August 3, 2005 – Learning Where the Money Was

August 3, 2005 – Learning Where the Money Was

It’s close to 2300 miles from El Paso, Texas to Long Island, New York and they are some pretty hard miles when you’re on your way to start a new life together. My wife IM and I did those miles back in August of 1967. I had a job offer at Bendix Field Engineering at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland—Bendix had the contract to maintain computer equipment for NASA. We were en route to Bethpage, Long Island because I had an interview at Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., to see if they would make a better offer. All our worldly belongings were in the trunk and back seat of the new 1967 Buick champagne-colored two-door sedan—we managed to get a deal from GMAC financing and a local dealer in El Paso, based on my job offer from Bendix. We got the car for $3123.01 or 36 payments of $103.65. Given my starting salary was $635.00 a month, we were spending 16 percent of our income for transportation. We had no idea of what it was going to cost to live month to month in Maryland or on Long Island. The last time IM and I lived on the east coast we were each renting rooms—not practical for a new family. None of this was taken into consideration as we both excitedly planned for our new start.

When you’re young you have no concept of what’s practical and what isn’t. We started our trip east the afternoon of Sunday July 16, 1967 planning to stop when we got tired of driving. I had entertained the notion of driving all the way to New York without stopping, but soon realized the folly of that notion. We stopped for the night in Muscogee, Oklahoma, IM experiencing the first signs of morning sickness. The next night was spent in Columbus, Ohio and the third at a motel on Long Island close to Bethpage. We arrived early in the morning Tuesday July 18 and checked into a motel and spent the day resting from the long trip. Wednesday morning we packed up and drove to Bethpage for my interview. IM waited in the car as I spent the morning talking to a series of technical project managers. It was mostly wasted effort as they weren’t willing to offer any more than I was getting at Bendix. I told them I would think about their offer and get back to them. When I returned to the car, my poor IM was miserable. She and I both wanted to try starting new on Long Island, where she still had some friends. But, we both realized that all the bother we had gone through to get here and the unwillingness of Grumman to improve on the offer from Bendix was telling us this was not meant to be.

We turned our backs on New York and began the drive south to Maryland. Our cash was running low and the cost of living on the road was burning what little we had left at a healthy pace. We needed to get settled and start earning an income. We arrived in Maryland and found a motel just outside of Washington DC. We got in late again and slept well into the following day, glad to finally be where we were going to settle at least until after the baby was born. When we got up the following morning, I called Bendix and told them I had arrived and asked where we might find reasonable priced apartments. My soon-to-be boss gave me directions and the name of someone at the Landover Gardens Apartments at 7254 Landover Road to call. Within a day, we had found our new digs for the next year—apartment D on the second floor of the three-story apartment block—long enough for our first born to come into the world and be baptized. No sooner had we moved into our apartment than the realization hit us that my salary at Bendix was insufficient to cover our monthly expenses and would only get worse when IM began her regular visits to the doctor in preparation for the baby. The health plan at Bendix wasn’t covering IM’s existing condition. This baby was coming into the world on our nickel.

The first place I found to earn extra money after hours was a new hamburger restaurant called Hot Shoppe Jr., which was owned by Marriott Corp. This was before the company became big in hotels and their money came from food preparation: the Hot Shoppe restaurant—the sit down table service chain that started it all for company—and commercial food preparation for Airlines and other industrial food service. The Hot Shoppe Jr. chain was in direct competition with the McDonald franchise and a slew of others all starting out to take advantage of the fast food craze sweeping the country in the 60s. The Hot Shoppe Jr. was across the street from where we lived. I needed money fast and the shoppe had a “help wanted” sign in the window. From 6:00 PM until 11:30 PM every night when we cleaned and closed the place, I worked five days a week plus another full day on Saturday. One of the perks of working there was you got to take home any left over food. IM and I ate a lot of hamburgers the two weeks I worked there. I would have probably kept working those insane hours if the money had been better but I was busting my butt and not getting much in return. During that time, I had been looking for jobs that would take advantage of my background in electronics and I answered an ad for a technician job at a TV repair shop at 1138 9th Avenue N.W. in Washington DC. It paid a great deal more than the hamburger stand and I took it immediately.

