A second song on the Zune from Cat
Stevens/Yusuf Islam’s return after 30 years, An Other Cup, is this mash-up. It
takes a couple verses from a movement of 1973’s Foreigner Suite:
The moment you walked
inside my door
I knew that I need not
look no more,
I’ve seen many other
souls (girls in Foreigner Suite) before, ah-but,
Heaven must have
programmed you.
The moment you fell
inside my dreams
I realized all I had not
seen,
I seen many other souls
(girls) before, ah-but,
Heaven must have
programmed you.
This song, and especially the
Foreigner Suite, conjures up memories of the summer of 1973 when I got a sweet
job with Illinois Bell Telephone.
I had started the summer with a job
at McGraw/Edison in Algonquin, a manufacturer of appliances such as toasters.
The building is long gone, the Route 31 by-pass cuts through the area where it
had been, as is the company (Toastmaster is now part of the Middleby
Corporation).
For the first day I worked as a
parts runner on the non-air conditioned factory floor, I would go to the parts
bins to get whatever parts were running low on the assembly line. It was
ungodly hot in there, and I remember sweating like a horse in a sauna. After
that first day I was sent to work in the warehouse, which was about five miles
away in Carpentersville. There I loaded skids and tried to stay out of the way
of fork lift trucks that were running around, getting appliance in huge boxes
ready for shipment.
During that week I got a call from
Illinois Bell, where my dad worked, and where I had dropped off an employment
application as well, asking if I was available for a summer job for the
princely sum of $3.25 an hour.
$3.25 an hour!!! I could live like a
king on that!!! (I was still living at home, on summer break from Elgin
Community College)
I reported for work at the garage in
West Dundee (long gone, just across the street and NW of Emmett’s
Tavern/Microbrewery in the downtown) and went out for the morning with Jack L.
to learn how to take out wall phones. He had a pack of forms with the name and
address of a telephone company customer and the number of phones at that
address, and some minimal access information.
In 1973, you did not own the
telephone in your house, you rented them from Illinoi Bell and they were
hard-wired into your walls. There were no modular jacks that plugged into the
wall. When you moved, the phones were supposed to stay behind, and it was going
to be my summer job to come in and remove them.
However, many people would cut the
cord (some even ripped the wall phone from the wall) and take them with.
The access info would tell you if a
realtor was involved, who may have a key to get into the empty house/apartment.
The worst access info were the letters
UNK-NON-PAY; which meant Unknown, phone disconnected due to non-payment. I
hated these, since it meant someone was probably still in the abode and they
would never let you in to take their phone, working or not. If they let me take
their phone they would have to pay another deposit when they wanted to re-hook
up. If they said, “The check is in the mail,” I had to take their word for it.
I was not the Illinois Bell Police, I couldn’t kick in the door and say, “I
know you’re in there and I’m coming in after ya! Come out with your hand set
up!”
However, my whole job performance
was based on the number of phones I collected each day. I was the only full
time phone taker-outer in the NW suburbs of Chicago. Each day I would receive a
pack of forms from an area (Algonquin/Dundee/Carpentersville or Elgin/South
Elgin or Hanover Park/Streamwood) and I would take the green telephone truck of
whatever installer/repairman was on vacation that week and drive around the
suburbs and see which phones I could get to and which I could not (short of
breaking and entering)
As
the summer went on, the packets would be 3% new forms and 97% forms I had
already visited 8-10 times, checking with neighbors or realtors for keys, so
that I only had to drive by to see if anything had changed. This reduced my
actual work time to 3-4 hours, and I began to take 3 hour lunches in whatever
park was nearby. It was a great job, and they wouldn’t show me how to do
anything else.
Then
I had an accident, or actually, caused a very bad accident.
The
week of the accident the only truck available was an older truck with 3-speed
on the column, with a clutch that was wearing out. After a stop, it took a good
200-300 feet before the clutch would fully engage and you could get it up to 30
mph or so. This meant when you stopped at an intersection where cross traffic
did not you had to have a huge gap in the cross traffic before starting across.
Where
Bartlett road crosses Higgins road, just east of Dundee, was the intersection.
I was at that clear, sunny day. The sky was blue, there were no clouds, the sun
was bright and I was sure the
way was clear as I started across the 4 lane Higgins Road (today, Bartlett Road
is 4 lanes as well, not so in 1973)
Just
as I slowly built up speed, crossing the 2 closest lanes, I heard a squeal of
tires to my left and saw behind me a light blue VW beetle going sideways until
the wheels hit the island at the intersection with Bartlett Road and the car
was launched into the air and it flipped several times, ending up on its roof
in the ditch.
I
was in shock as I got out of the truck and went over to the ditch just as the
driver got out of the car and stumbled up to the roadway. He was holding his
arm in pain (it was broken) and I went over to help him sit down to wait for an
ambulance.
At
that time there was a bar on the corner and I went in to call the police (no
cell phones in 1973). We waited about a half hour or so until a police car came
and then the ambulance.
I
decided I should go back to the garage to report this incident, so I did. And
they sent me home, I was so shook up.
My
dad came home that night and said he heard (he worked on the test board in
Elgin and had talked to several people) I would be fired the next day. He said
he would call the union to see if they could do anything. I was not a union member
since I was only a summer hire, but the next day a union man was there to make
sure I had some representation as I explained to my supervisor and a couple
suits from Illinois Bell, in exquisite detail, what happened.
After
several hours, they retired for several minutes and returned to tell me I would
be allowed to keep my job.
Whew!!!
I
sure didn’t want to have to go back to McGraw/Edison and really work!!!
For
the rest of the summer they strove to give me the best truck available,
automatic transmission whenever possible. One week I was given the car of my
boss, which had an early mobile phone installed in it. The works were about the
size of a small suitcase and it was mounted on the transmission hump between
the front seat and the dash.
However,
they didn’t tell me how to operate it, nor that its ring was sounding the horn.
It started honking one day as I sat in downtown West Dundee, about a block from
the garage, scaring the hell out of me. I picked up the hand set and hit random
switches until I finally turned the right one.
“Hello?”
I squeaked.
“Randy?
This is Jack L., come on in, we have a project for you.”
“OK.
How do I turn this thing off?”
“Just
hang up and then switch the transceiver to “off””
“No
problem.”
I
came in and they had a Mickey Mouse phone for me to assemble and then wire (you
could buy novelty phones like this from Illinois Bell, which you could keep, I
think they were about $50).
Towards
the end of the summer, I got an UNK-NON-PAY one day and when I went up to the
door, a nice lady in her bathrobe actually let me in. And she had 3 phones.
JACKPOT! That was more phones in one place than I usually got in a day.
As
I was removing one of the phones in the bedroom her husband came home…
“What
the hell is he doing here?” he yelled.
“He’s
taking the phones for non-payment,” she calmly replied.
“He’s
what??? If he takes them now we’ll have to pay another deposit to get our
service back!!!”
“He’s
just doing his job,” she pointed out.
I
was scrambling to get the last phone out of the wall to get the hell out of
there. As I walked past them with three phones in hand, the lady was keeping between
me and her husband.
“Umm,
thanks,” I mumbled as I scurried to my truck to get away.
I
know where you thought I was going with this story (“Not much was happening,
until the “repairman” showed up at the scantily clad lady’s home…”), but I was
only 18 and was just glad to get out with my phones intact.
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