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”.
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