Learning the Ropes

I really wasn't sure what to expect when I showed up for work at A-1 Plastic Supply in June of 1972, but after a few days of "observing" it was clear that there was more to being a delivery driver than I had anticipated.

The company was located north of the LBJ Freeway, and each day there were two delivery runs. The morning run was a counterclockwise loop around the west side of town and back up through the central corridor. Then after lunch (and reloading) it was time to hit the east side (mostly Richardson and Garland - occasionally Plano and Mesquite)... I also had to call in periodically in case there was an emergency, meaning that someone forget to file an order and when the customer called the salesman lied and said it was already out for delivery :-)

The first order of business in the morning (after clocking in and grabbing a cup of coffee) was to go through the invoices and arrange them geographically. (I had been provided with a Mapsco book - the delivery driver's best friend and constant companion before GPS). Once the route was established I loaded the truck (first in / last out) while double checking the orders against the invoices. Then I gave the truck a quick "once over" and hit the road... The whole process was expected to take about 15 minutes, and after a couple of weeks I had it down to 10.

The truck was a red 1970 Dodge D300 dually stake-bed with around 60,000 miles on it. Here's a picture  of a similar vehicle I found online:

The main difference is that the A-1 truck had a big canvas covered frame over the bed. BTW: There were no markings on the truck identifying the company. (They were kind of paranoid about competitors spying on them.)

Aside: The overall height of the vehicle was just shy of 11 feet. I found that out one day as I was pulling into a gas station. I noticed the attendant running toward me waving his arms and I had no idea what the problem was until I stopped at the pump and hopped out of the truck. He yelled "Are you f*cking crazy??" and pointed up... The station had an 11 foot high overhang and the top of my truck was almost scraping it... I definitely "dodged a bullet" on that one, and that was the last time I failed to consider the height of the truck when there was anything overhead...

 The truck was powered by the legendary "leaning tower of power" 225 cubic inch slant-6 engine. Now - although that was arguably the most "bulletproof" engine ever made, it was not know for power... In other words, the truck would barely get out of its own way :-)
Yeah - I could never figure out why anyone would order a truck that big with an engine that small. A trucks's gas mileage is far more dependent on weight and wind resistance than the size of the engine. As a matter of fact, when you considered that with the smaller engine the rear-end has to be geared so the engine spins a lot faster at any given speed it's unclear if there's any benefit at all...
Regardless, the truck was so underpowered that it wasn't unusual to still be going 45 MPH when I ran out of freeway on-ramp. (The solution was to stay in the emergency lane until I could get up to speed and edge my way into traffic.)

The transmission was a manual 4-speed with "bulldog low" (meaning that first gear would barely get the truck rolling before you had to shift). I was instructed to always use first gear (to reduce clutch wear). Later on when I joined the military I was taught the exact opposite: Never use bulldog low unless you have a heavy load and are starting out uphill... Go figure...

The truck did have two other significant problems: There were no turn signals and the parking brake would not hold the vehicle on even a slight slope.The turn signal problem was fairly obvious - someone had broken off the signal lever. When I complained to the boss he said he wasn't going to pay to repair any problem that didn't prevent it from moving... But it wasn't that bad. I quickly discovered that if you are driving a truck and you start "drifting" into the other lane people will get out of your way. :-)

The truck didn't have air-conditioning, which was an issue in Dallas during the summer. (The boss said it was for my own good because it's unhealthy to go back and forth between hot and cold all day.) Yeah - I typically drank 2 gallons of water a day and only needed to make one "pit stop".

But it did have an AM radio, so I got to listen to "Top 10" to my heart's content. In retrospect that wasn't such a bad thing - it was an excellent summer for music. The songs that immediately come to mind are Elton John's "Rocket Man" and "Honky Cat", and "Hold Your Head Up" by Argent, "Long Cool Woman" by the Hollies, "Don't Mess Around with Jim" by Jim Croce, "Brandy" by Looking Glass, and "Layla" by Clapton. And a bit of online research turned up "Alone Again", "Lean on Me", "Song Sung Blue", "Too Late to Turn Back Now",  "Stuck in the Middle With You", "Tight Rope" (Leon Russell), "Where is the Love" and "School's Out" (Alice Cooper)... Yes - I listened to all of them ... over and over again ... all day long, every day :-)

