Every commercial enterprise needs a goal, weather they are product or service driven. They also need a facility, equipment and most importantly a work force. The workforce must be motivated, trained and confident. Although rules of conduct and boundaries must be set, the workplace cannot be all work and no play. I believe a sense of humor must also be part of the mix.

When I first went to the Transportation Garage, the immediate supervisors consisted of three Foreman (one for all three shifts) and a General Foreman who I will refer to as the Boss. The Boss was a man that I admired greatly. I thought that he reflected all of the traits of an exemplary supervisor. He was firm but fair, clear thinking, was a good problem solver, would listen to other people’s ideas, would offer praise when deserved and he had a good sense of humor. He was an imposing figure, standing over six feet tall. As a child, he had been involved in some kind of mowing accident and had partially lost the ends of the two center fingers on his right hand. For all of these fine traits he did have one unreasonable characteristic. He was terrified of rodents. When I think of him, I think of the elephants in Dumbo when the mouse shows up and they all stampede in panic. At the shop, if there was an actual siting or even a rumored siting of a rat or mouse, you can be sure that within the hour there would be a representative of the pest control company on hand. These guys would show up with a suitcase and go around the shop re-baiting the various control stations. Of course, as he walked around the shop, all the guys would meow at him.

The Boss’s office ran along the main aisle for driving into the shop and as it was the last one, there was glass on two sides. There were not many decorations in the office. For wall hangings the Boss had posters of the “Miss Direct Connection” pin up girls (you wouldn’t get away with that these days). The furniture consisted of a couple of guest chairs, the usual corporate desk, (large, all steel, weighing at least two hundred pounds) and a swivelling office chair on castors. The desk top was usually clear except for a phone and a Hemi Piston with a broken aluminum connecting rod. The Boss lived within a few blocks of the shop, so most days he would walk to work. Once he got there, he would change into a pair of cowboy boots that he kept stashed under his desk.

One night on the Midnight Shift, one of the mechanics was out on a service call where he witnessed a large jack rabbit get hit and killed by a car. The mechanic picked up the rabbit and after returning to the shop, he went to the Boss’s office and loaded the rabbit into one of the cowboy boots so the rabbit’s head and front paws were sticking out the top. The Boss must have been still half asleep when he came into work that morning, because he failed to notice that the entire Midnight Shift and early arrivals for the Day Shift were all loitering in the aisle outside his office. When he reached under his desk for the cowboy boot, that’s when the human bomb went off. The two hundred pound desk went at least three inches off the ground and the Boss and his chair were plastered against the back wall in a crucifix pose. I don’t know how, but he was able to identify the culprit and shouted out his last name followed by a string of obscenities that made the Direct Connection Girls blush. This will always be remembered as “The Bunny in the Boots Caper.”

Employees in the garage could be divided into three groups; licensed mechanics, licensed body repair men and non-skilled support staff. The non-skilled guys consisted of clerks, janitors, tire men, wash rack crew and tool crib attendant. I remember on my first day at the garage and the day shift foreman taking me on a little tour. When we got to the tool crib the foreman walked up to the window and said “I need......” and rattled off a ten-digit part number. The tool crib attendant dutifully handed him a book of matches.
The group I want to focus on is the six men in the wash rack crew. The highest echelon of management was given cars to use and they paid no lease on these E-cars. They could be identified by a golden Penta Star in the lower left-hand corner of the windshield. The wash rack crew had a schedule and they would pick up the E-cars from their dedicated parking spots, fill them with gas, hand wash them, clean the interior and deliver them back to their spot. They had a full-sized van to use. At the beginning of each shift, the leader would come to the office and get a security pass so the van could go in and out of the plant gates as required. The wash rack crew were all very high seniority employees. The leader, who I will call Scrubbs and one other guy in the crew were number one and two for seniority in the entire corporation. Scrubs was a very gentle, kind hearted, but a somewhat gullible guy. Rumor had it that he was hen pecked at home, especially in the amount of beer consumption that he was allowed. Apparently, he had two cases of beer on hand. One case, unbeknownst to his wife, he kept in his neighbor’s shed. If he was caught drinking one by his wife, he would just say the neighbour gave it to him. The other case he kept in the basement of his house. If he wanted a beer from that case, he took it out through the bottom so the case looked unopened. Here’s an oft repeated scenario on a lot of Fridays. The van was not supposed to be used for anything other than picking up the various E-cars. During the morning hours the wash rack crew would start to harp on Scrubbs to slip on over to a hamburger shop across from the plant. You would hear stuff like, “Nobody’s going to find out. Come on it’ll only take a minute.” Finally, Scrubs would agree under pressure to use the van to slip out and get an order of burgers for the crew. Of course, one of the crew would rat Scrubbs out to the Boss and he would pull up outside the burger place while Scrubbs was inside. Busted again! There would be two results back at the shop. Scrubs would get a mild tongue lashing from the Boss and the crew would try and beat Scrubbs out of the money they owed him for the burgers.

