¿Til Death do us Part

LEAVING HOME

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more
No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more
Wel, I wake up in the morning
Fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a heafull of ideas
that are drivin' me insane

                                                                                               "Maggie's Farm" - Bob Dylan

I left my hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania at about three in the afternoon on August 24, 1971.  It was a Tuesday.  Temperatures had been running around 85-86 degrees the past week.  (Out of curiosity, I just scanned the internet to see what other worldly or earth-changing events might have occurred on that particular day, but came up only with an India vs England cricket match won by India with a margin of 4 wickets and the birth of the Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, who played Christopher Columbus in Ben Stiller’s “Night at the Museum”) 

A week earlier, I had walked out of the windowless carding room at Magee Carpet Mills and into the morning sun following a long and dusty third shift.  I shook off the last eight hours of listening to the ratcha-ratcha-ratcha of electric powered, belt driven machinery that occupied an entire floor of the building and constantly filled the entire space with fine particles of wool fiber.  There was a small family-run breakfast and lunch place that catered to Magee workers a half block from the parking lot, and I decided to enjoy some eggs, bacon, toast and coffee before heading home to catch a few hours of sleep prior to hitting the streets to see what kind of fun might be available before having to once again clock in for another eight-hour shift. 

With few variations, this had been my routine for the last 12 months or so.  I would drive from wherever I happened to be, leaving enough time to pull into the parking lot at the side of the three-story red brick factory building, park, run in and wait for the old wooden freight elevator that would take me to the third floor so I could slip my card into the electric time punch at a few minutes before 11 p.m.   I would then take up my position at the front and middle of three rows of gears, belts, rakes, rollers and aprons making up the machines that for 24 hours a day pulled, stretched and twirled raw wool into thick fragile threads that would be rolled onto stacks of four foot long wooden spools.  The roughly processed thread would then be shuttled to another floor of the building to begin the next step in the making of carpets for the automobile industry.  My job was to sit on a stool against the wall at the far end of the machines, remaining alert for breaks in the twenty or so threads that spun out of each of four vibrating aprons onto steadily rotating four foot wooden spools.  Every now and then I would have to reach in with a hook-tipped pole to cut and pull the looping wool from the aprons and attach it back onto the growing rings.   As the spools on the machine filled to their capacity- usually every half hour or so - I would position a tall rack holding four empty spools in front of a given machine, gauge the speed and flow of the threads, grab a full spool from the machine, pause just enough to generate enough slack  to allow me to turn and place it on an empty slot on the rack, using my left hand to roll it at approximately the speed that the threads were coming off the machine, grab an empty spool from the above slot with my right, turn back to the machine to spin it in the space just vacated by the full spool and, finally, to gather the threads together in both hands to tear and wrap them around the new spool.  At times the process seemed like ballet, at others like I was simply an extension of the machine in front of me.  So on and so forth until all four spools were replaced from top to bottom:  the eight hour process broken only by two ten-minute cigarette breaks taken in a Plexiglas- covered booth just big enough to hold four stools, four smokers, and all the cigarette smoke (there was even the occasional pipe or cigar smoker!) you could breathe in as a smoke blackened ceiling fan pulled it into the ventilation system.  About halfway through the shift, we would get a 30-minute lunch break in a small room off to the side of the foreman’s 8’ x 8’ paper-filled office.  What I remember most about the foreman, an elderly white-haired man who, when he was not sneaking up from behind and goosing employees as they bent over a machine, would spend the majority of the night hiding away and taking catnaps in his office.   He also called me “Suzy” in recognition of the fact that I was the only long-haired employee in the section.  (I believe that there were only two of us “hippies” in the entire factory at the time.  I do remember that the mill came out that year with a brand new regulation requiring ALL workers with long hair - male and female - to wear hair nets while working around open machinery. )

