My Two Summers in a Factory

No, I don't claim to be blue-collar

In the summer of 1972 and the summer of 1973, I worked at Soundolier, Inc., a company that manufactured speakers used primarily in office buildings.¹ The speakers were used to pipe in music, or Muzak. When I returned to college in the fall, I would joke with my fellow economics majors that not everything that the private sector produces has positive social benefit. I can still occasionally find myself in an old office building or restaurant, look up, and recognize a “sixty-eight dash-eight,” which was our most popular model.

I am writing this because very few people in my social class have ever experienced working in a factory. And in fact few people of any social class are going to have that experience: last time I looked, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was showing that only about 5 percent of the employed labor force was classified as “production workers” in manufacturing firms. We are a white-collar economy, and a lot of the politicos who wax romantic about manufacturing jobs would be horrified at the thought of one of their kids having one.

My two summers at Soundolier came after my freshman and sophomore years of college. They were the last blue-collar jobs I ever had.

I got the job because the owner of the company was a former neighbor, and his wife and my mother had stayed in touch. But I never saw him at the factory, and I don’t think any of my co-workers knew that this was my connection. They could tell that I came from a different background, but they did not hold it against me.

The factory was in a southern suburb of St. Louis, and most of my co-workers had southern accents. The union had only reluctantly admitted black members, and the blacks that did work there were on the second shift (meaning at night), so that I never interacted with them.

I worked in the shipping end of the factory, which had the most variety of tasks. One of them was “answering the oven.” Right before the speaker covers came to us, they were in the painting area. Blackie, the cigar-smoking union boss (he insisted that I join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) led a team that spray-painted the metal speaker covers as well as the “cans” that were the speaker backings. Blackie’s team would place the painted parts on a rolling rack and push the rack into an oven about 10 feet high and 20 feet long, to dry. After they had baked long enough, a buzzer would go off, and one of us in the shipping area would use a hook to pull them out of the oven to cool off.

When the cans cooled, we had to apply finishing touches. We would have to install rivets to the lip of the can, so that a speaker cover could be screwed onto it. This was a boring, repetitive job, where you sat in front of a rivet gun, positioned the can, pressed a pedal to get the machine to put in a rivet, rotated the can to the next place for a rivet, and did that several more times until all the rivets were in place. Then you did the same thing to the next can, and the next, and the next…

The next finishing step was called “gooping and padding,” done most efficiently in a team of two. One guy would use a paintbrush to apply the “goop,” which was a tar-like substance, to the inside of a can, which was about 15 inches in diameter and about 3-1/2 inches deep. He would then toss the can across the table to the other guy, who would stick pads of jute onto the goop. Both the goop and the pads served to muffle the metallic cans, making the sound from the speakers tolerable.

I typically did padding, because more experienced workers were faster at gooping. One of my gooping partners was a guy named Jim, who preferred to be called “Indian.” On one of my first days, he told me what the goop was made of. “Th’ ahfice calls it human excrement but ah calls it shit.” I assumed he was kidding, and I laughed. I never did find out what was in that stuff.

Finally, we put the cans and the speaker covers in boxes, along with packs of screws that could be used at the receiving end to assemble the speakers. We would take the bill of lading from the woman at the window to the office and put it, along with the boxes, onto the loading dock.

At our lunch break, we would use the loading dock as a handball court. I was an enthusiastic player. St. Louis in the summer will have hundred-degree days, and the guys would sometimes tell me to ease up so as not to get heat stroke.

We had one huge contract that took us several weeks. It was for a big office building in Chicago. Maybe Standard Oil? I’m not sure. For padding, instead of jute they wanted fiberglass. After a couple of days of getting fibers stuck in my arms, I opted to wear gloves. Nowadays, I figure that if I get lung cancer that job will be where it came from.

My guess is that there were adverse health effects from most of the jobs there. Guys who were cutting metal were subject to getting splinters. The painters were breathing in fumes that were probably toxic in the volumes that they were inhaling. Those of us doing gooping and padding were inhaling tar fumes and handling dangerous fibers (jute is less irritating than fiberglass, but it is not something you want to work with every day for hours on end.)

You are welcome to say that working at Soundolier would be better than sitting around playing video games and living off your parents or the taxpayers. But when a politician who has never worked that kind of job goes into some rhapsody about how wonderful manufacturing jobs are and how awful it is that they have disappeared, I am not ready to sing in harmony.

1. On the Internet, I found this article about the history of Soundolier. It has many holes. I’m pretty sure that Norm’s last name was spelled Friedman. The article has a “list of employees” that lists only a few in each year. The list starts in 1969 and ends about twenty years later, and only totals 119 for the entire period. There were more than that working at the Crestwood factory in 1971 and 1972 alone. The names I remember—Mike Stuckey, Jim Eicholz, and Bob Smith—do not show up o the list. Nor do I. The article says more about the Festus plant than about the Crestwood plant, which is where I worked.