Warehouse
Tapioca flour and forklift driving in the summer of 1986.
This year I’m sharing monthly true stories about jobs I’ve held during my lifetime of chronic underemployment. Consider it a ground-level look at the economy, what work means, the role of money, and the craziness of life.
Graduation Present
I graduated cum laude from the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC in 1986 with a double major in Anthropology and Classical Languages. I even received an award from the Anthropology Department. Plus I had been accepted to a graduate program in Anthropology at Duke University where I proudly expected to attend that fall. Amid the fake Gothic buildings of Durham, NC I imagined I would earn my PhD and join the earnest community of brilliant scholars amongst whom I would no doubt shine for my special contributions.
Unfortunately, while my late father and my aunt Clarice earned Masters degrees in Education through night courses during their high school teaching careers, I didn’t know anyone in my family or among family friends who had ever pursued advanced degrees in academic subjects. C of C had not advanced degrees at the time except in education. So I had no idea how it worked. I did ask my professors questions about what steps I should take and what was expected of me, but I was too shy to press with follow-up questions or reveal my own ignorance. I would nod as if I understood whatever they were saying, as if I too were an insider, while assuming I’d figure it all out eventually. The system must have clear-cut steps—like those Masters programs in Education. Universities wouldn’t let me just get a PhD without my knowing what to do with it, right?
Doubts lingered especially about Duke’s exorbitant tuition. Three times the rate of my back-up school, University of Florida. It was so high that I assumed it must be a fake number like the sticker price on a new car. After all, I’d heard from friends and professors that graduate students were paid to teach classes or grade papers, or even given stipends or grants to be graduate students. So maybe I paid full price the first year and then the stipends and grants and teaching jobs would kick in? Certainly, if I took out loans I would never be able to pay them back on what college professors seemed to make.
I would have to visit Duke and straighten things out.
Soon.
Summer Plans
Meanwhile, what to do for the summer? I didn’t want to go back to Charlottesville. My mom and I no longer fought like we had in high school. I’d even house sat one summer while mom and my younger brother traveled across the country. But being there for more than a couple of days following her rules while getting judged and criticized wore me down.
The rental lease on the house I’d shared my senior year with some friends on Bull Street was up.1 Tim and “Ned” were off to other things, and I was only killing time till the fall too. Meanwhile my high school bestie, James Bowers, needed a place to stay for the summer. He’d just finished his junior year at Princeton, but his parents had dis-invited him from coming home for the summer because the year before he’d driven to Virginia Beach with my ex-girlfriend’s visiting cousin in the middle of the night.
My other Bull Street roommate Alex Boinest also needed a place. Alex attended C of C too and was one of my Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers, but Alex lived a different life. He worked in kitchens full time, which in Charleston meant seafood, deep fryers, late nights, and heat. He came home after two or three most nights covered in sweat and kitchen grease, often soothed by shift drinks and chewing tobacco. Even on nights when he wasn’t working his body was still set to service industry circadian rhythms. I never remember him up early in the morning. I never remember him looking refreshed whenever he did wake up. I don’t think I ever saw the man eat breakfast. He was however probably the nicest guy I knew in Charleston. I mostly picture him sitting on couches laughing as he confessed to having slept through another morning class, hair matted across his forehead, spitting tobacco into a cup or can between self-depreciating jokes and smiles.
Foodies, you have no idea what you put people though.
So James, Alex, and I went in on a summer sublet by the Medical University of South Carolina.2 It was a nice place, small, but with three separate bedrooms, high ceilings, and I think central air, which was unusual for Charleston rentals. I had a ‘76 Plymouth Volare station wagon, puke green with fake wood siding (ugliest car you’ve ever seen) that I’d bought for a few hundred dollars from my “aunt” Ginny. (Not the biological aunt who had the Masters Degree, but a former neighbor in the Hessian Hills apartment complex in Charlottesville, who became a family friend.) Also Alex’s brother’s friend had a truck. So the move was easy. One great thing about living with a bunch of guys is one can always move households in a single day.
Next I needed employment to save for Duke’s exorbitant tuition, and I didn’t have any leads. While C of C was a school where many worked regular jobs during the school year, I tried not to. I wanted to concentrate on learning. I didn’t care about grades so much, but I spent a lot of time in the library reading books. I wanted to be a real scholar. So the only leads I had were from previous summer jobs.
