Oct. 15, 1982
On those rare times when the radio plays
Kenny Rankin music I can't help think of Stan.
In the earlier days at Cosmetics Plus --
when he and I work side-by-side in the warehouse – Stan used to play tapes he
made from Kenny Rankin albums, tapes made using a condenser mic because he had
not yet figured out how to record them any other way. So, sometimes I could
hear a cough or him shushing someone in the background.
Over repeated listings, these small additions
became aspects of the music I came to expect and hearing them on the radio now
I anticipate.
Then, when they don’t come when they
should, I'm disappointed when they're not there
Kenny Rankin wasn't the only music he
recorded to listen to while we worked but was by far his favorite. He like
Jackson Browne, James Taylor the kind of music radio with later labeled as soft
rocks these tapes became the soundtrack of our lives, a mellow underpinning to
the day-to-day routines we shared for two or so years before Donald made enough
money to buy his own building across town and to expand his business enough to
hire other employees and to condemn Stan to management position he craved, for
but proved unqualified to do.
Stam could not and often would not
delegate authority. So, when he got his office in a new place, we called it the
“Fishbowl” because he had a large picture window that looked out onto the
warehouse and he seemed to be floating inside it waiting to be fed.
Stan became miserable and angry, largely
because he believed he got sold a bill of goods when he took the job with
Donald and because being manager looked more tempting than it actually became.
Stan’s family originated in steel
country in Pennsylvania which is how he got into metal work while still in high
school -- though he grew up in Newark at the time when it began to change due
to white flight.
He didn't move far when he got married slipping
over the border into nearby Belleville, a mostly white enclave that bordered
some of the worst of Newark’s ghettoes.
As a teen, he was more than a little
wild, a typical high school kid who like to drink to excess though he's somehow
kept himself out of jail and out of the hospital.
He hated metal work, but it paid good
and allowed him to go to school at night, even if it did take him seven years
to earn his degree in business.
He would often recall how tough those
days were and how tired he was trying to hoist and cut sheets of metal by day
and crack school books by night.
He said he kept looking ahead to a day
when he would earn his living with his brain and not his back and would not
have to come home and treat the cuts bruises and burns, he got from his
non-stop struggle with steel.
He wanted to wear white shirts and a tie
and a suit jacket and not the work clothes he sweated through within an hour of
punching the time clock.
Every day, he looked ahead to when he
would get his degree, his key out of the sweatshop and into the dignity he
believed a college education would endow him with.
Stanley was too working-class to fully
understand how the system worked, how people like him would only trade one sweatshop
for another and, unless he went to the right kind of school and came from the
right kind of family, the degree would be a useless piece of paper.
Donald understood
If not a member of America's elite,
Donald understood he would need another way to climb the social ladder and was
able to manipulate the system to get him there and to better to guarantee his
children became even better than he did
Stanley must have felt the first twinges
of the truth when the degree did not immediately turn him into a Cinderella at
the prince’s ball and he did not get the kind of offers he dreamed about in the
steel company.
Part of this was his age and the fact
that he was already married, he needed a higher salary to support his family
when younger kids popping out of the university could afford to work for less.
The fact was, Stan earned more cutting
steel by far than any of the office jobs he worked as temporary on a trial
basis.
Donald offered a position with a future
which meant if Stan took the job in a startup company, the position would
eventually grow into the kind of job Stan dreamed of.
It was a tough choice taking, a job that
paid less than steel metal work with the hope that it would bring him what he
wanted or wait to see if a more conventional office offered him something
closer to what he really wanted.
Practicality
won out.
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