Underwood Typewriter

Alice Davies was excited to send her son Mike off to his first day of work. It was the summer of 1942,  Mike was about to turn thirteen. This was going to be his first official day on the payroll at his father’s firm. Ever since he was young Mike had been accompanying his father to the office. Mike’s father, Myron Davies owned a company that exported fresh fruit and vegetables. Since his business crossed the international date line Myron often had to

go to the office on Sunday’s. Myron Davies was serious about his business. He was stern and had little patience or time to spend on his relationship with his son. These Sunday outings to the office were one of the only ways Mike could connect with his father. Years later Mike would recall with fondness the Sunday’s he spent in the offices of M.L Davies Company with his father.

Myron was more relaxed on Sunday as often he and Mike were the only people there. Myron would spend his time attending to his duties. He would busy himself checking the telex machine, writing letters, and would work on quotes for future orders. Mike would enjoy adventuring around the office.

Mike would feed paper in to the typewriters and practice typing. He did this under the careful watch of Myron. His father warned him not to press more than one key at a time. Mike had practiced on the Underwood machines quite a bit. He become a proficient typist at the age of eight. One Sunday he fed a sheet of M.L Davies letterhead in to the 1935 Underwood Champion typewriter. The next day Mike brought his letter to school for show and tell. This is the letter that was passed around his class that day.

M.L. Davies Company

Distributors Fresh Fruits and Vegetables

14 Spring Street, Room 105

Seattle, Washington

Dear Chun Hoon, Hong Kong
We have some really big red apples for sale. They are called Winesaps.

They come from Brewster, Washington in the U.S.A. My dad wants to sell

you some. You should buy them. They taste really good.
Sincerely,
Mike Davies

Seattle, Washington

1939

Mike would also walk around the office and open file cabinets and look at invoices and other documents. He daydreamed about a future in which he sold fruit all over the world. Mike wanted to grow his own apples and own his own ship. He would sail around the world delivering apples to the four corners of the globe.
In his father’s office Mike found a copy of the National Geographic. There was a full pictorial layout on the Kodiak Brown bear. Mike was fascinated by the piece. He showed one of the pictures to his father. Myron agreed they were majestic animals. He explained to Mike that the Alaska territory presented almost unlimited potential.
He went on to explain that Alaska was a land of great riches and natural resources. Myron told his son their firm was already shipping merchandise to Alaska. Myron looked out the window and pointed to a ship tied up at the pier. He said “ that ship will be carrying merchandise to our customers in Alaska”.
Myron slid a stack of bills of lading in front of Mike. He told his son he could look them over if he wished. He also lectured Mike to keep the bills in order and not to fold them or damage them at all. Mike read the bills with amazement.