The summer before I’d worked for a guy named Tony who sold folding “Ferarri” and “Porshe” sunglasses in pleather cases from a table in the historic Charleston City Market. “Ferarri” and “Porshe” were deliberately misspelled to avoid being sued by automakers Ferrari and Porsche.
But Tony was gone or in jail. I’d also worked selling ads for the independent College of Charleston Phone Directory run out of a skinny house on Montagu St. by a nice young man and older woman big into Democratic politics. They loved Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings and were working for his reelection and my meetings with them were often interrupted by calls about banners and buttons and events. I liked them and I liked the phone directory and even though I’d been raised in a “liberal republican” household I liked Fritz Hollings.
So I’d started strong selling ads for the first couple of weeks. I can still remember part of my shpiel: “The College of Charleston Directory has a readership of over 5,280 students, faculty, and staff.” But then I had some sort of mental collapse where I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t face one more minute of talking anyone into anything anymore.3 Or collecting the checks. Or bringing the checks and contracts to the nice couple in their skinny house on Montagu. So I ghosted them until they finally called me worried that I was dead or injured. Then I think I mailed them all the checks and contracts even though their skinny house was only a couple of houses away.
So neither of those jobs were likely to be great recommendations.
The First Job
Fortunately, Alex’s mom was the office manager of a warehouse in North Charleston, and they had acquired through some deal five containers of tapioca flour from Indonesia, which they needed to unload. So James and I signed on.
Charleston is the beautiful peninsula formed by the Ashley and Cooper Rivers with the historic houses, historic City Market, historic battery, and all the other historic history in the lower beautiful part of the peninsula. Farther up on the Cooper River were the modern commercial naval yards. Not beautiful but bustling and gleaming with huge metal towers, container ships, and cranes. But up the spine of the peninsula itself was ugly scrub land and baking multi-lane highways with low-slung commercial and semi-industrial buildings.
That ugly scrub land with the baking multi-lane highways, and low-slung commercial and semi-industrial buildings was North Charleston.
James and I drove up in the Volare. We eventually found the place. I don’t remember the name of the company, but we’ll call it W.W.I.W. for “Warehouse Where I Worked.” It was cinderblocks, metal beams, and corrugated sheet metal off a strip of bare road off a two-lane access road off a banking multi-lane highway. From a distance it looked like an stained couch cushion on the side of a road. It was the size of a football field on the inside, but looked smaller outside because it was so wide relative to is height, and unlike most warehouses it was built with the bay doors at ground level. This meant there was a wide paved slope that truckers had to back their rigs down to reach the loading docks and bays. Which from time to time led to dented loading docks, doors, and trucks. WWIW rented three of the building’s four sections. The far left section was the office entrance, a door into the warehouse, and the three bay doors bounded in black rubber blocks to mitigate the damage of backing trucks.
The third bay was occupied with a container unhitched and parked, its back wheels chocked and front landing legs cranked down. At some distance from the building there were other containers unhitched and parked.
Meanwhile trucks were coming and going.4
The WWIW office was built into one corner of the warehouse. A little cabin with wood paneling, shag carpet, and window ACs droning. We signed some paperwork and they led us through a door into the warehouse itself, massive, gray-dark and cooler than the summer outside. Florescent lights glowed from rods high in the ceiling somewhere, but the real brilliance was sunlight blasting from the open bay doors in bent rectangles had stretched and retreated as trucks came and went.
James and I were teamed with a nice guy whose name I’ve forgotten. He was small and wiry maybe two years older than me with a dark thick hair and a dark mustache like a singer-songwriter. Incongruously, for a warehouse worker, he often wore white shirts and white shorts. Picture a singer-songwriter on the crew of the Love Boat. He often folded his arms I remember but not out of impatience; out of restlessness, I think. James and I are both tall but were also skinny (back then), so the scene was three stick figures piling bags.
The container was crammed floor-to-ceiling with 50 lb brown paper bags of flour, so it couldn’t be unloaded by forklift. Apparently attempts had been made too, because several bags at calf level were punctured leaving the dock dusted with tapioca flour and scraps of the brown paper with squiggly Asian writing bent and curled from the heap.
