted to know if a particular order number or run number for a specific style or color or brand of wallpaper was still available because a customer had miss-measured his or her needs and not ordered enough of a particular run of wallpaper to finish the job.
A.U. Morse is long gone, I imagine. The two distribution sites in Burlingame and L.A. and then Orange County were likely shuttered some years ago. I don't think people install much vinyl wallpaper or murals in their homes as they used to in the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, made by the Borden Chemical Company.
I actually still bear the physical scars of working at the warehouse. Though that's not so impressive as the sentence makes it sound. At least twice, when using the box cutters we were given to open a case of wallpaper, my right hand slipped. Twice I had to be taken to a nearby clinic in a very poor part of town, to be stitched up and sent back, which the company paid for. One scar, between a quarter of an inch and a half inch, is still visible on my left forearm. The second is on the side of my thumb on my left hand. It, too, is less than a half inch long and even less perceptible. The wounds healed long ago but the scars have healed only to a point and faded some but then stabilized. So I would never forget that I once engaged in physical labor to earn a paycheck that I had to cash at a check cashing facility because I did not even have a bank account or checking account. And even that facility exacted a proportional fee from my hard-earned wages to give me cash. The warehouse was certainly not a coal mine, but you had to put your back into lifting the heavy cases of wallpaper day after day. And the bus ride or drive in a car along Santa Fe Avenue was a tedious one from South Gate. I do not begrudge anyone who is only able to get such a job and retain it for the rest of their lives.
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