M.L. Davies Company

Distributors Fresh Fruits and Vegetables

14 Spring Street, Room 105

Seattle, Washington
Ship to:
Bayside Grocery

Ketchikan, Alaska Territory

Stow low, below water line

5 Crates Red Delicious apples

5 Crates Winesap apples

5 Crates Navel oranges

3 Crates Green Cabbage

15 Sacks Potatoes bakers 100lb

5 Sacks Onions yellow 50 lb
Stow “ tween” deck
10 Crates Tomatoes Cuba, breakers

5 Crates Bananas, tropical code 2
Dry stores upper hold
20 Cases Green River Soda
Consign to

Alaska Steamship Company

S.S. Latouche

Pier 46 Seattle

Mike was completely fascinated by the idea of shipping merchandise in the holds of cargo ships to remote outposts in the Alaska territory. He asked his dad when he could start working for the company. He told his dad he was an excellent typist. Mike said he would come in on Saturdays and type bills of lading. Mike further explained he knew the difference between the Red Delicious, Winesap, and Gravenstein apples. Mike had memorized a chart from the wall in the office. Winesap and Gravensteins were light red in color and were tart. They were both good for eating and baking. Red Delicious were a sweet apple, mostly for eating. They were distinguished by the five star outline on the blossom end. Myron shook his head and chuckled. He said “ my now, you’ve been studying your apple charts haven’t you”?
Myron had difficulty processing Mike’s enthusiasm for the business. He reminded Mike there was much more to learn about the business. Myron chided his son for his enthusiasm. He told Mike that he’d have to study accounting and international business at the University Of Washington if he ever expected amount to anything. Myron was serious about this. He never considered how heavy that proposition might weigh on the shoulders of a nine year old boy. Myron was stern and was used to telling people exactly what was on his mind. Young Mike felt weak and vulnerable around his father. Mike engaged in lofty daydreams. Even at young age he felt he would have to deliver something big in order to impress his father. Soon Mike would enter the world of paid work. He couldn’t wait.
With much anticipation Mike Davies walked from the street in to the warehouse of M.L. Davies Company that day. Mike was twelve, about to turn thirteen. It was the summer of 1943 and the war was raging full steam ahead. The Seattle waterfront was bustling with activity. Myron Davies enterprise was very busy and was returning huge profits.
Twelve year old Mike was introduced to a man named George. George was a veteran of Seattle’s Commission Row. For several years he had managed the temperature controlled banana rooms for the firm Crenshaw and Bloxom. Crenshaw and Bloxom held a coveted license to import bananas under the Chiquita label from united Fruit Company. Myron had purchased Crenshaw and Bloxom earlier in the year. George had come to work for M.L. Davies Company in the purchase deal. He was now in charge of the banana and tomato department at M.L. Davies Company.
In the winter of 1941 Myron had acquired a mechanical three belt tomato sorting machine. M.L. Davies Company was the only firm on the “ row” that had such a machine. The new machine increased their production capabilities dramatically.

Everyone was coming to them for tomatoes. As a result tomato sales had increased ten fold.
The machine had a hopper at one end. George could fill the hopper with about five crates of tomatoes. This amounted to about one hundred and fifty pounds of product that had reached varying degrees of ripeness. The tomatoes would rumble out of the hopper and go on to three belts. The belts were divided up into wide, medium, and narrow widths. The belts were separated by rails that kept the tomatoes in their respective lanes.
One belt was for ripe ripe fruit, one was for “pinks”, and the other was for greens or “breakers” as they were referred to. The product was sorted by hand as the tomatoes came down the line. It took a good eye and fast hands to keep up with the pace of the machine. When the tomatoes came to the end of the belts they dropped into empty boxes. George stacked the ripes in stacks of five and lined them up on the warehouse floor. The salesmen were wheeling stacks and stacks of ripe, sorted tomatoes out to the street. Here the wholesalers and peddlers and jobbers were buying them as fast as the machine could produce product.
The pinks went to military bases, ship stores, and were shipped way north to Alaska. The breakers and greens would go back in the heated storage rooms. M.L. Davies Company had acquired the heated banana rooms of Crenshaw and Bloxom. It was in this environment in the summer of forty two that Mike Davies stepped in to the world of wholesale fruit and produce.
Alice had dressed Mike in his Sears and Roebuck striped coveralls. He was wearing heavy duty patrol boots, tied in double knots. Mike had a pair of heavy duty gloves in his back pocket. To top things off he was wearing a Milwaukee Road railroad cap. His sister Muriel had acquired the cap on a trip aboard the ski train to the Milwaukee Ski Bowl at Snoqualmie Pass. George saw the gloves in Mike’s pocket and told him he would need them to undo the wire bound tomato crates.
George showed Mike how to unfasten the wires on the crates. He showed Mike how to gently unload the tomatoes in to the hopper. George wheeled several stacks of tomatoes out of the warm room. He lined them up next to the hopper. Mike was standing there anxiously waiting to get started. George told Mike they were going to be working “asses to elbows” the rest of the day. Mike wasn’t sure what George meant by this statement. He found out sooner than later.
Mike unhooked the wires that held the top on the wooden tomato box. He carefully dumped the tomatoes in to the hopper. Mike dumped two more boxes and he thought the hopper was full. Mike moved the empty boxes to the end of the machine. This was where George would line up the boxes under the belts. As the sorted product came to the end of the line it would fill the empty crates. George had a scale and he would make sure each box contained twenty five pounds of tomatoes.
At first Mike thought the job might be too easy. Then George flipped the switch and the giant machine came to life. The tomatoes started leaving the hopper and running down the belt. There were ripes, and pinks, and greens, all coming toward George at once. Mike watched in amazement as George starting sorting the fruit. George had incredibly fast hands. Mike noted that George had fast hands, like Joe Lewis fast hands.
Any dreams Mike had of the job being easy were quickly erased. In the time Mike had wasted watching George sorting tomatoes the hopper had emptied out. Mike went over and dumped two crates in to the hopper. The hopper seemed to empty out as fast as Mike could fill it. Instantly Mike developed a more efficient system. He would unfasten the wire bound lids of five crates. He would put all five crates in the hopper. The he would unfastened five more crates, reading them fo per the hopper.
A delivery driver named Mel joined in the action about 9:30. He had run an order out to a ship at Smith Cove that morning. He joined in on tomato machine duty as he waited for his next dispatch. Mel was faster than George. Mel could work the sort line and the crate fill station at the same time. Mel would take the full crates from the end of the belt and put them on the scale. Ninety nine percent of them weighed in at exactly gross twenty six pounds.
Mel was a fine tuned perfectly efficient working machine. Mel could either work in silence or he could talk while he worked. If you struck up a conversation with him he would continue to turn like a well oiled wheel . This dream team of Mike on hopper, George on the sorting belt, and Mel doing everything else, was producing sorted boxes of ripe tomatoes at a world record pace. Stacks and stacks of crates were being sold on the street in front of the warehouse. The word had spread all over town. M.L. Davies Company was the place to go for tomatoes.
Mike reached for another crate of tomatoes. He started to untwist the metal hooks. He noticed on the crate a primitive looking label that had been hot branded on the side. It said “ tomatoes, produce of Cuba”. Mike opened five of these crates and then carefully dumped them in to the hopper.
He heard Mel say to George