The first day James, Songwriter, and I pulled the sacks down one by one from the trailer and stacked them neatly on a wooden pallet set just inside the bay. When the first pallet was piled chest high, Songwriter’s friend Jimmy drove up in his forklift. Jimmy and Songwriter had graduated from high school together several years before. They might have been roommates. Anyway, Jimmy had recruited Songwriter for this job.
So Jimmy’s forklift scooted up, tongs slipping into the pallet’s gap, then braked long enough to lift the load with a pull on a black knob. The forklift itself teetered to hold down its rear wheels from the weight. Then Jimmy backed away, spun, and sped off to store the pallet in the designated warehouse row.
One of us dragged over another empty pallet from a stack leaning against a wall, plopped it flat, and we started again. There was always a coolness to the warehouse except for the strip of sunlight by the doors, but the container was brutal. No ventilation and the metal scalding. We took turns crawling in that suffocating upper three feet of liquid heat, tugging, sliding, and pushing sacks one by one backwards to the edge where someone would sling them down. Once a section was reduced to chest height, we tested different configurations: passing sacks in a bucket brigade, moving in a circle to each pick up a sack and taking it to the pallet, divvying up the wall of flour into two sections with the third man supervising the stacking. Honestly, I don’t remember anything working especially well.
As the day went on truckers would back their rigs into the two other bays, and stroll in through a side door to talk to Jimmy or head into the office. Jimmy would skid around on his forklift, unloading and loading pallets of boxes wrapped in plastic, pallets of cylinders, pallets of machinery, ferrying to and from various aisles and shelves, sometimes speeding into the next warehouse section beyond the concrete wall. Jimmy always carried manifests and paperwork on dim-colored sheets smeared in sweat and grease, bordered with hole-dashed tear-away strips. He’d check off items with cheap ballpoint pens with the little blue caps that he would constantly disapper, leading to high-pitched outbursts:
G*ddammit! F*ck! F*ck! G*df*ckingdammit!
Jimmy was about 5’10” but very much overweight. In a way that was rare back then. Not just a gut like the truckers, but Jimmy jiggled in and tumbled out of bunching sweaty t-shirts and sagging blue Dickie pants. Half his white butt perpetually defied his waistline to follow behind his roving forklift as a beacon. He had frizzy hair like Larry from the Three Stooges and pale skin that blotched red instantly at any emotion. My favorite of his emotions was amusement. Any joke, funny observation, or self-depreciating comment, and Jimmy’s mouth would break into a wide smile, his face would blotch scarlet, his eyes would twinkle, and he would let out a high-pitched laughter of shoulder shaking joy. If you’ve ever been funny, you would love Jimmy. He got everything instantly, appreciated it, and showed it. Then when the laughter was done Jimmy’s eyes would dart to the next thing and off he would go, jumping back onto his forklift to skitter away.
But as when he couldn’t find a pen, his rage was scary. Not for our sakes because Jimmy was never mean or insulting, but several times a day it looked like Jimmy would actually die. Any time the prongs of the speeding forklift missed the pallet, or boxes tumbled off a load, or he couldn’t reconcile a manifest, Jimmy’s teeth would lock, his face would blotch scarlet, his eyes would fill with actual tears, and he would scream in a high-pitched shriek:
G*ddammit! F*ck! F*ck! G*df*ckingdammit!
Jimmy was agonized by imperfection.
I think we worked the first day till the container was unloaded and then they sent us home. When we arrived for the second day the first container was gone and a fresh container was parked in the bay. It was stacked to the ceiling like the other. By the second day we got fast enough that we had pallets ready before Jimmy could pick them up. As with all these sort of jobs, my memories get confused, but I think we finished the second container early and they sent us home. The third day we emptied the container early enough that they didn’t send us home. Instead we split up and took naps on top of piles of this and that while Jimmy found someone with a tractor to switch out the containers. Or maybe he borrowed one and did it himself. By then Songwriter had shared the gossip that one of the dents in the middle bay was from Jimmy backing in a container himself. I am amazed his arteries sustained the cursing such a mistake must’ve caused him.