We had a mechanic in the garage, who I will call the Firecracker Kid, FCK for short. He was one of those guys who always came up with a good line for every occasion. We used to have an Italian Mechanic who would laugh at FCK’s jokes and then say “Ho-ho Bobba Hope.” You remember what I said about the Boss’s hand. One time he got into a minor discussion with the Boss and he told him, “It’s a good thing you have this job because you would never have made it as a piano player.” We were sitting outside one evening for lunch and one of the mechanic’s girlfriends showed up and talked to him through the chain link fence. I’m sure she was a nice girl, but it was obvious that she had buck teeth. FCK’s comment, “Wow, that girl could eat corn on the cobb through a picket fence.” My wife and I had purchased a story and a half house where the staircase did a ninety-degree turn at the bottom. One time we were getting ready for work and Louise missed a step at the top and she tumbled down the stairs and her head broke a couple of lath boards at the bottom. Luckily, she went through between a couple of wall studs. There she was covered in plaster, but not really hurt. I wanted to take her to Emergency at the hospital, but she insisted she was OK. She got cleaned up and went to work. By the time she got to work, she had a nice black eye. I stupidly told the story at work, FCK’s comment, “I hope you wiped your boot mark off her back before you let her go to work.” About his own wife he would always say, “I had to borrow ten bucks so I could take her on our first date and I’ve been broke ever since.” If you have been thinking he got his nickname because of all his clever come backs, you would be wrong. He got his nick name, the Firecracker Kid because he had a never-ending supply of firecrackers and smoke bombs. He delighted in sneaking up behind guys and dropping a cracker or a smoke bomb. The curious thing was that he would always instantly feel remorse and would insist on giving the victim or victims a handful of his tiny bombs. If I check around the house, I can still probably find some to this day. One day, one of the mechanics banged his knee while working under a trailer when a firecracker exploded near him. No amount of free crackers or apologies would placate this victim and so a revenge plot was hatched, materials were gathered and all that was needed was a suitable time. Several days later, FCK had a transmission rebuild and replace job on the midnight shift. The job would take a few days. At lunchtime the victim installed a windshield washer bottle and pump under the dash of FCK’s truck. A pair of hoses with nozzles were placed under the steering column. Power was supplied to the pump when the brake pedal was engaged. Finally, the transmission job was finished and FCK was taking the truck out for a test drive. Now, the Foreman on mid-nights knew all about the plot and he began to worry that FCK might panic when he hit the brakes and in the chaos, he might drive through the garage door. As it was winter, there would have been a lot of explaining to do. So he flagged down FCK before he got near the door. FCK still had to hit the brakes and he did have to change his coveralls while everyone present clapped. That’s the tale of “The Ball Washer” caper. Ingenuity at its finest and satisfaction for a job well done.