IM and I had met a young couple, JC and AC, in the apartment complex where we lived. JC, a lovely brown-haired, round face English woman became a great companion for my pregnant Scottish wife, IM. JC for her part was the neighborhood caregiver, busying herself adopting neighbors who seemed to need help. Boyishly handsome AC—5-foot, 8-inch tall with a young Jimmy-Steward-thin build and long thin face—was an ex-airman who had met JC while on duty in the UK. He was now in the executive program at Marriott on a fast track for advancement. They had two boys, the eldest 4-year old SC had a fascination with keys—I often wonder what has become of him now in his early 40s. His younger 3-year old brother BC lived in his brother’s shadow—JC had just gotten over birthing SC when BC came into being. In many ways BC shared much in common with his father. Both were brooding individuals who took life very seriously, the sort who couldn’t see the folly of the world around them. On the other hand, JC had a great deal in common with her eldest son, SC. Both found delight in the simplest of things; both quick to smile; and both found interest in others around them. Having given birth to two boys, JC became IM’s source for information on pregnancy. JC provided IM with the best gynecologist, Dr. IC, and proved to be a great friend to IM throughout the time we lived in Maryland. JC, AC and the boys left the apartment complex a few months before we did, finding a detached home off one of the exits on the Beltway. AC was moving up and needed a home that befitted his rising status in the corporation.

The job at the TV repair shop in DC lasted a couple of weeks. It provided me some great insight into everyday working world of the nation’s capital. By 1967, affirmative action had entered the nation’s lexicon and the work place had more persons of color than I remembered when I was a child in the south. This was thanks to our 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, issuing Executive Order 11246 on September 24, 1965, which ushered in the era of “Equal Employment Opportunity.” The shop, located in a DC middle class neighborhood about to turn, had a delivery guy who would pick up and drop off TVs and radios to be repaired. He was a tall dark skinned African with a big build who I got to know. He spoke about coming to America a few years back with ambitions to go to school. He was taking the occasional class at college. He spoke with a heavy accent and tended to write exactly the way he spoke. On each of the receipts he would fill out for a set he’d picked up, he would write “OK to Fit,” by which he meant the set was ready to be repaired.

The shop had a number of technicians in the back room working on wooden benches that lined the rectangular shaped room behind the shop’s storefront. The older guys, who had been repairing TVs and radios for a long time could find and fix a problem in under an hour some fixed in minutes. Being unfamiliar with consumer electronics, it took me longer to find the same problems. After a couple of weeks, the shop owner got impatient with the time I was taking and gave me a choice of taking a pay cut or being fired. I had found another TV repair job in Bethesda and told him I was leaving. The owner was a big guy in his early 40s with a large build and a spreading midsection. He was eking out a living selling the occasional radio or TV and fixing them day in and day out. His workers were like him. They had settled for a life that fed off the retail industry in consumer electronics—they were the ones who repaired broken goods. It was very similar to the mechanics I had known in El Paso working in gasoline service station repairing cars. As a young boy, I had promised myself I wouldn’t become a mechanic. I saw myself, as I left the TV repair shop on my last day as a failed TV repairman. I promised myself I would find something else to spend my time doing than repairing broken electronics.

The job in Bethesda was illustrative of what I said earlier about young people being impractical about choices. The job paid about the same as the job in DC, but I was driving a great deal more. With the DC job, I would come home from work at Goddard and drive 8 miles each way to my second job. With the Bethesda gig, I was driving 16 miles each way from Goddard to Bethesda. If I had agreed to the pay cut, I would have been taking home about the same. The Bethesda TV job lasted a little under two months before the math became clear to me. Not only was the commute getting to me, but I was driving the Beltway (I-495) from Greenbelt to Bethesda in winter. When a job at a TV repair shop in the shopping center across Landover Road from our apartment complex came open, I jumped at it. The shopping center was an older strip mall built during the late 50s or early 60s with a barbershop, a smaller food store—struggling now that the Giant Food Store had opened up nearby, a drug store, as well as other small stores—the Hot Shoppe Jr. was at the southeast edge of the center. I worked six to nine each night and all day on Saturday for the same pay as the Bethesda shop. I thought I had the perfect part time job. This shop was smaller with only a couple of full time technicians working in the back room. I helped with picking up TVs to be repaired and delivering them when our work was complete as well as working on the bench. I stuck this job for about a month and only left because of a big raise in pay.

I recall seeing an ad in the local paper for a technician job at the Montgomery Wards in the Prince George Shopping Center at 3500 East West Highway in Hyattsville, Maryland. I went by the store and found the supervisor who had placed the ad. He was actually the sales manager for the electronics department of the store and he explained that he needed someone who would troubleshoot new sets delivered to homes that were dead on arrival. The amount of money he offered me was 50 percent more than any of the TV repair shops were paying. I realized that I had moved up the food chain in the consumer electronics business. I was now part of the sales channel. I started work right after New Year in 1968 and stayed with them until I left in October 1968. I saved the store a great deal in revenue from irate customers returning sets that were dead on arrival when delivered. When a set failed to turn on when set up in the customer’s home, I would arrive, make sure the power cord was plugged in and typically replace a fuse that notoriously blew when the set was first powered on. The TV set manufacturer must have been using defective fuses because for the year I was on the job, a great many of the calls I went on I replaced that fuse and turned an irate customer into a happy one. My boss was pleased because the number of returned sets dropped and his sales revenues rose. I had learned my first lesson in life, where the money was.