I Was Hired Without A Resume
Ellenville, NY July 1948
For a Jewish teenager in the Bronx, working as a busboy in a Catskill Mountain hotel was a rite of passage. The tips were quite good, girls were available, but I didn’t know what to do with them. The hangout, our candy store, which was a forum of hysteria, was not a very good mentor when it came to the opposite sex.
On my first day, totally inexperienced, I selected a rectangular tray instead of an oval one to carry the glasses I had just bussed. As I turned to enter the kitchen, I hit the left door jamb with a corner my tray. The glasses came skidding down the tray and shattered at the feet of Mr. Tucker.
“Oh. I’m sorry Mr. Tucker.”
“It’s awrite, it’s awrite. You vuddent be here temarreh.”
That bastard knew he needed me. I spoke Yiddish to the guests, and they loved it. Mr. Tucker was a horror of a hotel owner. His eyes clung to the busboys and waiters like a barnacle clings to the hull of a ship. We were perpetually under under a microscope, especially when we ate, which, quite often, was the leftovers from the meal we had just bussed. Larry, the waiter brought his portion of chicken to the cook (a relative of Mr. Tucker’s).
“Look at this. There are teethmarks at the edge of the breast.”
“Teethmarks? Teethmarks? Those aren’t teethmarks. Maybe the shochet’s (ritual slaughterer) hand slipped when he kaylit (killed) the chicken.”
After that event, we placed our meat dishes “under a microscope”. It was Friday afternoon. I was wearing my high-top sneakers, T-shirt, and dungaree shorts making parallel sweeps with my mop. The Central Hotel’s dining room floor had to sparkle. The rabid husbands were on their way for their weekly conjugal visit at the Central Hotel in Ellenville.
Enter Mr. Tucker.
“Diss is vott you vehr to mop mine floor?”
“Mr. Tucker, maybe I should go to Ellenville and rent a tuxedo?”
“Vehr gehargett! (Drop dead!),” he cleverly replied.
My highlight as a busboy came on the eve of Labor Day. Mr. Tucker hired a pianist and his wife, a singer. I listened to her rehearse. During the Depression, the singers who came to our backyard for pennies wrapped in newspaper sounded like divas compared to her. Dinnertime! The dining room was so crowded with guests that I was given an extra table to bus. That’s OK. More tips. It wasn’t OK. No sooner had I returned from the kitchen to deposit the soiled dishes, then a trayload was waiting for me.
The solution stood behind my second table. There was an upright piano with sliding doors on the vertical portion for the tuner. I moved my tray stand near the piano, placed a few bussed dishes on my tray then slipped some of the dishes behind the sliding doors. I’ll get them after the guests leave.
Suddenly, the room darkened and there was a spotlight on the piano. The vocalist placed her hand on the top of the piano to the polite applause of the guests. She nodded to the pianist. His fingers struck the keys. Not a sound!
From behind the kitchen door, Mr. Tucker’s face was suctioned to its triangular glass window. He was glaring into the dining room. The clear glass window transformed into a multi-tinted stained glass as he maliciously observed the scene. He came tearing out. Torrential curses on a shower of saliva came swirling towards me. As he pulled out the dishes from the piano, some came crashing to the floor. The guests found this scene priceless.
The Central Hotel season came to an end the following day. Mr. Tucker glared at me as I approached him for my $4.50 Labor Day weekend salary.
“Money you vahnt fur die show you put on lest night? Gehrradah here bestid.”
Good things come in small packages. I told my story to my cousin’s husband who was an attorney. He told me it was against the law to work for no salary. The State Labor Department told Mr. Tucker he must pay me. The bulimic check was in the mail immediately.
The year was 1948. I returned for my senior year at James Monroe High School. During the official period the classroom speaker went on. “This is Doc Wiedman. Tryouts for the football team will begin tomorrow. If you are interested, meet at the gym at the end of period 8.”
Lenny Gallis was gushing with enthusiasm,
“Hey Danny. Let’s go!”
Why not? The following day, I carried all of my 126 pounds to the gym. At the end of the week, we continued outdoors. Made the cut.
Practices and calisthenics were so bruising that each step home was a transit of agony. Was it worth it? Usually, Doc Wiedman played his first team for the entire game. I was on the third team. We were beating Columbus H.S. 27 to 10. Doc pointed to me. I was on the field! Columbus had the ball. The quarterback faked to his halfback and began an end run. He was tall and wiry. As he rushed around end, I threw a block at his feet. He went up in the air and came down on his head. He was flat out on the field, unconscious. A doctor came out to attend to him. A stupid bugler from the Monroe H.S. band stood up, and played Taps to the laughter and applause of many Monroe students.
