Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We’re in our sixth month on the road. After a stay back in Boulder, Colorado to take care of  personal matters, we traveled through Wyoming, Montana, and Washington, on our way to Portland, Oregon, where we lived for fifteen months in 2003 and 2004. We stopped first in Casper and Buffalo, Wyoming, neither of which will likely make you want to visit again. We did take a good hike on Casper Mountain, and we met some friendly Mormons having a breakfast cookout. Like so many small cities, Casper has allowed its downtown to be hollowed out, while the developments and strip malls outside town have grown rapidly.  Our hotel was five miles from town, close to a burgeoning healthcare center.  As the United States gets older and less healthy, medical entrepreneurs have seen investment opportunities in such places.  Motel and hotel capital always follows; recovering patients and visitors will need places to stay. Read More

VII. By the time Clyde got the letter telling him the date of the arbitration hearing, he was nearly out of money.  He’d made house payments, but the rest of the bills were overdue and food was in short supply.  His parents offered to lend him money, but he refused to borrow from a man who’d never object to what the company had done.  He had made a little money betting the horses.  He had plenty of time to study the Daily Racing Form.  The old  guy who owned the newsstand that sold the form had been a union organizer in the thirties, and when Clyde told him what had happened, he let Clyde have the Form on the house.  He started making elaborate calculations and charts, picking winners and checking his choices against the results the next day.  He placed imaginary bets, and kept track of his winnings. They were substantial. Too bad he didn’t have money to bet. Read More

V. A factory is a battle zone.  Nothing better illustrates the slogan that “time is money” than the daily struggle between workers and bosses to squeeze a little more free time or a little more work out of the workday. The time study guy would sneak around with his stopwatch, ever on the lookout for a motion to be saved so that another fraction of a second of work could be added to the daily grind. The men watched for him and devised ingenious ways to pretend to be working.  If you could start working at 8:02  instead of 8:00, take an extra three minutes for lunch, or line up in front of the time clock a few minutes before the shift ended, you’d beaten the system.  Same thing if you lingered in the toilet stall reading the newspaper. A minor injury that sent you home early with a full day’s pay was a sublime victory.  If the boss had you do something forbidden by the contract, you licked your lips in anticipation of the grievance you’d file and the backpay you might win.  Some guys had learned how to do two jobs along the assembly line, theirs and their buddies, and each would relieve the other for as long as half a shift.  This worked especially well when the foreman was in a meeting. Read More

  III. Like everyone else, Clyde Yassem remembered what he had been doing on December 7, 1941.  Sleeping.  His parents and two of his younger brothers rushed in to awaken him and tell him the news.  He didn’t think much of it at first, but as what happened became clear, he could see that it had electrified the town.  People talked of little else, and within a few days, young men were driving, taking the train, or hitchhiking to the next town up the river to the military recruiting offices.  A patriotic fever swept the nation, and everyone was now paying attention to events in Europe and Asia.  There were no Japanese-Americans in Clyde’s town, but the many families of German ancestry found themselves suspect by their neighbors.  Some teenagers had vandalized the German Beneficial Union club, after a report in the big city paper said that the GBU was a hotbed of homegrown Nazis.  Read More

 I.  [Note: This is a story from my book, In and Out of the Working Class.  I am posting it in episodes, so stay tuned!]                            Read More