BOOK NINE
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THE QUIZ KID AND THE CARPENTER
BRUCE FLETCHER
Nobody likes to grow old, but Iâm afraid I grew old at a very early age. The years went by quickly when I was very young, and all too quickly in the years when I should have been having fun. I became a concerned old man at a very early age. I began to grow gray when I was twenty-one . . .
He was one of the original Quiz Kidsâfirst program, June, 1940. He was the youngest. âI was seven, going on eight.â He participated in the network program for three years, 1940 to 1943. He is thirty-nine years old.
âMy specialty was Greek mythology and natural history. These two subjects were what they asked me about on the show. At home Iâd sit on the floor and go through the book and recite off the names of the birds. My Aunt Louise thought this was very great and very wonderful. So she called in the neighbors to have me perform. One of the neighbors called the newspapers and they came and photographed me and reported on me. I was considered a child prodigy.
âAfter three years as one of the Quiz Kids, I was eleven and pretty obnoxious, Iâm afraid. When youâre seven years old, these things are tolerable. When youâre eleven and becoming an adolescent, these things become intolerable. It was considered wise that I retire earlier than age fifteen, which was considered the graduation age for the Quiz Kids. I wondered what happened. From then on, I was just plain Bruce Fletcher.â
My big ambition was to go to New York and Columbia University. When a Midwestern hick arrives in New York, you start at the bottomâand I did. I worked in a factory and was amused by the way it was run. Eight â the bell rang, all the machines started, and you started working like little machines yourself.
I found a job at a very exclusive menâs club for the social register only. What amused me was something that existed far beyond its time: servants were treated as servants. I cleared twenty-nine dollars a week plus two meals. They were slip-cowish, and this hateful chef sought to give it to the employees. Things became so desperate that one of the servants went up to a club member with some sausage that you wouldnât feed a puppy that was starving, and he said, âHere, you eat this.â Six months was a bellyful, I assure you.
I liked the factory much better, aside from the money. I was glad to be a cog in the wheel. At least it wasnât humiliating. I felt that I could just go through the dayâs work, make enough money, oh, that I could go to the Met three times a week or Carnegie Hall, and I could more or less live my life properly when my time was my own.
I was a young Columbia man while I worked in a cafeteria from 6:30 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. I was much respected by the management, even though I drove the people that I worked with insane, because I had standards they couldnât cope with. I cannot stand laziness and neglect when Iâm breaking my neck and somebody else is holding up the wall. I would scream bloody murder and carry on like a demon and a tyrant.
Through Columbia,80 I got a job as a proofreader at one of the biggest law firms in New York. Whatever the case, the law firm brought me back to the fact that I was not just somebodyâs scullery maid. The people either liked me very much or hated me with a purple passion. But I was respected. Iâve been respected on every job I ever had.
It wore out my eyes, just like you had them grated on a grindstone. You have to read small print all day long and keep your eyes glued to it. Also, we had handwritten documents that the lawyers would send in. Some of their handwriting was like Egyptian hieroglyphics. We ran into ridiculous situations. If something went wrong, we would be blamed and heads would roll like cabbage stalks.
I left under circumstances of considerable honor. I was given a farewell luncheon by half the staff of the law firm, meaning the lawyers themselves. I was asked to make a speech and I was much applauded.
The most I made was seventy-five dollars a week. I consider making good money in this life where you can walk into a supermarket and you can fill up the grocery cart with everything you choose without having to add the prices of every item. This should have gone out in the thirties, when there was never enough money to go around. Ha ha. I did in New York what I do now. I add up the prices when I put things in the grocery cart to make sure that the purse matches the fancy.
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During the years 1960 to 1968, he was on the west coast and in Texas. He worked as an announcer for three different radio stations, favoring classical music. With his collection of ten thousand phonograph records, he made tapes for broadcasts. One job âconsumed me day and night for a year and a half. Those were the happiest times of my life.â
âSince coming back to Chicago in 1968 I have considered myself in retirement. At thirty-six I was no longer young. People hire people at age twenty. They donât hire people age thirty-six. Oh, Iâve felt old since my twenties.â
I now work in a greenhouse, where we grow nothing but roses. You walk in there and the peace and quiet engulfs you. Privacy is such that you donât even see the people you work with for hours on end. It is not always pretty. Roses have to have manure put around their roots. So I get my rubber gloves and there I go. Some of the work is rather heavy.