That hot August Monday I finished my breakfast in the small diner and decided to take a spin through Bloomsburg before heading to my parent’s home in Danville.  I was probably just wired from the eight hour shift at the factory and needed time to unwind.  Maybe it was because I was still thinking about that night the previous week when I had sauntered over to the aisle between two of the three carding machines under my responsibility to see why one of them had shut down unexpectedly. As I turned the corner, I came upon the woman whose job it was to turn off the machines at programmed intervals and remove the tufts of wool that tended to accumulate on the open gears and belts.  She was standing at the shut off station halfway down the aisle holding the stub of what had been her right arm.  She stood there in a state of shock,  repeating, “Oh My God.  Oh My God.”   She had decided to save some time by reaching into the midst of the moving gears to quickly and, to her thinking, effortlessly snatch a small tuft of wool without shutting down the entire process.  The unforgiving machine grabbed her hand, pulled her in and took her arm to the elbow.  In some unexplainable clarity before the shock set in, she shut down the machine herself.  In retrospect, I think it was that horrific scene that brought to the forefront a growing sense of despondency with my life and led me to park the car along the main street of Bloomsburg and walk through the glass doors of an Army Recruiting Office as it opened for the day.

“What can I do for you, son?”  The sharply dressed army recruiter looked up from his paperwork and took in my scraggly blue-jeaned and long-haired appearance with an appraising eye.  The Viet Nam war appeared to be winding down in 1971 (in reality hanging on another 4 years), and although the draft was still in effect, the Army was beginning a publicity push for an “All-Volunteer” force, seeking to lure recruits with offers of training in a number of technical and/or administrative areas.  “I….I guess I want to see what my options are…”  He knew he had a live one, and I’m sure that if I had been paying attention, I would have seen a broad smile stretch across his face.  “Well son, with a three-year commitment we can look at a couple of options.  What exactly do you think you would want to do in this man’s Army?”   Now there was a question.  What DID I want to do?  I knew what I DIDN’T want to do.  I didn’t want to continue on in a never-ending cycle of working, partying, sleeping, working and partying.  My closest friends in town had shrunk to three or four, with an extended group of high school classmates and others who had not gone off to college invariably showing up at the rock concerts and dances that represented our main form of entertainment.  Our social life revolved around the search for alcohol, drugs, girls and music, not necessarily in that order and increasingly expanded from the traditional “loop” run between the Tastee Freeze parking lot across from the old high school and the steel river bridge over to Riverside, to include longer runs up and down the Susquehanna River or over the mountains to similar loops in towns like Selinsgrove, Scranton, Shamokin and Pottsville, occasionally crossing borders into neighboring states.  There was nothing incredibly wrong with this scenario; it just felt empty.   Lots of folks were perfectly happy settling in to okay paying jobs, getting a home of their own, starting a family.   Maybe if I just turned myself around, cut out the partying and………..

“Son?”  The recruiter’s impatient look drew me back to the glass-fronted recruiting office with the patriotic posters and American flags to the pressing question at hand – what DID I want to do?  Well – even though I had pretty much been a piss-poor student (an under-achiever, they said) throughout high school, preferring to spend my time hanging out in the art room, being a lineman on the football team, playing trombone in the school band and taking part in theater productions rather than crack a book to study  such things as algebra, chemistry and history, I did have a passion for reading and occasionally had tried putting my hand to writing.  “I guess I’d like to be an Army Journalist.”  Once again, if I had been paying attention, I would have noticed the facial reflections of shrewd calculation that were crossing the mind of the recruiter.  He had certain quotas he needed to fill.  With the war dying down and the push to convert to a “professional” military, the army was increasingly in need of office workers to support the endless paperwork.  “Well, you know, son…It’s kind of hard to get into journalist training right now.  And besides, you would need to hone those writing skills a bit – learn to type faster, things like that.  I have an idea.  How’s about you sign up for Clerk/Typist school? That way, you get the basics and THEN you ask for training as a journalist.”  What he failed to mention was that any additional training in the army was conditional on additional time commitment:  three years enlistment – one specialty training course.  Do you want an additional course?  Sign up for an additional three years.  Oh well, what was I to know?

So there I was, signing away three years of my life on the dotted line.  I would be heading out one-week later.  I gave my notice at the carpet mill.  At home and among my friends, there was at first a general disbelief that I had taken this step.  My family, especially my WWII veteran dad, thought that it was good thing - that it would "make a man" out of me.  My mother might have a bit teary behind the scenes.  My friends didn't believe that I had done this crazy thing on the spur of the moment, but in the end I think they too understood my desire to change my life - to do something different. 