“ the captain told old man Wannamaker the Krauts have already sunk five this year in the North Atlantic”.
Mike knew they were talking about the war. On commission row in 1942 everyone was talking about the war. Mel would soon be enlisting in the army. He returned to work at M.L. Davies Company after the war. He worked there for the rest of his life. Years later Mike and Mel would chat when they saw each other in the warehouse. They had formed a special bond that summer of forty two, sorting tomatoes together at 1111 Western Avenue.
At 10:00 George informed Mike it was break time. He offered to buy Mike a hot cocoa from a vending machine. Mike told George that he’d take a coffee black. Mike fought hard to choke down the black tar like substance that came out of the primitive machine. Mike had worked the first part of his first shift at Western Avenue. He had drank his first cup of coffee. George indicated it was time to get back to it.
George put his hand on Mike’s shoulder and said “ you’re a good worker Mike. You’ll make a good tomato man someday. “
Thus began a life long love hate relationship with the industry for Mike. He lived in the shadow of the old man for much of the remainder of his life.
Mike worked all summer on the tomato machine. He held his own for a young man just turned thirteen. George taught Mike how to sort the tomatoes for color. By the end of that summer Mike was adept enough to run the machine by himself. Mike loved working the tomato machine.
While he worked he would fantasize about owning his own tomato farm. In his day dream vision he saw his farm as the exclusive supplier of tomatoes to M.L. Davies Company. Mike had visions of several dozen greenhouses all producing tomatoes. Mike would have a truck and would deliver the tomatoes to Western Avenue. The more he thought about he realized he would need a fleet of trucks. He would own the biggest tomato farm of them all. Mike wanted to deliver something big. He knew his big tomato enterprise would impress his dad.
His hours spent working on the tomato machine were cathartic for Mike. His love for that old machine ran deep in his bones. Mike felt like he was in command of his own universe when he was working the tomato line. The machine was like a mental health oasis for Mike. Mike faced much self doubt and fear in his life. When he was running tomatoes the outcome was always a success. He could transition his mind in to another reality. When he was done with a run he always had three rows of tomato crates lined up.
There were ripes for the salesman to sell on the street. The pinks were for Alaska, ship stores and the military. Mike would put the the greens and breakers back in the warm room. He would mark them with a sign, indicating what day they had been run. He and George would leave the greens in the room for three days and then run them again. Mike’s contribution that first year was profound. George was able to focus more of his time on the banana operation. Which in its own right was a huge financial asset to M.L. Davies Company.
One day in August Mike walked over to a stencil machine that was located by the shipping desk. He carefully turned a dial to a series of letters, each time pulling down a handle. When the handle was pulled it punched out a letter on piece of heavy card stock. When he was done he pulled out a piece of the heavy brown card stock. Mike grabbed a device that looked like a flashlight. It was a refillable ink brush they used to stencil customer names on shipments leaving the warehouse.
Mike took his newly created sign and the stencil brush over to a giant white post in the warehouse. The post was cut from an old growth tree and was one of several load bearing beams that held up the warehouse. Mike held the stencil up to the post and ran the ink brush over it. George was curious about what Mike was up to. George walked over to the post and saw the message. Stenciled on that beam at 1111 Western Avenue in the summer of 1942, it said:
MIKE DAVIES JR