Setbacks
After a few days James dropped out of the tapioca flour unloading business. He’d gotten a job working for a local architecture firm. James was an architecture major at Princeton and this was his first career-related job, so I was happy for him, but I felt a vague injustice that on the Princeton name James had gotten an instant office job despite not being an A student (as I was) and only being a junior (while I had graduated). While I was still unloading tapioca flour.
By the end of the week—or maybe in the middle of the second week—Songwriter and I emptied the fifth and final container, and no doubt impressed by the strong work ethic and positive mental attitude which you dear reader no doubt perceive in every post here at Blame Cannon, WWIW offered me a full-time position. (I don’t know if they offered the same job to Songwriter and he turned it down or whether they knew I was better suited to the minimum-wage job.) I said I would be leaving for Duke in the fall, but if they still wanted me I’d be happy to finish out the summer, and they said that was fine.
However, James’ job, the end of the tapioca, and telling WWIW that I was leaving in the fall reminded me that I needed to get the money issue settled, so I took a couple of days off to visit Charlottesville where I hoped a change of place would give me a sense of how to approach Duke. I kept trying to overcome my crippling fear of phone calls to call Duke and make an appointment to speak to someone, but I couldn’t think of what I would ask, so after wasting a day in Charlottesville, I gave up on an appointment and just drove to Durham, parked near the Anthropology building,5 and walked inside.
The campus was deserted, the halls empty, and the receptionist seemed surprised to see anyone, and more surprised when I asked to speak to a professor without an appointment. Then once I started speaking I began to gush. I told her I’d applied and been accepted to attend in the fall and was hoping to work with the anthropologist, Carol Something (I can’t remember her name now) who studied sharecroppers in Western North Carolina. In living memory sharecropping had been a major part of the U.S. economy, and one of the biggest social changes in America in the 50s and 60s—greater than the beatniks or hippies, nearly as great as the Civil Rights movement—had been the end of sharecropping and how it changed the settlement patterns of cities in the American South.
Also Dr Carol Something had done field work with one of the few remaining communities, and she taught classes with names like “The Political-Economy of Rural Labor” which was code at the time for courses where Marxist ideas were included in the syllabus, but I didn’t say this part.6
Once I paused to breathe the receptionist was kind. She called around. Dr Carol Something was not there, but the receptionist found a professor who happened to be in the building, and agreed to meet with me. After a few minutes of me milling in the lobby, not knowing whether to stand or sit, the professor appeared. She was a pear-shaped white lady in a track suit with a short haircut and a brusque but honest manner. If she had had a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth, she would have been the spitting image of my “aunt” Ginny, the one who sold me the Volare.7 So I liked Professor Ginny immediately.
She led me to her office, a cluttered space with books and posters. We sat. She didn’t make a lot of eye contact, but when she did it was obvious she was very smart. Also her books and posters blazed far-left sensibilities, so I trusted her. I told her I was excited to be coming to Duke, especially because I admired Dr Carol Something’s work on sharecroppers in Western North Carolina. In living memory sharecropping had been a major part of the U.S. economy, and one of the biggest social changes… etc.
But I added, as I hadn’t with the receptionist, I’d noticed that Duke’s annual tuition was extremely expensive. Three times the rate of my back-up school, University of Florida.
I told Professor Ginny that I’d heard from friends that graduate students were often paid to teach classes or grade papers, or even given stipends or grants to be graduate students. What were the chances that if I proved myself in the first year, that Duke might somehow give me tuition relief in future years? I was happy to work for it.
She blinked a couple of times.
“Duke doesn’t really do that.”
I thought about the allegedly-left-leaning sensibilities that Dr Carol Something, Professor Ginny, and I shared. I blinked a couple of times.
“Then how do people afford to go here?”
Professor Ginny shrugged.
“Frankly, unless you’re independently wealthy, you can’t.”
I both loved her and loathed her.
I drove back to Charlottesville sobbing in shame for my ignorance and folly. I had no plan, no next step in life. I tried to put on a brave face before going back into the house. My mom rarely asked me questions, so I hoped she wouldn’t ask about this, but immediately when I went in mom asked about the meeting. We sat and I told what happened. She frowned and said maybe it was because I didn’t wear better shoes.
Full Time
So I drove back to Charleston and told WWIW that I wouldn’t be leaving in the fall, if they wanted me to stay longer, and they said, great. It was a minimum wage job but there could be more if I proved myself.
