Summer Job

Buffalo, NY - 1968

As the school year began to draw to a close thoughts turned to summer employment. My best friend, Bob and I began to conspire. Going home wasn’t an appealing option so we opted to stay in Buffalo and find work. Our football coaches were instrumental in helping us find employment at the Republic Steel Bar Mills on the south end of town near Lake Erie. On the graveyard shift we worked from 11pm until 7am. The pay was $2.73 per hour, a lot of money at the time. Being ambitious, we signed up for summer school as well. This meant attending two classes from 8am to 12 noon, weekdays for six weeks.

Bob and I found an apartment close to downtown. It was an interesting ethnic (black) neighborhood right off Main Street. An old Polish lady who liked to watch our every move rented us an upstairs two bedroom furnished apartment. Furnished was a key component as most of what we had were the clothes on our back. We lived on fried eggs and fried baloney and tried to sleep in the warm afternoons between 2pm to 10pm. My sister, Bridgette, who had just graduated from high school moved in with us and got a job at the hospital just down the street, as a nurse’s aid; good training as she later became a nurse.

The hardest part about the job was staying awake. The work was hot and dangerous. These were bar mills, the hot steel came out in large ingots and went through a number of progressively huge rollers to stretch and lengthen them into bars of steel. An ingot could be a red hot lump of steel measuring 2 feet high, 3 feet long, and 2 feet wide. The finished bars could be 50 feet long an inch thick and 4 inches wide.

We weren’t assigned specific jobs, instead each night we were assigned an area or a task. One of the jobs was pulling the finished bars off the rollers. We had a long metal pole about twelve feet long with a short hook on the end as the bars came down the line I would pull them off. Another job was grabbing the red hot steel bars coming out of one set of rollers and spinning them around and feeding them into another set of rollers. Bob got this job and his great fear was that he’d suddenly turn into Lucy Arnaz and foul up the assembly line. There’s no way he could eat that red hot steel.

Other things that made an impression were the pollution and chemicals running into Lake Erie. You had to be careful where you put your lunch because the rats would eat it if you didn’t. The noise was so loud in some places you couldn’t hear yourself think. I almost got fired one night because I couldn’t hear the instructions my boss gave me. At the end of our shift we’d be filthy and covered in thick soot. We had to wear safety goggles and when we took them off our eye sockets would be white and the rest of our faces would be black. We all looked alike, you could only recognize someone by the way they carried themselves.

Bob and I worked there eight weeks but some of the men we worked with had spent their whole lives in that hellhole. One of the things I took away was that there had to be a better way to make a living. My career options were slowly being whittled away one at a time through trial and error. There ought to be a better way.

Time and Chance Happen To Us All

Buffalo, NY – January - May 1968

Winter in Buffalo is typically depressing, it’s unbelievably cold and grey and summer is along way off. But in January 1968 I was not depressed but ecstatic for I’d started dating an unbelievably beautiful girl. She was bright, captivating, intriguing and sexy, all ingredients to which I was irresistibly drawn. She was tall and thin about 5’ 8” with blue eyes, an angelic voice and short, light brown hair she kept in a page boy cut. Her long legs supported by slender model’s feet. She was a conservative dresser and prone to fluffy blouses. She attended a private Catholic girl’s school just down the street. Her name was Sheila.

Frustrated by the dearth of attractive women on the UB campus, there were too many liberal hippies, a definite turn off. Being attracted to blonds at the time, there might have been three or four on campus. I had been extremely envious when my best friend and roommate, Bob met Sheila at a campus mixer and dated her several times that fall. When I noticed that he’d started dating another girl, I asked Bob’s permission to call Sheila. “No problem,” he said and so it began.

Sheila and I started going out. My philosophy about dating at this time was too pursue until I lost interest or the girl did. My assumption was if a girl continued going out with me she was interested. Sheila was gorgeous; not believing my good fortune I tended to put her on a pedestal. This was a mistake. It’s funny, at the time I didn’t want to make any mistakes with her and yet I made a huge one.

Real love where emotions are reciprocal does not visit us often in the course of our lives. Foolishly, when we are young we think it awaits us around every corner. Nothing is further from the truth. Love is more difficult to find than gold or the most precious diamond. When you do find it hold on for everything you’re worth for it is indeed a precious gift.

For the first five months of the year we went out together most weekends. Taking in a variety of activities; poetry picnics in a pastoral setting, visiting the zoo, submarine races etc. As a poor college student, I didn’t let my lack of funds stand in the way of having fun. Fortunately, Sheila was good humored enough to go along with most of my foolishness. One night we hitchhiked together down Main St. to a German “Oktoberfest” restaurant where we sang German drinking songs and drank beer. On the way home we smooched on the sidewalk while waiting for our next ride.

All that winter and spring Sheila had been my inspiration and a motivating force. She was in my thoughts constantly and I wanted to be a better person because of her. As a college football player you’re expected to train all year around. We had “practice’ on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings at 7:00AM at the gym. The coaches crammed a two hour workout into an hour of intensive drills, it was murder. On Tuesdays and Thursday we were expected to lift weights in the afternoon. This went on until the beginning of spring practice when we began football practice for about five or six weeks finally culminating in the “Spring Game”.

One night in particular stands out as a turning point, a good example of not knowing what one wants. Sheila and I had a date right after the game. It had been a great game for me. I’d made a number of stellar plays and had moved up to the number one spot at the defensive tackle position. This was an achievement as just a few months before I’d been a “red shirt” on the scrub team.

When you’re a “red shirt” you sit out a year, you keep your eligibility for another year. The way I was treated I wondered if I’d even be playing next year; they made me feel like I was the worst player on the team. It seemed I couldn’t do anything right. None of the coaches ever spoke to me about being “red shirted” and it caused me a great deal of bitterness and resentment.

The feeling of exhilaration at that moment was a highlight of my college career. My teammates and fraternity brothers were there and it felt like being on top of the world. Sheila was waiting for me outside the stadium. We went to small cabaret on the Southeast side of the campus, a rock band was playing. My roommates and I spent a lot of time pretending to be rock stars so I knew the words to a few songs and before long I was singing with the band on stage.

Afterward, as we sat in my car I tried to express how much she meant to me. At nineteen I was still a virgin and hadn’t made the decision to change. This was a night something could have happened but didn’t. It was a missed opportunity. How do I know, because six months later Sheila told me. “All you wanted to do was talk and all I wanted you to do was take me.” I have no idea what might have happened had I slept with Sheila that night or any other. But I’m guessing it was another crossroad.

In college all three of my roommates were dating girls they later married. Now forty years later they are all still married to those same women. I can’t help but wonder what life would be like had I followed their course, but I took a different path and wound up in a different place.