TOMATO MANAGER

M.L. DAVIES CO
Mike saved his money from his summer job at the produce warehouse. He used some of his savings to order a pair of Bushnell binoculars from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Alice Davies protested the purchase when she first learned of it. She lectured Mike about the virtues of hanging on to his money. She went on to tell him that the bottom might fall out of the market again. If it did the binoculars would seem like a foolish purchase. Mike was confused because it seemed the family was doing pretty well financially at this point. Alice told him that prosperity could be temporary. The crash could come again at any minute.
In order to appease and impress his parents Mike bought a certificate of deposit at Peoples National Bank in Seattle. He put one hundred dollars into a six month certificate. The interest rate was four percent. Myron took his son to the Joshua Green building in Seattle where Mike met Mr Green in person. One of the clerks helped Mike with his certificate. The clerk also prepared a ten dollar money order made out to Sears Roebuck and Company. This was the amount for the binoculars including shipping.
When Mike the clerk handed Mike a receipt for the certificate he noticed it was for one hundred and ten dollars. The clerk also handed Mike the money order. Mike told the clerk he must have made a mistake. He told the clerk the certificate was only supposed to be for one hundred dollars. The clerk looked toward Myron who then looked at his son and winked. He had paid for his son’s binoculars. Mike suspected that old Mr Green and Myron may have had a few pulls off a bottle that was in Mr Green’s office. Myron smacked his lips and was in a pretty good mood during the drive to the family’s home in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood.
Thus Alice Davies lost the battle of the binoculars. She did win the battle of prudent investment however. Myron had his money deposited with Peoples Bank during the crisis years of the early 1930’s. Joshua Green’s bank remained solvent and no depositors ever lost any money, even during the darkest years of the crisis. Mike renewed his certificate and over the course of one year made five dollars in interest.
Mike was patriotic and wanted to do something to aid the war effort. He knew he was too young to join the service and fight. So he joined the war effort in Seattle and participated in rubber and tin collection. The Japanese had a stranglehold on the rubber trade in Indonesia. The allies desperately need rubber for the war. Mike went around town and as part of the Youth Corps collected old tires. The rubber was used locally by Boeing in airplane production and by Pacific Car and Foundry in tank and rail car production.
Mike had a specific plan for the binoculars. He and the Youth Corps group went to work on a special project. There was a call put out to kids that had binoculars. Mike would hike up Magnolia bluff with his friends. On the bluff they would be joined by kids from all,over Seattle. Most of the kids had binoculars. Some of the luckiest kids had small telescopes. Some kids had neither but came along anyway. All of these kids would be up on the bluff watching for incoming Japanese planes. Mike felt this was the most patriotic thing he did during the war. He would stare in to his Bushnell’s intently looking for the enemy. Below him the city stood dark and silent. There was a blackout and headlights were restricted for almost three full years.
Mike would walk home, sometimes in the dark. Alice would worry about him incessantly. Mike would team up with buddies and they always made it home safely. As it worked out not one Japanese plane ever attacked Seattle. Mike hung on to the binoculars for many years to come. He had a picture from the 1960 Rose Bowl. He was sitting in the stadium watching the Washington Huskies play the Wisconsin Badgers on New Year’s Day. You could see that same pair of Bushnell’s hanging around his neck.