The money isnât good. The heat in the summer almost kills me. Because there you are under a glass roof where everything is magnified. Thereâs almost no ventilation, and I am literally drenching with perspiration by the time the day is over and done with. But at least I donât have somebody sneak up behind you and scream in your ear abuse. I had enough of that.
The reason I like this job is because my mind is at ease all day long, without any tensions or pressures. Physically it keeps me on my toes. Iâm a little bit harder and tougher than I was. Iâm on my feet all day. I have an employer whoâs the best one I ever had in my life. There has never been the slightest disagreement, which is a miracle. Everyone says, âBruce is hard to get along with.â Bruce is not difficult to get along with if I had intelligent people to work with, where people are not after me or picking on me for that and that and another thing.
I tend to concentrate so much on what Iâm doing. Thatâs why I scare very easily. If anyone comes up behind me and speaks to me very suddenly when Iâm at work, Iâm concentrating so thoroughly I nearly jump through the roof.
I start at seven fifteen in the morning, and the first thing I do is cut roses. They have to be cut early in the morning. The important thing is to cut them so that theyâre rather tightly closed. Bees and butterflies donât last very long because thereâs no nectar and pollen. We cut the roses when theyâre so tightly closed that they canât get at them. If theyâre kept in refrigeration and in water with the stems trimmed properly, theyâll be fresh a week later.
Of course, thereâs always the telephone. That is a big problem. The greenhouses extend what seem to be miles from the telephone, but you can always hear it, even at a distance. It means a great big long run to get it, and pray that they wonât hang up before you can answer it. That usually means orders to be taken. Sometimes the day gets too much and I feel I want to die on the spot.
When the day is over I go to the library. If itâs a night of operas or concerts, I time myself accordingly. I always do as I did in New York. Unless I had to go stand in the standing room line at the Met, which meant getting there right after work, Iâd go home, take a nap, so that I wonât fall asleep at the performance. And then come back and get as much sleep as I possibly can. The day isnât complete unless I fall asleep with the reading light on and a book in my hand.
I donât know whatâs going to happen to me. It would be much more convenient if I had cancer and passed away and say, âOh, how tragic,â and I could have the peace of the grave. I donât know. Iâd love to be back in radio, in the classical music business. I blossomed forth like the roses in the greenhouse . . . I was in my own kind of work.
Peace and quiet and privacy have meant a great deal to me in the years since I made my escape. I didnât feel free as one of the Quiz Kids. Reporters and photographers poking you and knocking you around and asking ridiculous questions. As a child you canât cope with these things. I was exploited. I canât forgive those who exploited me.
I would have preferred to grow up in my own particular fashion. Had I grown up as others did, I would have come out a much better person. In school, if I would fail to answer a question, the teacher would lean forward and say in front of the class, âAll right! Just because you were one of the Quiz Kids doesnât mean that youâre a smart pupil in my class.â I wish it had never happened.
(Softly) But we were unique at the time. The Depression was over. America was the haven and all good things were here. And I was the youngest of the Quiz Kids. Of course, Iâm a has-been. The Quiz Kids itself has been a has-been. But it brought forth something that was not a has-been. It achieved history, and that is where Iâm proud to have been a part of it. (Laughs.) Ah, the time of retirement has come and Iâm in it! Iâm in it!
NICK LINDSAY
Though he lives in Goshen, Indiana, he considers his birthplace âhomeââEdisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina. At forty-four, he is the father of ten children; the eldest, a girl twenty-six, and the youngest, a boy one and a half years old.
He is a carpenter as well as a poet, who reads and chants his works on college campuses and at coffeehouses. âThis is one of the few times in my life I had made a living at anything but carpentry. Lindsays have been carpenters from right on back to 1755. Every once in a while, one of âemâll shoot off and be a doctor or a preacher or something.81 Generally theyâve been carpenter-preachers, carpenter-farmers, carpenter-storekeepers, carpenters right on. A man, if he describes himself, will use a verb. What you do, thatâs what you are. I would say Iâm a carpenter.
