大象传媒

At Work on the Loading-dock at Chrysler
I landed a job at Chrysler in early April 1942 and was assigned to the loading-dock on the midnight or graveyard shift. It was hell, pure unadulterated hell! I couldn't see myself lasting out a week, let alone the seven months I actually did labour on valiantly, though without a shred of enthusiasm. The work itself wasn鈥檛 all that strenuous or demanding, just a matter of hammering nails into huge wooden crates in which disassembled trucks bound for the North African battlefront were closed in.. It was the shift itself that was the toughest part of it all. My biological clock simply could not adjust or adapt to staying awake from midnight to eight in the morning. In that first week I thought for sure I was going to flake out, drop dead before sun-up.. My job performance wasn鈥檛 all that bad, at least up until 4:00 a.m. lunch-break. After that it went downhill at an accelerated rate. I could barely stay awake. By six I was little more than a zombie with a hammer in my hand, my eyes like two piss-holes in the snow. Out of every handful of nails I picked out of a keg I couldn鈥檛 have driven a dozen into the wood. The rest were scattered all over the floor. It's a wonder I never got fired. After two weeks of suffering on the graveyard shift I wanted to quit so bad I could taste it. But I knew this wasn鈥檛 the way to go, especially after having given up a job four months earler at the Walker Metal chemical laboratory as a fledgling chemist. I couldn't hack the suffocating foundry fumes. I was sick for the two and a half weeks I languished there. My mother, naturally, was deeply disappointed in me for having quit, and for this reason I didn't care to face her wrath should I give up on this job as well. I also didn't relish the stigma of being a 'quitter' sitting heavy on my mind. Since there was no way out of this one as I could see it, I just had to hang in there, come hell or high water. And hang in there I did.

For three months I stuck it out and then came the great day when I got switched to the afternoon shift. It was like coming back from the dead. I never could sleep properly in the daytime, not even to take a nap. The very few times I did, I'd invariably wake up nauseated. So, with having been switched to the afternoon shift my well-being returned to near normal. The only thing not-so-good about it was that I鈥檇 miss out playing ball after supper with the gang, and also miss the street-corner gatherings in front of Lee鈥檚 Lunch, and when it got dark, hoping to make a date with the girls in Memorial Park. But other than that I was happy to get back to the normal swing of things.
In those first few weeks on the job, all the trucks coming down the line through the dock for partial disassembly and crating were sand-coloured for use in the North African desert war. For the first two months the crating procedure was such that two cabs went into one crate while the chassis and wheels went into another. This was fine and dandy until our people got the message from Ottawa that an imbalance of truck halves was accumulating at the ports of destination. There were either too many cabs and not enough chassis, or too many chassis and not enough cabs. This situation was brought about by U-boats sinking freighters carrying either one or the other half of the vehicles. It was a major problem which had to be quickly rectified. And it didn't take the designers in Ottawa long to come out with a new, more sensible method of crating. A simple answer鈥攃rate the trucks complete. Eighth Army either got the trucks or they didn't.

Every so often, several trucks would come through painted in olive-drab, which broke the monotony of work to some degree. It鈥檚 hard to explain, but the mere fact that because we were now crating vehicles with a different paint job acted as a stimulant. Day after day it was the same old colour coming down the line. And then this one morning, down the line came these olive-drab Dodge three-ton trucks. You could see and feel the subtle change in mood in every man on the line. It reawakened interest in their job, whether it was nailers like myself, the guys who stripped down the trucks, the checkers, the crane operators, the foremen and leaders, in fact everybody who worked in the dock. It might have seemed like nothing to get excited about, but it was indeed enough to make the day go a little easier. Strange鈥攂ut true. And when a vehicle other than an ordinary truck came through the dock, such as a fuel or water-tank truck or one of those great big workshop vans, you'd almost think the circus had come to town. A gala event, no less! The place swarmed with all kinds of important-looking people supervising the change in crating procedures, and watching over things in general. I always looked forward to such breaks in ther daily routine. I suppose everyone else working on the dock did too. Other than that, my job was not much different. I still hammered nail after countless nail into the green, highly scented pinewood panels

What one couldn鈥檛 help but notice every day was the departure of draft-age fellows on their way to join the Services. The war, as far as Canada was concerned hadn't reached that stage where great demands were being made on its youth to fill depleted ranks, although the draft age was gradually being lowered as the war heated up. The RCAF was the only arm of the Service losing men on a regular basis. Aside from the Corvettes and Destroyers of the Royal Canadian Navy on escort duty in the North Atlantic, and our boys flying in bombers in the night skies over enemy-occupied Europe, Canada had not yet committed its young men to total war in comparison to other Commonwealth nations. But the powers-that-be had to have seen the demand coming and were prepared for it. In the summer of '42 the draft-age stood in the 20 year-old grouping. In July of that year the word making the 'rounds was that the draft age would very soon be lowered to '19'. For me that was tremendous news, and I was hoping the famous letter from Ottawa wouldn't be long in coming. I fair chafed at the bit, not only to get away from the humdrum routine of working on the dock, but mainly because I wanted so desperately to be in the army. I looked forward with unbounded anticipation to that great day when I'd find my call-up notice in the mail. I was 18, going on 19 in September, so I assumed I wouldn't have to wait all that long. I hoped it would be inside the next couple of months. I hated the thoughts of having to spend another year of hammering nails.

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