Chapter two (rough Draft)

I ejected the cassette tape of Steely Dan’s “Can’t Buy a Thrill”. I switched my radio to the AM band. The song “The Streak” by Ray Stevens came on. It was 1974, the war was over, disco was on the horizon, and Americans were taking off their pants and running through the streets.President Nixon was slowly slipping deeper in to the quicksand that was the Watergate affair. In a televised speech the previous night, he once again denied his involvement in the planning and subsequent cover up. One of his handlers had referred to the 1972 break in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters as third rate burglary. In his speech he had shown off volumes of transcripts of conversations that had been taped in the oval office. I watched the speech with my mom. She looked at me when Nixon signed off and said “I supported that guy, now I think he’s a rat”.

We talked about how long we thought Tricky Dick would last in office. Both of us concluded the doomed commander in chief didn’t have long. His time in power was about to come to an end.

I hit the channel button and was subjected to the song “Jungle Boogie” by Kool and the Gang. Americans were weary of the heaviness of the last ten years. We had been worn out by the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Images of flag draped coffins had left Americans in a state of exhaustion. Daily body counts from Vietnam had taken its toll on the American psyche. This combination of sad stories had cast a pale of darkness over our land.

This dark shadow, cast from a cloud of gloom, had opened up a market for bands like Kool and the Gang. Jungle Boogie didn’t have any hidden meaning. It wasn’t full of symbolism and metaphors. You didn’t have to slow it down or listen to it backwards. It was a stupid song with a funky beat and banal lyrics that not one person could sing or remember. In 1974 American was ready for songs like Jungle Boogie.

I punched the button and switched to another station. They were playing “Rock On” by David Essex. Essex was mired between two genres, punk rock, and glam rock. Whatever Essex was or wasn’t his song was very easy to listen to. You didn’t have to take acid or smoke weed and sit ponder its deeper meaning. In April of 1974 the radio dial was full of this kind of music. In the next several button pushes I heard:

Sunshine on my Shoulders, Hooked on a Feeling (ooga-sakka-ooga-sakka), Billy Don’t Be a Hero, Rock Me Gently, Top of the World, The Night Chicago Died, when I hit the button one last time and the song Mockingbird by Carly Simon and James Taylor came on I was gasping for air.

I fumbled madly for the Houses of the Holy cassette. I found it, it was pink, I pushed it in to the cassette and it went clunk and started playing. I turned it up real loud and tried to erase the memory of those other songs from my mind.

And so was the state of culture in America in 1974 when I handed the thirty five cent toll to the less than enthusiastic toll booth attendant. It was 5:45 am and there were about five cars on the Evergreen Point Bridge. The late April day held some promise of an appearance by the sun. It looked like it would take a while to burn off the marine layer that hung over Seattle. That would be okay because I had a full day of work lined up.

I was going to work with the banana man, Bob Haigh. He looked like a guy that rode cross country with Kerouac in the back seat of Neal Cassady’s car. He dressed in casual slacks, wore brown shoes and groaned and grunted a lot. Haigh’s car and his driver’s license were memories from a long forgotten era. Haigh depended on coworkers for rides to and from work. Sometimes Haigh wouldn’t go home after work. He would go to Jules Mayes joint in Georgetown and hang out. Somehow, someway, he would come rolling in to work in the morning. He had more lives than Morris the cat. He had an iron constitution.

I started work that day sorting tomatoes on an old three belt sorting machine. Haigh explained to me that the old machine had come to the new warehouse when they moved from Western Avenue in 1954. Haigh had worked for the company for over twenty years.