On the following Monday Dr. Hein, our principal, called two assemblies for the entire school. He was furious. He reprimanded the bugler and those students who showed approval for the bugler. The entire ruckus would have been prevented had Doc Wiedman kept me out of the game.
A graduate with an academic diploma! With no guidance from the school, nor my inexperienced parents, I graduated Monroe H.S. for the working world. It was 1948. I was competing with GIs who either graduated on the GI Bill, or were unemployed and looking for a job.
For 75 cents an hour I was hired by the Loma Dress Corp. as a billing clerk. My manager selected the dresses, I billed them, then sent them on to the packers for shipment. Just before Christmas, I was called into the personnel manager’s office.
“Do you like it here?” he asked.
“I guess your office is OK,” I replied.
“Not this office god damn it. Do you like working here?”
“Not for seventy-five cents an hour, I don’t.”
“All you do is fuck around with the girls in the office.”
“If I fuck around with the girls in the office, you know what you can do about it.”
He knew.
“Get the hell out of here!”
Sayonara Garment District. It will never see me again. Unemployed and unskilled, I swore that the soles of my sneakers would never leave a footprint on the streets of the Garment District, but what was available?
My resume read, H.S. Academic Diploma, a busboy in the Catskills, and a billing clerk in the Garment District. Could I meet the essentials of a messenger boy? A busboy in a diner? A Western Union Happy Birthday singer? A clerk at Woolworths?
Two weeks passed when Alvin came running up two flights of stairs to apartment 11.
“New York Central Railroad is hiring switchtenders!”
“What do we know about tending switches?”
“It doesn’t matter. No skills required.”
We rushed down to Grand Central Station. An aging doctor who needed a physical, gave us a physical. A gnome tested us for colorblindness, and then we were ushered into a room to read The Book of Rules. Seated behind a large mahogany table were men that appeared to have just been scrubbed, and given some ill-fitting clothes by the Salvation Army. From their struggle with more than five-letter words, this could easily have been a mentally-challenged classroom. Two weeks later, Alvin and I received a letter informing us to meet yardmaster Brophy at the 72nd St, freight yard.
We met the men with whom we shared the mahogany table at Grand Central Station. Yardmaster Brophy called out the names. Names I hardly ever heard of after twelve years of public schooling. He told us our work will be shape-up, i.e. we will be on a list from which we will be called to work. The salary will be twenty-five dollars a day. Wow! That was more than my father made after working over 30 years in the Garment District.
A hand signal, or a phone call would tell us which switch we were to flip. The work was simple, and so were our co-workers. One day, I was working with Murphy at The Hill. We enjoyed talking about baseball. He was a Brooklyn Dodger fan, I was a Yankee fan.
“Maybe we will work together tomorrow” said Murphy.
“No, Tomorrow is a holiday. I won’t be here.”
“Holiday? What Holiday”
“It’s the New Year. It’s Rosh Hashonah.”
I could see him agonizing over the nails I hammered into Jesus’ forearms.
“You’re not a Jewish lad, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” That was it.
No longer did I have a friend called Murphy.
From simple to complex and dangerous. One day, a brakeman called in sick. My name was next on the shape-up list. Yardmaster Brophy, knowing I had never done braking, joined me in our approach to a freight car at the top of The Hill. The freight car was connected to an engine.
As a brakeman, I was to climb to the top of a ladder on the freight car where a braking wheel was waiting to be turned. Brophy handed me a rounded, fairly narrow stake, the size and shape of a baseball bat. I climbed up the ladder to the wheel.
“Now the engine will give you a gentle nudge. I will release the freight car from the engine. As you go down The Hill, turn the braking wheel with your hands until the car speeds up. Then use your bat to bring the car to a near halt. Jump off with rear foot first, or you will tumble over.”
Why not? The brakemen did it, why can’t I? I felt “the gentle nudge” and I was on my way slowly down The Hill. The Hudson River was to my right and the Ripley men’s clothes factory was to my left. The freight car sped up. I turned the wheel, but the car didn’t slow down. I placed the bat into an opening in the wheel and pulled. The car slowed down to a speed where I was able to jump off.
“I put my rear foot down first.” If I was assigned as a brakeman again, I was certain I would come face-to-face with my expiration date. Sayonara New York Central Railroad.
