Finding Myself

In December of 1916, I had my seventeenth Birthday. I had already run away from home once and came back. A few days after New Years of 1917, I was getting restless again and started looking for a job.

I found one at a large machine shop named the American Tool Works. Their machines are still well known today. It was located on Eastern Avenue near the lower part of Cincinnati across from the Penn. Railroad Depot. I got a job running a milling machine.

I worked from 6 PM to 6 AM, twelve hours a night. In those days there was no overtime. The pay was 25 cents per hour (but boy, what you could buy in them days for a quarter). We were paid every week and our pay was in gold. For my 60 hours a week I received a five and a ten dollar gold piece.

We were given 30 minutes for midnight meal period which we got paid for in our 12 hour shift. There was a small restaurant near our factory and we would go there for our mean. They served a small steak or two pork chops and a lot of fried potatoes, coffee, and all the bread and butter you wanted.

The bread was sliced by hand and there was a loaf on a plate for about every four stools. You grabbed your bread or someone threw you a piece. They were very unsanitary and put the butter on a plate in a pound brick. The cost for the meal was 15 cents and a piece of a 10 inch pie cut into four pieces was 5 cents.

In 1917 you could get a nice bedroom for $1.50 to $2.00 a week. I rented a room in a private home within a few blocks of the factory. I got the best suit of clothes I ever had for $10. You had to walk up a flight of stairs and you could have any suit in the store for $10. It was located in the heart of town near Woolsworth and Kresses. I think the store was named Richmans.

While working at the American Tool Works I got something that was common at the ship. I got a dose of crabs from the toilet. Crabs was a small bug which attached itself to the body. I soon got rid of them but it reminded me of a story.

A man got a dose of crabs, and a friend of his told him to put Blue Ointment on them. Not satisfied, he stopped in a drug store and asked the clerk if he knew of anything good for them. The druggist told him to go home and put some bread in a bowl and pour milk on the bread and add some sugar. Then put the mixture on a cloth and tie it on him. The man said to the druggist that a friend of his told him Blue Ointment was good for them. The druggist said, "Heck, no. Blue Ointment will kill'em."

In early 1917 I learned where what everybody called the Red Light District was in the lower part of town. It was about two blocks long. On one end was some older houses and on the other end was where the newer and fancy houses were. We boys at work called them the Cat Houses. In the shabby end you could go in the parlor and pick out the girl you wanted and take them to their room for 50 cents. Then they had the $2.00 houses and the elite of the girls were $10.00. Some were better furnished but the parlor held a couple of the old style love seats and fancy chairs. Some of the better houses had a piano. Some places really had a red light blub in their windows and they had some good looking girls and women.

In the fall of 1917 I was offered a job at the International Harvester Co. in Akron, Ohio, as job setter on milling machines. The job called for setting the machine in shape so the operator could produce the part of a tractor or farm machine that was called for. I worked there for about two months. We were at war with Germany so I left International Harvester and got a job at Wellman Seaver Morgan Co. on a milling machine making parts for guns of the big battle ships.

The Company was unionized and the union salary for machinists then was 60 cents per hour and a lot of ships over the Country was getting what they called a war bonus of 30 cents an hour. We had a case in front of the Was Labor Board in Washington, D.C. for a raise but they kept stalling us off.

They had no jigs at the time. You were given a blue print, some pieces of iron strap, and was allowed three to five one-thousandths of an inch. It was very close work.

The war had things in a turmoil. In August, 1918, all males from 18 to 45 had to register. Being young and single I figured I would be called up. When our draft forms were sent out, the Company had a couple of lawyers help us fill them out. To my surprise, when I got my rate card I was 3-K. The Asian Flu struck (I think it was in early October) and thousands of people in Akron were laid up.

On November 11, 1918, the Armistice was signed and we all celebrated. We still had not gotten our raise and by this time we figured it was a lost cause. The Company made millions of dollars more then they were allowed by the Government. They were told they could do one of three things. Give it to the employees as a bonus, put up a new building, or give it back to the Government. You guessed it, they put up a new building.

The following January 31, 1919, we were laid off as the Company contract expired. And in a couple of days I went back home to Cincinnati.

*****

This story is a continuation of Dad's story, "A Million Miles From Nowhere" (posted on my March 10 th blog) which followed Dad's adventurous life when he was 16 years old. Here he picks up the story about a month after the "Miles" story ended, now 17 years old, and continues his recollections until he returned once more to Cincinnati, several weeks after his 20 th birthday.

Needless to say, Dad didn't stay in Cincinnati and, as far as I know, by the time he saw Cincinnati again, more than 25 years had passed. During those years, after leaving his first wife and baby daughter, he married two more women, both named Goldie. I never saw pictures of any of them. But Dad deliberately skips over that part of his story.

He always left his wives and never bothered to get divorced. But he never met anyone as tough and determined as my mother, who he met when she was 29 or 30 and who had already been married once for a short time, so she was also somewhat seasoned at the marriage game. For roughly the next 45 years, Dad evolved from ladies man to family man.

This story was printed in Colorado Old Times paper January 1, 1981 in an issue whose theme was "Winter Potpourri."