I liked the warehouse. The business of it was fascinating to me. Naturally, I wanted to know what they would do with the tapioca flour, since I’d never even heard of tapioca flour. I peppered the office folks with questions about it, but I never sussed out a true plan. Mostly, the WWIW warehouse didn’t really store things. A few pallets seemed to be stuck in dusty corners unwanted, but most of what we brought in from one truck was sent away on another within a week. Only the tapioca seemed unwanted. Gradually, over the summer from time to time Jimmy would load a pallet of the flour into a container. Eventually an entire container was packed with the stuff, the office having found a buyer somewhere, but on pallets so it held only a fraction of what we had unpacked from those earlier containers.
The containers held everything in the world. A few miles away massive ships heaped with the colored rectangles unloaded at Charleston docks by hulking gantry cranes, tower cranes, and reach-stackers. The containers sometimes were set onto railroad flatbeds, but mostly onto the waiting hitches of lined up tractors—Peterbilts, Freightliners, Kenworths. The tractors hauled the containers to warehouses like ours, where they might be repackaged into other containers, or simply hooked to other tractors who would drive them across the country.
It was a wide-open market business with everything based on price and hustle. Anything could be bought or sold or repacked to be shipped anywhere. I’m sure computers do all this now by mathematical predictions, but it really was guesswork and relationships. The warehouse building was not in any particular place. It was just a location to unpack and pack. Like the folding sunglasses or the college directory: anyone could do it with luck and instinct, and it was just a matter of who did it first or best. For WWIW it was about good relationships with the buyers, sellers, and truckers. Very different from the business models Princeton or Duke which operated on the false scarcity of reputation.
Sometimes I felt sorry for the tapioca flour waiting there in a row of palettes, wanting to be wanted. Often I could relate. I didn’t have enough to do. Since I was making minimum wage it wasn’t worth it budget-wise for Jimmy to stress out trying to keep me busy for the sake of keeping me busy. It was better to have me there to unload trucks quickly when they needed to. So I checked manifests, deliveries, cleaned up, and organized sections of the warehouse.
The best part was learning to drive a forklift. Jimmy wouldn’t let me unload a truck if the driver was in a hurry or if whatever was in the truck was fragile or expensive. And he definitely wouldn’t let me change out the forklift attachments to the sideways “clamps.” These replaced the forks for cylinders that weren’t on pallets.
When there were no trucks waiting to be loaded or unloaded and no invoices or shipping manifests to check I loved to race the forklift from giant room to giant room beneath the cavernous loft, speeding and spinning in my little yellow beast, lowering and raising the prongs with the little black knob to get a feel for their height. Forklifts are great little vehicles, like a cross between a golf cart and a skateboard with a bit of tank thrown in.8
My other way to kill time was to poke around the office asking questions. The owner was a middle-aged duck-belt Southern prep who always wore docksiders and sunglasses on his head. He may have had another warehouse upstate—in Spartanburg maybe?—so he was seldom there. Alex’s mom was friendly but no-nonsense. She was at her desk working or out in the main room gently prodding others to work. The best conversationalist was a woman in her thirties in accounts receivable. She had hair like Flo from the sitcom Alice. She shared horrifying stories of being in South Carolina schools when they integrated. That was under the leadership of Fritz Hollings, then governor now the senator my skinny-house directory friends admired. My dad had been a teacher in that period and been proud of the state for integrating earlier than most of the South.
Flo’s best office discussion, however, came from her story of a friend who worked for the Charleston Police Department, then led by the charismatic Chief Reuben Greenberg. Greenberg was admired nationally for lowering the city crime rate. He was featured on 60 Minutes and similar shows philosophizing on the importance of community policing as clips showed him roller skating around the city or attending his local synagogue. (Greenberg was both Jewish and Black.) Greenberg was a source of pride for many in Charleston, but Flo’s friend was irked that he’d asked her to use her calligraphy skills on company time to write the names on awards and certificates. Back in those pre-internet days printers had one font. There was no fancy writing unless you found someone to do it. The discussion topic in the office was whether it was fair or not. Some said they would do whatever their boss asked if they were being paid. Others said they shouldn’t be asked to do anything not in their job description.9 It was a fascinating debate but never resolved.