By far the largest employee group at the terminal was the truck drivers, their dispatchers and management group. In the trucking world, driver turnover is a real problem. People will naturally jump ship for even a small pay raise or benefit increase. We didn’t have that problem as the drivers had a better than average union wage with benefits and all of their equipment was supplied. They didn’t have to worry about a lease on equipment, repairs or fuel costs. With all of these advantages we had the best of the best drivers. Despite all of these advantages, we had one driver who seemed to operate under a cloud of small boo boos. Someone nick-named him Colonel Klink, not because he resembled the tall aristocratic character from Hogan’s Heroes. Physically he was short and stocky with white hair, wire rimmed glasses and ruddy cheeks -- picture Santa Clause without the beard. I would guess that he was in his late fifties and he still lived with his mother, although he had a girl friend. She worked at Chrysler as well. She worked out in the yard in a small building called the Linker Shack. The workers in the Linker scheduled all of the trailers going into and out of the docks at the plant to maintain “Just in Time Delivery”. The Colonel’s usual job was running around Detroit picking up parts. However there came a Saturday when the Colonel’s job was not running so he took a job switching in the yard, delivering trailers to the docks. Early in the morning, he was backing under a trailer when he “missed the pin”. That is, he wasn’t on center to have the trailer pin slide into the jaws of the fifth wheel. Instead, he scraped the pin along the outside of the fifth wheel and bent the release handle for the fifth wheel. The jaws on the fifth wheel could not close with the bent handle. STRIKE 1!

Not wishing to admit to management that he had goofed up, he went to the garage and begged one of the metal men to straighten out the handle while he went to the wash room. The metal man got out the torches, straightened the handle by heating it up and then to make sure everything was going to work properly, he inserted our test trailer pin into the jaws and left it like that to wait for the handle to cool down. The Colonel came rushing back from the wash room and without asking anyone and wishing to hurry up and get back on the job, grabbed the hot release handle and burnt his hand. STRIKE 2!

So, the jig was up and the Colonel was forced to go and see his foreman and get a medical pass for the nurse’s station in the plant. He was also given the keys to a yard mule minivan so he could drive himself over. Instead of going directly to the nurse’s, he made a stop at the Linker Shack. Maybe he wanted his girlfriend to see his latest wound. In his haste, he failed to put the minivan in park and left it running in reverse. While he is dashing into the Linker, the minivan picks up speed, crosses the aisle and smashes the tail gate into the front of a trailer. Strike 3! That’s the day the Colonel got the hat trick.

That wasn’t the Colonel’s most famous adventure. One day he is high-balling it in the hammer lane of one of the freeways in Detroit. He is following another transport truck and they are both running way over the speed limit. About this time a guy in a Honda Civic enters the freeway and he is in a hurry. He sees a gap in the traffic and slides into the center lane. Still not fast enough for him, he sees another gap in the outside lane and he slides into it. Oh darn, there is a tractor trailer in front of him, so he slows down to match speed with the truck ahead. That’s when the Colonel picks him up on our truck’s front bumper. Honda guy is trapped. Can you imagine the terror in that Honda. All he can see in his rear-view mirror is a huge black grille and all he can hear is the banshee scream of a Detroit Diesel in full cry. Visibility for the area immediately ahead in a LCF Dodge, especially one with a Detroit Diesel and its raised hood is limited. We installed car aerials on the ends of all of the front bumpers of our trucks to act as a guide for the drivers. I don’t know how far the Colonel and the Honda went down the freeway. In his own words the Colonel said, “I looked over at my right fender guide and saw it was all bent. I was wondering how that happened when I noticed, wait a minute, there are two aerials. I let off the throttle and out popped this Honda.” Eventually they got pulled over on the side of the freeway. The Honda guy kept telling the Colonel, “I don’t know why you didn’t know I was there. I kept hitting the brakes.” Hitting the brakes, are you kidding me? It’s a wonder the Colonel didn’t run right over top of him. Back at the shop we brought the Colonel’s truck in for a mandatory after incident check-over. That truck had a light weight aluminum bumper and the only indication that anything had happened was a slight bow in the bumper between the frame rails. I think that 90% of the time the Colonel was unlucky, but maybe he was lucky in love and Hondas.