I'm still not sure where I'm going all of this, but there are lots more stories to tell :-)

Cast of Characters

It was sometime during June of 1972 that I went to work at A-1 Plastic Supply at 13700 Gamma Road in Addison Texas. (A-1 is long gone and that building is currently occupied by an auto repair shop called "Lord of the Rings" - bizarre name) ... I'm really not sure how many blog posts I should devote to this. "Working" was something of a novel experience for me back then so I remember an awful lot of (it in gory detail) - I'm just not sure how interesting (or relevant) most of it is :-)

Since a company is nothing more than the sum of it's employees I figure "roll call" is as good a place as any to start... As I recall, A-1 was comprised of 9 people (including me):

The man "at the helm" was William Tarrant Garrett (Jr?). He was a WWII vet and a product of the school of hard knocks - definitely the "good ole boy" type and decidedly redneck. However, there was no denying that he was an incredibly shrewd businessman. Despite the fact that I found most of his personal attitudes and beliefs "distasteful" I did have a tremendous amount of respect for his knowledge and leadership skills - and (whether he intended to or not) he taught me a lot of valuable lessons.

His son Billy, a recent college graduate (business?), also worked there. I think he mostly did sales and I recall that he was not much like his father - more of the shy, nerdy type. As I recall, there was a lot speculation about whether he was still a virgin :-)

Then there was the accountant - a middle aged woman with dark hair. I don't remember much about her other than I had to make sure all the invoices were properly filled out and signed before I turned them in or I'd catch hell... Hmm - now that I think about it, she seemed to be kind of angry in general :-)

I'm still not sure exactly what Bert did. I think his official title was VP and his job seemed to have something to do with advertising and marketing. Regardless, it was clear that he was the second in command...  I recall that he had "Dick Clark hair" and could have easily passed for a televangelist... He was always upbeat and seemed to be a genuinely nice guy.

The "hotshot" salesman was a young guy (probably in his mid 20s) named Ivan Angott. He was quite the talker and came across as the type you'd see hitting on women in bars... He knew a ton of jokes and often talked about having business cards made up with the name "Jock Strapinger" on them. For some reason he thought that was freaking hilarious...

Aside: It was Ivan who informed me that many of the secretaries in downtown Dallas didn't wear panties. When I expressed disbelief he suggested that the next windy day I rearrange my route to pass through downtown during lunch hour... Yeah - he was right :-)

There was an old black man named Sam who had been with the company since the 1950s. He ran the warehouse and did all the cutting and machining for custom orders... I recall that he drove a Dodge Colt with the personalized license plate "John 316". We had some pretty interesting conversations and he was genuinely one of the nicest people I've ever met.

The former delivery driver was an ambitious young fellow (maybe 21?) named Jim. He was transitioning into sales but he had to spend some time working in the warehouse first (learning the inventory)... I was surprised to discover that he was on his third marriage. As he explained, when a woman told him "not until we're married" that was the obvious solution...
BTW: Things had gotten rather awkward at his prior job when he proposed to his boss's wife. (Her divorce was already in progress and yes, she did marry Jim.) So that's how he ended up at A-1... He must have been one heck of a charmer because he (obviously) had an incredibly cavalier attitude toward women and relationships...

And that leaves the 19 year old receptionist. I don't recall her name but the boss called her "Sugar Booger" when she was sitting on his lap. (Apparently one of her duties...) She "played along" but it was obvious (at least to me) that she really disliked it... I'm sure I'll have lots more to say about her later :-)
 That was a definitely a different era... The boss was (in my estimation) a decent man and I suspect (hope?)  he only behaved that way to show off when " the guys" were around... Luckily, it wasn't much longer before the state legislatures stepped in and put a stop to those kinds of "job requirements"... And not a moment too soon.

Another One Bites the Dust

Before I talk about driving a delivery truck in Dallas in the summer of 1972 I'm going to wrap up the story of my sister Karina's second marriage (hence the title of this post).

