I was talking to my wife this past weekend about some of the odd jobs I had in my somewhat checkered work life. She thought the following was interesting, and since this one involved some of my old high school buddies, here we go:
Mr. King, Farley’s dad, used to be a high level manager for Standard Brands Inc., formerly Fleischmann’s Company, subsequently Nabisco Foods. Fleischmann’s opened a plant in Peekskill way back in 1901 and was once a stalwart of old Peekskill's manufacturing base along the Hudson River. In 1929, just before the stock market crashed, Fleischmann’s was merged into Standard Brands by none other than J.P Morgan.
Anyway, Fleischmann’s made (among other things) white or distilled vinegar, which is produced by a lengthy process involving the distillation of grain alcohol (more on that later). Distilled vinegar is used for medicinal, laboratory, and cleaning purposes, as well as in cooking, meat preservation, and pickling. As you can imagine, the plant where it was manufactured stank to high h*ll.
Once every twenty-five years or so these giant, free standing indoor tanks, wherein the distillation process occurred, had to be cleaned out. The tanks were about 30 feet high, and 15 feet in diameter; they were filled top to bottom with wood chips, over which the distilled alcohol alchemized its way eventually into the final product, vinegar.
The only way to clean these tanks was manually, and as it was only done once every quarter century, the plan had to be devised on the spot by the current plant manager. Us college boys, Farley’s friends, were the perfect guinea pigs (read: slave labor) for Mr. King. We were home for the month-long Christmas break, and we were always looking for temporary day jobs so we could afford to go out on the weekends and buy our beer.
Mr. King’s potential recruits had to be relatively hardy and agile souls, as it was crazy, backbreaking work. Farley lassoed Andy Ward, Paul DePaoli, Eddie Reilly, and me. We had no idea, obviously, what the work was; we were just glad to have a job.
Twenty five years is a lot of time. The wood chips inside those tanks had essentially hardened into brick-hard blocks, coated with a gooey, unidentifiable substance. It was very close quarter work. One big guy (Farley, Paul or Andy) and one small guy (Reilly or me) had to be lowered into the tank (yes, lowered). One man was armed with a pick axe, and one with a shovel. It was pitch-dark inside there (remember, those tanks were over 80 years old, and rarely saw the light of day). The atmosphere and gases inside the tank were essentially lethal (think pure grain alcohol and vinegar fumes locked up in the dark and fermenting, forever), so we had to wear full gas masks.
Mr. King brilliantly contracted with a huge water tank truck company (used to fill and empty public swimming pools), and reverse engineered their giant hose system to vacuum out the wood chips. All we had to do was loosen the chips so the vacuum could suck them up. Sure.
It was essentially akin to breaking up a 30 foot thick concrete floor with a pick axe and a shovel, inside a telephone booth, in the dark. With a gas mask on, so you couldn’t hardly breathe (the goggles of which fogged up immediately with exertion in the humid, fetid atmosphere, so you were really operating blind). If the gas mask came off, the only thing you had to worry about was that your eyes would melt and your larynx would spontaneously combust. At the end of the job our work clothes had to be thrown into a dumpster, destroyed. There was no way to communicate down there, as the giant vacuum was absolutely deafening. In effect, we were working deaf, dumb and blind. And, oh yeah, we generally all had hangovers, most working days.
No problem.
Mr. King issued us our working orders, stepped back and just smiled. (It was classic revenge for all of the dads all over the world on their doofus sons, for all time, everywhere).
Our first day, once we got in there and we realized what a grim task it was, there was nothing to do but … do it. Me and Paul were often teamed up, and Reilly got Dre or Farley. The big guy usually swung the pick-axe, as it required absolute brute strength to break up the wood, and the little guy shoveled the debris into the hose. It had to be intricately choreographed otherwise the big guy would impale the little guy, or the little guy would trip up the big guy, and we both would die. There was at least ten different ways to die down there, actually. I remember constantly cursing Paul for a clumsy oaf as that pick whooshed by my ear, and I’m sure he was cursing me for being a puny little mite always getting under his feet. Looking back on it I’m amazed we even did it. At the time it just seemed like another adventure with Farley.
Oh yeah, about the grain alcohol…
As previously mentioned in this space, Farley was the Ambassador of Good Parties, the Pied Piper of Fun, the Santa Claus of New Toys-to-Play With, and an Iron Man in the Sport of Consumption. Every once in a while he would throw a “Grain Alcohol Party”. It could only be a sporadic event as it was really, really dangerous.
The way it worked was this: he would procure a jug of the grain alcohol, let’s not worry about how, and a bathtub or very big barrel was filled with a mix of this stuff and Hi-C or strawberry Kool-Aid or similar. It required miniscule amounts of the grain alcohol, and it had to be done ever so carefully or very bad things would happen (and sometimes they did). Like a master chef, Farley was the only one who could do the final preparation. You could not taste the alcohol at all in the final product: not at all. And that is where the trouble always began. Those in the know would very carefully sip their tiny little Dixie-cups like small children at a birthday party, stand back, and watch. Invariably some Peekskill biker tough, or party animal and his cohorts would hear about free booze, show up and swill the stuff down, just guzzle it, complaining about the kiddy drinks being served. And then “BANG!” they went down, and I mean hard, one and all. They either hit the floor, literally, or stumbled around for hours mumbling nonsense to phantoms. My, oh my, what fun we had back in the day… |