There was a pretty woman about ten years older than me who handled the driver’s reimbursements. I can’t remember her name, but once in passing when I said I liked a Lynyrd Skynyrd song that was playing on the radio beside her desk she said she had partied with Lynyrd Skynyrd in Jacksonsville. So we’ll call her Dale, the wife of the late Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington. WWIW Dale was short with straight dark hair and round glasses. Her office had one door that opened into the main office and one door that opened into the warehouse, and the truckers loved to visit her through her special door.
1980s truckers still had a slight hold on American culture with CB talk and trucker songs.10 They came in all ages and sizes, but in three basic styles:
Texas. Most of whom weren’t from Texas but all of whom loved some combination of big coin belt buckles, cowboy boots, bolo ties, and cowboy hats.
Country/Hillbilly. Red Wing work boots instead of cowboy boots, cloth baseball caps with broken brims and fishing product logos. They anticipated 80s grunge.
Garage. Blue or green Dickies, garage shirts with names on oval patches, and cheap baseball caps with the plastic mesh backs. They anticipated 90s hipsters.
Truckers would back in a truck and saunter in through warehouse door, chat with Jimmy and tear off a top sheet of paperwork to give to him. Then they’d invite themselves into Dale’s office to get their checks. Sometimes three at once would be hanging out around Dale’s desk in friendly rivalry with one other. They’d banter and flirt until long after their truck was loaded or unloaded. I was too proud to flirt much with Dale myself since I couldn’t imagine a lowly warehouse complete with Lynyrd Skynyrd.
I tried to get to know Jimmy better. It was hard because he was so busy and frantic. But in slow moments I would ask him personal questions. He just smiled and blushed. I would crack jokes and he would break into peals of red-faced joy. Then he would hitch up his Dickies and go back to work.
One of my sharpest memories of Jimmy and the warehouse was about a canister of poison that broke near the opening between two sections of the warehouse. It was a cardboard cylinder waist high that split open when Jimmy was trying to move it with the clamps. I don’t know what it was but all the canisters were marked with skulls, exclamation points, and lightning bolts proclaiming Hazard! Toxic! and Danger! But none of us knew what to do about it. For a week we left it there on its side in a puddle of its own white powder. The office called around but no one could offer any help. Finally, I think Jimmy put on a paper dust mask just swept it up with a broom.
My other memories from that summer were watching the NBA playoffs in the apartment with Alex and our other friends. The Houston Rockets featured the Twin Towers: Ralph Sampson who had played for UVa when James and I were in high school and Hakeem Olajuwon. Houston won the semifinals but lost in the finals.
I also remember listening to the Allman Brother’s album Brothers and Sisters a lot that summer while staring at the cover. I don’t know why. There was something about their hillbilly-hippie aesthetic that seemed hopeful. I still remember the way the piano and then the drums and then the slide guitar kicks in on the song Jessica.
The End
I liked WWIW but I hated North Charleston. Especially lunch. I hate sandwiches and the salt from most potato chips make the inside of my mouth hurt, so figuring out what to bring for lunch was agony. I would sometimes drive out to get fast food somewhere, and there was either a Popeyes or a Bojangles nearby—I can’t remember which—but I also find driving stressful.
Three times I tried to walk to lunch but there weren’t sidewalks and all three times as I was walking along in the summer heat wondering if a truck mirror would take me out, at least one car full of rednecks would yell at me and throw cans or bottles out the window while yelling f*gg*t. No doubt they were the grandkids of sharecroppers struggling to adjust to the new economy.
James left in August to make his way back to Princeton, and Alex needed to make arrangements for the fall, so on a lark I wrote a letter to the University of Florida (instead of trying to muster the courage for a phone call) explaining my situation, admitting that I’d hoped to go to Duke but couldn’t afford it, and wondering if at this late date they thought I should come to the University of Florida.
A professor wrote me back suggesting I come, so in late August a few days before the academic year was about to begin with no advisor, no plan, and having missed the deadline for campus housing, I gave notice at WWIW, gave my furniture to Alex, packed everything else I owned into the bed of the Plymouth Volare station wagon, and drove to Gainesville, Florida to begin what would be a brief and ignominious academic career.