But  before I get to husband Mike's "demise" there's one more related story to tell:
As I mentioned in a prior post, Mike was legally blind (wore very thick glasses) but still drove regularly. And around the time we moved to the apartments on Verde Valley his Datsun 510 started having clutch problems... BTW: That was first time I had ever seen a hydraulic clutch setup. The Japanese car makers used them to avoid having different transmissions for the right and left hand drive versions of their cars. (Quite clever, actually.)
So we drove the Datsun up onto a pair of those metal ramps (a.k.a potential death traps) so I could crawl underneath to figure out what was going on while Mike stayed in the car to push the clutch pedal if needed. Of course, I gave him my standard lecture on listening carefully to my instructions and not doing anything unless told to, at which point I proceeded to disassemble the clutch linkage. After a couple of minutes it occurred to me that (with the linkage removed) if Mike inadvertently put his foot on the pedal it would cause the slave piston to pop out, so (just as a reminder) I said "Whatever you do, don't push the clutch!"... Mike said "OK!" - and I caught a face full of hydraulic fluid...
I was like "Mike! What the $$!$$?" and he responded with "Well, I didn't catch everything you said, but I'm sure I heard 'push the clutch' "... Yeah - that was Mike :-)

And back to the marriage:
As I've said before, there were two kinds of men Karina couldn't stand - men who didn't challenge her and men who did. Mike fell into the first category.  He was a nice enough guy, but not at all equipped to deal with her... (I swear... I don't know why guys like him were so attracted to Karina... Moths to the flame, I guess.)

It was pretty obvious from the "get go" that it wasn't going to work. Mike liked to spend his time at home (sitting around and watching TV), while Karina always wanted to be somewhere else doing something different. (It was her defining characteristic.) ... They didn't really fight - she just berated him and he got all teary... It wasn't pretty.

I'm not sure exactly when Karina told Mike it was over - probably less than a month after the wedding. Mike was quite distraught, and (like many of Karina's ex'es) turned to me for reassurance. ("No - I don't think you did anything wrong." ... "No - I don't think you could have done anything different".) It was a very uncomfortable position to be in - balancing my loyalty to my sister with my empathy for Mike.

So I spent the rest of the day commiserating with him. He had to make two trips to Ardmore to haul all his stuff back home and I ended up riding shotgun with him for the first round trip. (It was about two hours each way.) Despite being legally blind (and crying the whole time) he would not let me drive... Yeah - between the sheer terror of riding with a guy who couldn't see for sh*t and having to console him the whole time it was one of the worst road trips of my life :-)

Karina filed for an annulment the following week and thus ended her second marriage...

A New Job

I never had a very easy time finding a job when I was a teenager. That's because it's hard to convince a prospective employer that it would be to their advantage to hire you when you don't really believe it's true... Yeah - I'm still not exactly sure how I ended up feeling so totally useless - but my self-opinion couldn't have been much lower.

Aside: I did have an offer from one of our neighbors at the apartments to work as an apprentice carpet installer but after he showed me how to use a "kicker" I was pretty sure I wouldn't survive the first day. (The kicker is used to stretch the carpet around the edges so there are no loose spots. You operate it by slamming your knee into it repeatedly. I used one a couple of times to install carpet in my home and was limping for a week.)

So I decided to try an employment agency. There was a "for profit" one in Richardson (the next suburb over) and it really wasn't too bad of a deal. There was no fee unless they found you a job and then it was a percentage of your paycheck for the first six weeks or so.
I was kind of surprised when the first thing they did was administer a test. (It was the Wonderlic Personnel Test, but I didn't find that out until later.) Their were 50 questions - not particularly hard but there was a 12 minute time limit (~15 seconds per question). If you took the time to "think through" all the problems you'd be lucky to finish half the test. But after the first few I realized that I already knew the answers to many of them. For example : "If farmer John has 51 chickens each laying an egg a day, how many eggs would he have in a week?" Well - the answer is obviously a little bit less than the number of days in a year (52 weeks times 7 days) and a quick glance at the answers revealed that only one of them was in the ballpark. As it turns out, there were shortcuts to a number of the questions and spotting them was the key to getting a high score. That makes perfect sense given that the purpose of the test is to measure "trainability". (Applying what you already know to new circumstances.)

So - when my time was up the young lady (roughly my age - possibly the daughter of the owner) who was administering the test took it back to her office to score it. (BTW: I was kind of bummed because I didn't make it through all the questions.) Then a couple of minutes later she came flying out of her office so fast that she almost tripped and fell. She gave me a glance as she hurried past that is still etched in my memory - it was stunned disbelief... The owner (a middle-aged heavy-set blond woman with too much makeup) was on the phone when the young lady interrupted her saying "You have got to see this!!"
She immediately called me into her office and informed me that I had gotten the highest score she had ever seen on the test (I think it was a 42 - above the 99th percentile)... I was like "Really??"

