Nabisco Summer

                                                                   A surprise in every box...


 In  1968, the minimum wage was $1.40 an hour, but my  friends and I found a way to  make three times that amount.  The Nabisco Bakery on 73rd and Kedzie was hiring college kids that summer.
Once we joined the  American Bakers and Confectioners Union , passed an informal interview were given  our white uniforms, we were assigned our shifts. Dan and Paul lucked out with the 8 AM to 3PM shift, while I was given  3PM to 11:00 PM . Each shift had its advantages, but it meant I only got to see my friends on weekends. We decided it was worth the money we would make.

My first day on the job, I reported to the Mr. Salty pretzel line. Yes, there actually was a Mr. Salty sign on the door. Imagine a large, white room with rows of pretzel tying machines topped with huge metal hoppers. Men scurried around the room and fed big balls of dough into the hoppers, which were quickly converted into bow shaped pretzels by rotating arms. The tied pretzels were shoved out onto a conveyor belt and whisked into an oven, where they were baked, coated with oil, salted, and spun onto a large waterfall-like machine for cooling. What, I wondered, did I have to do with all of this?
 
It turned out that my job was to  tend the tying machines. I carried large dough balls and dumped them into the hoppers. I did this over and over again until I could barely move my arms. A cheerful young guy about my age named Jose noticed me struggling, and showed me how to lift correctly. For a while, he helped me until I got the hang of it. As we worked together, he filled me in on where he lived, where he had gone  to high school, and that he was a member of the Insane Latin Kings Southside Crew. He pulled up his uniform shirt and proudly displayed the first ever gang tattoo I'd ever seen. At a loss, for words, I complimented him on the artwork.

Jose's job was to tend the dough hoppers and clean the bakery floor. No scraps of dough escaped his big push broom. After a while, we switched jobs, and I made the rounds with Jose's broom and pan.
The foreman didn't seem to mind, so we kept alternating back and forth, talking all the while.

When I finished my shift, I changed out of my uniform, tossed it into a basket, and hurried outside where
Dad was waiting to drive me home. He was curious about my first day. I told him everything, leaving out Jose's tattoos and gang stories. Walking into my house, Mom met me.
  "Take a shower, you smell like pretzels" she said.  Good nose, Mom.

For the next four days, I carried dough balls, swept the floor, and Jose added a few dozen helpful   swear words to my college Spanish vocabulary.  Every night, in my dreams, I was carrying dough and sweeping the floor, over and over again. If this was going to be my summer's work, I would slowly go crazy.

The next week, I was transferred to sandwich cookies. Not, Oreos, mind you, just sandwich cookies. Hundreds and hundreds of cookies that ran down a wide conveyer built and were sorted and scooped into large square trays by a dozen or so women. Once a tray was full, it was my job to hoist it onto a wheeled cart. When the cart was piled ten trays high, I hauled it away, brought an empty cart and the process repeated itself.  What seemed like an easy job soon became difficult. Each tray full of cookies weighed nearly fifteen pounds . Lifting the last five or so trays over my head for was no treat. The foreman showed me how to safely lift, but my arms and shoulders started aching. When quitting time came, I was ready to leave Nabisco for good.

I arrived at work the next day stiff and sore. The union steward met me and told me that I wouldn't have to lift cookie trays any more. He asked me if I was ready for my real job. "Sure,"I said,expecting a trick.
As it turned, out, the college kids were hired for a reason. In the next few weeks, we would learn how to perform a number of different jobs, so that we could relieve workers when they took their lunch and coffee breaks.

For the rest of the summer, I made the rounds of the factory.
At any time, you could find me:

    Packing Saltine crackers into moisture proof tins for shipment overseas.
    Operating a machine that made boxes for Ritz crackers.
    Shoveling  peanut butter icing  for Nutter Butters.
    Inspecting Oreos for structural continuity. (Really!)
    Piling  pallets of Chips Ahoy cookies onto wheeled containers for shipping to stores.
    Eating countless snacks of crackers and "spray cheese" while I rode up and down a freight elevator.

Not knowing what I'd be doing from one hour to the next made the days fly by. The best
part was that I met dozens of really frendly, interesting people, each with their own story to tell.
The absolute best tale came from the man who was in charge of the Fig Newton filling line.
     When he first started at Nabisco, he was a relief guy like me. One day, he took over
     at the Fig Newton line. The  filling was mixed in a huge vat with a motorized
     blade that slowly ground figs, starch and sugar into a gooey, fragrant mess. There was
     a catwalk overlooking the vat, so the operator could start and stop the process.
     Stopping the line, however, meant time and money lost, so the instructions were
      "Don't stop unless there is an emergency."
       One day a worker began talking to the Fig Newton man on the catwalk while bending
       down to tie his work shoe. Don't ask me how, but the shoe slipped off his foot and
       fell into the mixing jam below.  The line was stopped and a foreman came rushing over.
       "What the hell is the problem?" he yelled.
         Looking down, he saw the remains of the shoe disappearing into the figgy filling.
       
        The foreman  scratched his chin and said," Let nature take its course, we're already behind schedule."

      I can't vouch for the truth of this story, but I stopped eating Nabisco Fig Newtons.