It was 1950, the onset of the Korean War. A letter arrived for a new occupation. No resume needed. The government requesting my presence at 39 Whitehall St. It was for a physical to determine whether I was fit to be a killer for the U.S. Army. Almost every young man I had met in twelve years of schooling was there. While we reviewed the fun we had, and the history of our employment, the doctor checking for hemorrhoids interrupted us. Fridiholz, a peculiar character from our school tried to comply with the doctor.
“Now you saw the other boys do it. Bend over like they did,” he pleaded with him.
Fridiholz bent over. No sooner than the doctor’s tongue depressor edged near his rectum, Fridiholz was airborne. After two more attempts, the doctor asked Fridiholz to stand alongside of him “and watch again how the other boys did it”.
Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is not quite the place for seniors to reminisce. The sandwiches are cholesterol bombshells, the pickles are crunchy brine, and dissolved in the sodas are ten teaspoons of sugar.
Danny felt he had monopolized the conversation. “That’s enough about me. Let’s hear from you guys.”
Julie looked around. “Look at this place. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and every table is taken. There’s a population explosion in New York City.”
“Population explosion in New York City?” said Peb. We are the only survivors from our old neighborhood. The old neighborhood, which was like a shtetl, is now like a cemetery. It’s called Charlotte Gardens.”
“Yeah,” added Danny. “Just like the shtetl is history, so is our old neighborhood history.” Alvin joined in.
“Remember when I ripped off an eggy (a fart that smells like a rotten egg) near Refugee Jack’s wife and he shouted (in Yiddish) “This woman is a lawyer!” Danny rollicking with laughter replied,
“How could I forget it?”
Sy recalled,
“Whenever a young girl, or a woman came into his candy store, Refugee Jack’s eye’s lit up and his mouth salivated. What was that song we made up about Refugee Jack?” All of us sang together to the tune of Gentleman Jack:
Refugee Jack’s A sex-maniac. There is no such thing As a piece of dreck (shit) To Jack, Jack, the sex maniac.
The customers at the adjoining tables laughed at the five seniors who were trying to resuscitate “the scenes of their childhood, when fond recollections presented them to view”.
On a somber note. Sy asked,
“Where is Alice? Has anyone seen or heard from her?”
“Alice? Who’s Alice?”
“Don’t you remember, she married The Fink.”
“The Fink?”
“We called him The Fink because he ratted on Flippy when his stickball stick flew out of his hands and broke the grocery store’s window.”
Leaning back on his chair, Al closed his eyes, and seemed to carry himself back seventy years, where he was in the middle of that stickball game and Puggy was the next batter..
“Ah, Puggy couldn’t hit a car tire with that stick. I’m surprised he was able to hit the window.”
“Will you have cake with your coffee?” asked out waitress.
All of us chimed in, “No we’ll have water for our pills.”
We shook the bread crumbs off our pants and shirts, shook hands, and promised to meet again.
Unlike our good old days, parking on the streets of Manhattan was impossible. Our parking lot was waiting. I sat in my car, and locked the seat belt. No, I didn’t start the motor. The impact of meeting the boys crashed in on me. I was brought back to the neighborhood where we grew up, came of age and were drafted for the Korean War. Whoever thought I’d be sitting in a Honda CRV? Whoever thought I’d be sitting in a car, when I lived with my family in the Seabury Place tenement ? On my drive home, I decided to visit Charlotte Gardens.
The West Side Highway was nearby, but the rush hour traffic began to build up. So What? I’m not going to work, Sheila knows I’m connecting with friends, and it will just take about a half-hour to visit the scene of my childhood. I turned off at the Cross-Bronx Expressway and was part of a crawl heading east. Finally, I exited at Webster Ave. to visit the school where I had taught biology for 35 years. A passerby told me that he school was closed by the Board of Education. Closed? When I taught there my students weren’t Harvard potential but, I did have a 75% passing rate in my Regents biology class.
I approached Jane Addams High School with a roomful of pleasant memories. A passerby told me that the Board of Education closed the school down because it didn’t meet the standards set by the Board. I left, still clinging to those fond memories that were generated behind the locked doors of the school.
For the entire story read: Seabury Place: A Bronx Memoir.
Other books by Daniel Wolfe: Cold Ground’s Been My Bed: A Korean War Memoir and Coming Home: A Soldier Returns From Korea
danielwolfebooks@aol.com