He knew more about bananas than any guy I ever met. He showed me the tracks in the ceiling where the bananas used to arrive in giant clusters from Central America. The clusters were held by hooks like huge pieces of hanging beef. The bananas would come down the tracks through the back doors of the banana rooms. They would fill the rooms with rows and rows of the one hundred pound clusters of green fruit from the jungles of Central America. Sometimes when they were rolling the clusters in to the warehouse they would find snakes and bugs and spiders hanging from the bananas. Haigh said the snakes were pretty lethargic having made the trek all the way from Costa Rica in the refrigerated hold of a ship. He would call the zoo and they would send a guy down to pick up the snakes. Haigh would kill the bugs and spiders and just throw them in the trash cans.

Haigh told me before Castro had come along the tomatoes would come from Cuba. He explained to me that my grandfather’s company sold a lot of tomatoes because they had the sorting machine. We would dump the tomatoes in to a hopper and they would start to come down the line. There were lights hanging down right over the sorting line. You would have to move your hands real fast to keep up with onslaught of fruit coming down line. Haigh was the fastest tomato sorter I have seen or will ever see. He worked assholes to elbows, with a Pall Mall straight hanging out of his mouth.

He would start work at the warehouse at 6:00 am every day. Sometimes he would roll in on an hour or two of sleep. Some days he would roll in with no sleep at all. To this day whenever I think I feel sick or tired at work I think of Haigh. Haigh hanging over the tomato machine his hands flying. Every piece of fruit he sorted went in to the perfect belt on the machine. Haigh, the man who had seen a million tomatoes fly by. Haigh was the banana and tomato king of Occidental Avenue.

This was the same sorting machine my dad had started working on in 1942. That was when at the age of twelve he worked his first day in the business. On this particular morning I was working with Haigh and another longtime employee, Mel Ream.

Mel had started on the sorting machine in 1948. He started out in forty eight making one dollar an hour. He did a stint in the military and returned to the company upon his release. Mel was one of the employees that had been with the company when they moved from Western Avenue to the new warehouse at Occidental Avenue.

At the end of the line each belt would dump the tomatoes in to boxes. Mel would work the end of the line taking full boxes out of the way and replacing them with empties. He stacked the full boxes on pallets according to their color designation. Mel would nervously draw air in between his teeth while he rooted harder than any guy I’ve ever seen, other than Haigh. I would work the hopper and help Haigh sort the fruit by color. Sometimes early in the morning we would stack the ripe boxes in stacks on the warehouse floor. The salesmen would come and wheel the stacks away as fast as we could make them.

At about 7:30 a guy named Joe rode up on an electric pallet jack. He got off and walked over to where Haigh was sorting tomatoes faster than any computer chip would ever process data. Joe looked at him and said “hey Haigh, does the kid have any potential”? Haigh grunted, groaned and shook his head kind of up and down and kind of back and forth. Joe looked at me and said “you better find another gear if you’re going to work with these guys”. Joe looked at Haigh and said “I need fifty pinks for Kraft. Haigh shook his head up and down and back and forth and grunted and groaned. Joe got on the jack and drove off. As he did he nodded at Mel. Mel nodded back.

Haigh looked at me and he said “fifty pinks for Kraft”. He shut off the machine and said “kid let’s go look in room number eight and see what we have”. He went over to one of the banana rooms and opened it up. When we walked in there was musty dirt like smell. I immediately thought about the greenhouses my grandfather had owned in Medina. This banana room had the same feel and smell. Haigh took the tops off a few boxes. He showed me the fruit inside. He explained to me that he had run these tomatoes the day before. They had been sitting in the room at 56 degrees with some bananas. He took a box outside and set it on the sorting machine and showed me the tomatoes under the bright lights. He told me they would be perfect for the ride to Kodiak in a Sea Land van. We pulled the pallet out of the room and checked the count to make sure there were fifty cases. Haigh grabbed a strange looking brush like device. He took a stencil card from a table and started brushing on the boxes the words “O. Kraft and Sons, Kodiak Alaska”.