I boarded a chartered minibus at the gas station/convenience store at the corner of Danville’s Market Street and Route 11, heading for a central collection at the U.S. Army Reserve Center in Wilkes Barre.  The van had begun somewhere down the Susquehanna River, picking up recruits from towns along the way.  I was the only one to board at Danville.  The mix of eighteen to twenty-year olds on the van was pretty typical of the area:  farm boys, recent high-school graduates or dropouts, factory workers and a smattering of long-haired youths, all who had for one reason or another decided to leave behind their hometown lives and enlist in the Army.  There was little variation in terms of race or ethnicity among the boys  – we all pretty much came out of that rural Central Pennsylvania genetic mix of German, Dutch, Irish or Polish.  We had no luggage, other than a small bag with a few personal items.  We had been told that everything we needed would be provided once we arrived at our final destination:  the basic training facility at Fort Dix, New Jersey.  There was little talking among the occupants of the bus.  Each of us seemed to be wrapped up in our own little cocoon, thinking about what we were leaving behind and what lay before us.  I remember sitting by a window, gazing out at the passing countryside as we travelled northeast along Route 11, passing through the small college and industrial towns of Bloomsburg and Berwick, up into the coal region of Nanticoke at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and on towards the Reserve Center in Wilkes Barre.  The van stopped a few more places on its northeast journey, adding one or two boys at each way station.  We arrived at around five-thirty in the evening and were shuffled into a large reception area and given a packaged meal.  A few more vans and small buses continued to arrive from different points around the region to drop off new recruits until there were about 100-120 of us in total.  The previous homogeneity of the recruits from central Pennsylvania began to swell with Hispanics and African Americans from the larger cities to the north and south.  We were told that we would all be boarding two larger buses later in the evening for the approximate three hour drive to New Jersey.    The larger bus – I think it might have been a chartered Greyhound – pulled in at about 7 p.m. and we headed south in the fading sunlight.  I must have dozed for a bit, because the next thing I knew were pulling through the front gates of Fort Dix.

Once on the base, the bus drove past groups of drab one-story cinder-block administration buildings and expanses of flat open fields that were divided off into numerous exercise, drill and assembly grounds, stopping finally in a parking lot at the edge of a long row of stark, three-story red-brick rectangular barracks.  Glancing down through the bus window, I could see a tall, lanky Sergeant Major (I only later learned what exactly the series of stripes on his green fatigue uniform meant) wearing  a wide-brimmed Drill Instructor hat (the thought that immediately came to mind was “Smokey Bear”) tipped towards his nose to rest just above his partially hidden eyes.  In a few short days we would come to know him only as “YES DRILL SERGEANT!” when under his penetrating gaze, and “SSD” – southern sadistic bastard – under our breath and behind his back. He was joking with a short, wiry African-American  staff sergeant dressed in a similar outfit,  and a stocky, blond-haired 1^st Lieutenant in a sharply pressed khaki uniform and wearing a white parade helmet.  As we were herded off the bus into four haphazard lines under a dimly lit street lamp, we were met by these three with an orchestrated show of yells, head-shaking sarcastic smiles and pointed barbs about what a sorry lot of soft, overweight and long-haired losers we were.  Our first stop was a line in the hall outside a brightly lit, wall-mirrored room with five or six barber chairs and barbers waiting to clip off our varied lengths of head and facial hair.  The barbers would sarcastically ask what style of haircut we might like and then proceed to go about their shearing with uniformly set quarter-inch trimmers.  Anybody with exceptionally long hair was singled out by the drill sergeant for close up, in-your-face ridicule as our curly locks fell to the ground.  This was the “new all-volunteer army” mind you, so there at least were no “skinhead” cuts. 

After our haircuts, we were shuffled to an adjoining building, given a basic set of olive-green uniforms, boots and gear and then marched over to our barracks with its facing rows of two-tiered  bunk beds separated by metal lockers and footed by squat wooden footlockers where we would stow our gear according to a strict protocol, and told to shut up and go to bed : morning would come early – real early.  As the lights were turned out, I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of my fellow recruits settling in and falling asleep in the place where we would spend the next 10 weeks being drilled, run, exercised, and shouted into basic “combat-ready” soldiers before being sent off for our specialty training as office workers, artillery experts, mechanics, drivers, etc.

I had definitely left home.