âI started workinâ steady at it when I was thirteen. I picked up a hammer and went to drive in nails. One man I learned a lot from was a janitor, who didnât risk the ebb and flow of the carpentry trade. You can learn a lot from books about things like thisâhow nails work, different kinds of wood.â
He dropped out of high school. âItâs a good way to go. Take what you can stand and donât take any more than that. Itâs what God put the tongue in your mouth for. If it donât taste right, you spit it out.â
Let me tell you where the grief bites you so much. Who are you working for? If youâre going to eat, you are working for the man who pays you some kind of wage. That wonât be a poor man. The man whoâs got a big family and whoâs needing a house, youâre not building a house for him. The only man youâre working for is the man who could get along without it. Youâre putting a roof on the man whoâs got enough to pay your wage.
You see over yonder, shack need a roof. Over here youâre building a sixty-thousand-dollar house for a man who maybe doesnât have any children. Heâs not hurting and it doesnât mean much. Itâs a prestige house. Heâs gonna up-man, heâs gonna be one-up on his neighbor, having something fancier. Itâs kind of into that machine. Itâs a real pleasure to work on it, donât get me wrong. Using your hand is just a delight in the paneling, in the good woods. It smells good and they shape well with the plane. Those woods are filled with the whole creative mystery of things. Each wood has its own spirit. Driving nails, yeah, your spirit will break against that.
Whatâs gonna happen to what you made? You work like you were kneeling down. You go into Riverside Church in New York and thereâs no space between the pews to kneel. (Laughs.) If you try to kneel down in that church, you break your nose on the pew in front. A bunch of churches are like that. Who kneels down in that church? Iâll tell you who kneels. The man kneels whoâs settinâ the toilets in the restrooms. Heâs got to kneel, thatâs part of his work. The man who nails the pews on the floor, he had to kneel down. The man who put the receptacles in the walls that turn that I-donât-know-how-many horsepower organ they got in that Riverside Churchâthat thingâll blow you halfway to heaven right away, pow!âthe man who was putting the wire in that thing, he kneeled down. Any work, you kneel downâitâs a kind of worship. Itâs part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. Itâs necessary. If you donât breathe, youâre dead. Itâs kind of a sacrament, too.
One nice thing about the crafts. You work two hours at a time. Thereâs a ritual to it. Itâs break time. Then two hours more and itâs dinner time. All those are very good times. Ten minutes is a pretty short time, but itâs good not to push too hard. All of a sudden it comes up break time, just like a friend knocking at the door thatâs unexpected. Itâs a time of swapping tales. What youâre really doing is setting the stage for your work.
A craftsmanâs life is nothinâ but compromise. Look at your tile here. Thatâs craftsmanâs work, not art work. Craftsmanship demands that you work repeating a pattern to very close tolerances. Youâre laying this tile here within a sixteenth. It ought to be within a sixty-fourth of a true ninety degree angle. Theoretically it should be perfect. It shouldnât be any sixty-fourth, it should be oo tolerance. Just altogether straight on, see? Do we ever do it? No. Look at that parquet stuff you got around here. Itâs pretty, but those corners. The man has compromised. He said thatâll have to do.
They just kind of hustle you a little bit. The compromise with the material thatâs going on all the time. That makes for a lot of headache and grief. Like lately, we finished a house. Well, itâs not yet done. Cedar siding, thatâs material thatâs got knots in it. Thatâs part of the charm. But itâs a real headache if the knots falls out. You hit one of those boards with your hammer sometime and it turns into a piece of Swiss cheese. So youâre gonna drill those knots, a million knots, back in. (Laughs.) Itâs sweet smelling wood. Youâve got a six-foot piece of a ten-foot board. Throwing away four feet of that fancy wood? Whatcha gonna do with that four feet? A splice, scuff it, try to make an invisible joint, and use it? Yes or no? You compromise with the material. Save it? Burn it? Itâs in your mind all the time. Oh sure, the wood is sacred. It took a long time to grow that. Itâs like a blood sacrifice. Itâs consummation. That wood is not going to go anywhere else after that.
When I started in, it was like European carpentering. But now, all thatâs pretty well on the run. You make your joints simply, you get pre-hung doors, you have machine-fitted cabinet work, and you build your house to fit these factory-produced units. The change has been toward quickness. An ordinary American can buy himself some kind of a house because we can build it cheap. So again, your heart is torn. Itâs good and not so good.
Sometimes it has to do with how much wage heâs getting. The more wage heâs getting, the more skill he can exercise. Youâre gonna hire me? Iâm gonna hang your door. Suppose you pay me five dollars an hour. Iâm gonna have to hang that door fast. âCause if I donât hang that door fast, youâre gonna run out of money before I get it hung. No man can hurry and hang it right.
I don...