Containers
I thought about WWIW this year after the Israeli-American attack on Iran led to the closure of the Persian Gulf. A huge percentage of containers are shipped through that body of water, and those ships as well as the trains and trucks they’re offloaded to all rely on oil for fuel. Even when the war ends to conversion of the Hormuz Strait into a toll passage like a canal will likely lead to the institution of tolling in other straits like the Strait of Malacca. That will change shipping costs which will change manufacturing processes.
In the years since I worked at the warehouse I learned that the entire container system was invented in that region. It was devised by Malcom McLean, a NC native from Winston-Salem (an hour away from Duke and not far from Carol Something’s sharecroppers) whose family bought him a used truck because he couldn’t afford college. McLean was almost an exact contemporary of the builder William Levitt, whom we met in February, but McLean is even less remembered. Both saw the value of standardization during WWII. After the war McLean added a ship to his trucking line, and came up with the notion of stacking and shipping containers with the hitches and rear wheels intact, so they could be directly lowered on tractors and driven away. He standardized sizes and offered his patents for free to get the system adopted. This created the modern global transport system as we know it. For instance I-phones are assembled from processes and materials in fourteen different countries which would not be affordable without the cheap shipping that the container system provides.
Like Levitt there’s not a single biography about Malcom McLean, a towering figure in the world economy. Also like Levitt he when bankrupt. In McLean’s case the filing was in 1986, the same year I was working at WWIW. He pulled himself out of it more successfully than Levitt and created another company. McLean died in 2001.
Thanks for reading Blame Cannon! I’ll finish out the month with more on the history of the suburbs, and then we’ll continue with the second journey of John Lederer as he reaches a lake that may or may not have existed.
Comments are welcome but please no personal insults or profanity, so I can set a good example in case my daughter reads this.
One day sitting on the porch playing the harmonica one of the Charleston tourist carriages pulled up and the guide announced this was the Denmark Vesey house. It’s unusual that it didn’t have any sort of historical plaque, given that every house in Charleston seems to have a plaque, but maybe that’s because although the house was very old post and beam construction, it’s not proven that Denmark Vesey lived there. Denmark Vesey was a free black carpenter who after his wife’s master refused to let him purchase her and their children out of slavery, tried to organize a slave revolt. He was ratted out by a snitch in 1822, leading to getting hanged with 40 co-conspirators.
Founded the year after Denmark Vesey was hanged.
“Containers” or “trailers” are the boxy rear part of what we Americans often call, “18-wheelers,” “big rigs,” “tractor-trailers,” “semis” or simply “trucks,” though sometimes Americans call the front part with the engine and the cabin by itself a “truck.” That’s technically the “tractor.”
I have no memory of whether there was an actual Anthropology building or if it was included in some other building, but I parked somewhere and went in to wherever the Anthropology Department was.
I was never a Marxist, and I doubt Dr Carol Something was either, but questions of class were a core of 80s social science. Post-modern critical theory spread mostly after I dropped out of academia, at least in the second-tier colleges and departments in which I interacted.
My favorite memory of Ginny was after she moved to Richmond and we went to visit her, we went to one of those Americana restaurants with 50s nostalgia and a train that ran around near the ceiling from room to room. They had delicious battered fried okra. Later Bret and I slept in the den where we had access to Cinemax—”Skinaxmax”—where we could see nudity without the strip of static across the middle of the screen.
Actual Ginny did not have far-left sensibilities. She worked for the government. She did have the worst tobacco habit of anyone I’ve ever met. She wouldn’t even put her lit cigarettes in an ashtray for a moment. I remember her with a lit cigarette between her fingers while she was cutting and eating steak a cylinder of gray ash dangling menacingly out over the glowing red as it teetered over her plate.
The development of the forklift is usually credited to the Clark Material Handling Company out of Michigan.
I taught myself calligraphy in high school while playing RPGs, and word got out, because I was taken out of Chemistry class in 12th grade to write names on the National Honors Society certificates. I didn’t hint to the WWIW office that I knew Uncial from a Gothic, however. FWIW I would be happy to do 20 names on company time, but angry at being asked to do 200.
The last major trucker song to hit the mainstream was probably Kathy Mattea’s Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses. It came out almost exactly a year after my time at WWIW. Great song, but note that it’s about the end of a trucker’s carrier.