As one would hope it to be, my college experience was a happy, entertaining, and enlightening time of my life.
I loved the freedom, the challenge, the sheer joy of those years. Every day was fun and exhilarating, not just for me, but for those around me. What could be better than that?
As I explained in an earlier post, those were austere times for the Smith family. Dad had just retired from the Air Force, and he took a substantial pay cut to reenter civilian life.
As a result, my financial situation at college was bleak. I was functionally poor. Chronically bereft of spending money. Always lacking a few extra bucks for a few extra beers.
Technically, everything was under control. At the beginning of each term, Dad paid in advance for my dorm room, meals, tuition, and books. But after that, precious little remained for socializing and frivolity.
I wasn’t alone, of course. Plenty of other students were on a shoestring budget. You simply made the best of it.
And, if you truly were in need, a solution was available. You could get a job.
Later on, I worked various part-time jobs here and there. I worked downtown, for example, serving tables at Ma Dean’s Boarding House. In exchange for working one meal a day, I got three meals free.
I finally had to quit. The food was great, but eating three meals a day at Ma Dean’s was killing me. Half of everything she served was cooked in a deep-fat fryer.
But for my first two years in Athens, I made the conscious decision not to take on a part-time job.
Why? For one thing, carrying a full academic load was time-consuming. I took college seriously and wanted to do well.
Furthermore, at least for a while, I wanted to enjoy the little free time that was left to me. I was willing to forego the money in exchange for the freedom. To me, that seemed like a reasonable and harmless arrangement.
Mom seemed to understand, but Dad was clearly irked. To him, it was evidence that I lacked a proper work ethic.
In Dad’s mind, it wasn’t enough to have a work ethic; you needed to demonstrate that you had it. He communicated that feeling without formally expressing it, as most fathers are capable of doing.
For my entire freshman year, Dad fumed about it. Then, when summer arrived and school was out, he ambushed me. He set me up with a full-time summer job.
Dad probably made the arrangement through a business acquaintance. I don’t know for sure. In any case, the plan was completely unrealistic, doomed from the start. And, after certain unfortunate events played out, even Dad admitted that.
The events of which I speak occurred as follows…
The job was at Flowers Baking Company on the south side of Atlanta. At the time, Flowers was franchised to produce Sunbeam Bread.
Sunbeam — the brand that featured on its packaging the wholesome, angelic image of Little Miss Sunbeam, one of the great symbols of both white bread and whitebread culture.
The bakery was a huge operation, employing hundreds. Production was largely automated. On the giant factory floor, ingredients were mixed, poured, baked, cooled, wrapped, stacked, and shipped out to the grocery stores, all in one continuous operation, around the clock, shift after shift, without end.
My job was in the stacking stage. I stood at the end of a gravity-operated steel conveyor belt. As the wrapped loaves rolled downhill in my direction, I had to place them in stackable plastic trays waiting behind me.
When a tray was full, I placed an empty tray on top of it and filled that one in turn. When the stack of trays reached a certain height, another worker took it away, into a waiting delivery truck.
On paper, it was simple. In practice, it was a nightmare.
First, the bakery was 40 miles from home, on the other side of Metro Atlanta. The cost of gas was going to dent my paycheck severely.
Further, I was assigned to a shift that worked from 6:00 PM to 2:00 AM. Getting to work meant fighting the evening rush hour traffic.
The work itself was not only tiring, but stupifyingly repetitious and monotonous. We had to repeat the same motions, over and over. Loaves came down the rollers without let-up. Unless you kept up, they would be all over the floor. In the eyes of the bosses, surely that would be a flogging offense.
Every hour, we got a 10-minute break. That was my time to rest, to contemplate the miserable working conditions and the pathetic pay — and to endure the taunts of my co-workers.
Ah, yes, my co-workers.
I was assigned to a team of four. The other three, about my age, worked at the bakery full time. Two were black, one was white.
The white kid was an arrogant, menacing person who considered himself the lord of his corner of the production line.
From the very beginning, he went after me mercilessly. He needled me for being a soft, privileged college kid. He ridiculed me for how I got the job. He made fun of my inexperience, my clothes, my glasses, my haircut.
The black guys served as his audience and enablers. They never joined in the heckling, but they laughed uproariously at everything the white kid said.
After the third or fourth break, the white kid went analytical on me. He started in on my inner shortcomings, such as why I was such a snob with such an irritating air of superiority.
All of his wisecracks were expressed as humor, but he meant every word. The hostility was genuine and ominous.
At first, I tried to go along with it. I laughed politely at the jokes and mildly protested. I also tried asking the three of them friendly, benign questions — where they were from, how long they had been at the bakery.
When that didn’t help, I ignored them. Naturally, that didn’t help either.
Finally, at a rest break around midnight, I saw red and got really angry. I told the little punk to back off.
He reacted as if I had stomped on his toe.
He rushed at me, fists and curses flying.
I wasn’t prepared for so quick an assault, but he never reached me. The two black guys, apparently knowing their co-worker well, grabbed him and held him back.
As the white guy struggled and yelled, one of the black guys pleaded, “You wanna get yourself fired? You wanna get all of us fired?”
Soon, the fit of rage subsided, and the white guy stopped straining. For a few long seconds, he fixed me with a cold, murderous look. Then he jerked his arms free and left the break room.
The incident was over. So was my career at Flowers Baking Company. The next day, I quit. I didn’t tell the bosses why.
A day or two later, I sat in the living room with Mom and Dad discussing my run-in with psycho boy.
Mom thought the kid should be reported. He was unhinged, a loaded gun waiting to go off.
True enough. But Dad thought getting him in trouble would only enrage him further. He was bound to lash out, maybe at work, or against his girlfriend, or a family member. I agreed.
Finally, so did Mom. Any action we took probably would backfire. We could do nothing to help. We let it go.
In the break room that night, I came very close to having my butt soundly thrashed. The white guy was a thug and a bully, but I remember him with sadness and pity.
What happens in a person’s life to leave them so bitter and angry? So damaged?
A few days later, mail arrived from the bakery. It was my first and final paycheck, for an insignificant sum. Typed across the bottom of the check was, “Worked one shift and quit without explanation.”
Ordinarily, I care a great deal about what others think of me. Ordinarily, that statement would have been humiliating.
In this instance, it wasn’t. Except for the bosses and some accounting clerk, everyone who mattered understood the facts.
Somehow, when I think back on my brief career at Flowers Baking Company, my first thought is not about my volatile co-worker.
No, Instead of that unpleasantness, my first thought is about the omnipresent, overpowering aroma of baking bread.
And second, I think about the episode of “I Love Lucy” in which Lucy and Ethel are assigned to an assembly line, with predictable results.
I feel their pain.
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