Aside - I've mentioned this many times before but it bears repeating: My entire childhood I always had the sense that I was smarter than most of the people around me but all of the evidence seemed to indicate otherwise... Things that were obvious to every else (including my teachers) were hopelessly confusing to me. I saw nothing but ambiguity in even the simplest of tasks. And a lot of the time I had no idea what was going on... By the time I finished high school I still felt like I was somehow "different". I wasn't sure exactly how or why but I was pretty certain that it had nothing to do with "smart" :-)

Despite my high test score I still had no specialized education or work experience, so there were only 2 job listings I might possibly qualify for. The first was for an apprentice machine maintenance / repair person at a manufacturing facility. It paid quite well and (in retrospect) I probably would have been extremely good at it, but at the time I wasn't so sure I'd be able to handle it. (Plus it was at night.)
The other listing was for a delivery driver at A-1 Plastic Supply (13700 Gamma Road - not in business any more). It also paid quite well ($5 an hour - about triple the minimum wage at the time) and was only about a mile from the apartment. They were looking for someone with experience but the agency owner convinced them I'd be able to handle it and arranged an interview.

After coaching me a bit on how to behave and what to say the woman sent me over there and (much to my amazement) I got the job.

New Digs

As soon as Karina got back to Dallas with her new husband she started looking for a bigger place to live... Yeah - the apartment in Oak Lawn was was a one bedroom and there were four of us so it was a bit crowded :-)

Of course, money was also a problem... Karina was no longer a "kept woman" and Bernie (her ex) wasn't too eager to help out given that she had just gone off and gotten re-married... Her new husband was penniless... And that left me...
During the time I'd been with the McDaniels I had still been getting child support payments from dad and I had hardly spent any of it. By mid June of 1972 my bank account was up to roughly $400 (about $2200 in 2012 dollars). I was planning on saving until I could afford a better car but Karina decided otherwise. Since she "needed" money it was obvious I had to give her all of mine. (That was 40 years ago, and yes - I'm still pissed off about it.)

The Dallas area was undergoing a lot of growth at the time so it wasn't very hard to find a bigger place. It was in a brand new complex that had just opened up in Addison, Texas (just north of Dallas) and the rent was quite reasonable. We got a 2 story, 3 bedroom, 2 bath unit (furnished) right on the pool for something like $210 a month. So my $400 was more than enough to cover all of the "move in" expenses.

Aside: I cannot believe how much that area has changed. Back in 1972 the road leading north to Addison from the LBJ freeway had stop signs. That little road has since become the Dallas North Tollway and it is lined with high rise office buildings for miles.
The apartment complex was (is) on the north side of Verde Valley Lane between the Tollway and Montfort Drive. (It used to be a single big complex but has since been divided into smaller ones.) Our unit was near the east end. (If you check Google maps you'll see kind of an odd shaped looped driveway with a pool right in the middle. We were in the building between the pool and Verde Valley.)

Another aside: I probably shouldn't admit this, but one of my most enduring memories from that apartment is of the woman next door. She drove a 69 Buick GS and left it parked on Verde Valley right outside my window (so I saw her frequently). She looked to be in her mid-30s and of Italian heritage (long black hair)... Very physically fit - moved like a dancer... She usually wore skirts that were quite short but loose fitting (flared?) so they kind of swished around her upper thighs as she walked... Yeah -"sexy" doesn't begin to describe it...  But I digress :-)

I remember hearing that the apartment complex had been built as a tax shelter for some investors. I'm not sure about that, but the "fit and finish" definitely left something to be desired. For example: The openings between the rooms were edged with badly warped lumber. There were wicked curves in a couple of spots... Then the first time we used the dishwasher we discovered that the drain wasn't hooked up - and it didn't take long to realize that one of the toilets was hooked up to the hot water...

The plumbing issues were quickly fixed, but we had a much bigger problem: The monthly rent was twice the amount of my child support, so somebody had to get a job. Karina's husband Mike scored a telemarketing gig (at some outfit that employed disabled people) but he quit after a couple of days. (Apparently it wasn't very enjoyable.) Karina was rather unhappy about that.

So, once again - it was up to me.