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Chapter 12

Self-Employment/Roadside Mailboxes

It wasn’t long before I left the big company job I made a mailbox for a neighbor whose mailbox got ruined one night by two teenagers trying to out run a policeman. The mailbox was on the outside of a slight curve in the road. It was a regular mailbox with a steel liner. The liner was welded to a 300 pound I-beam that had six-inch webs and flanges 3/8ths of an thick. The night it got destroyed the post was twisted and torn from the ground. The car that hit it went out of control. The tires screeched as it went side ways. The loud noise woke me up. I rushed to the window to see what was the matter. The car had come to a stop across both lanes right in front of our house. I heard the sound of a police siren. The policeman was going fast to catch up. He didn't see the other car until it was too late. The siren stopped abruptly two or three seconds before the two cars impacted. I could hear one of the boys screaming when he realized the speeding police car didn't see them. The sound of the crash was loud. The baby started to cry. Soon there were many other police cars with flashing lights in front of our house. I got dressed and went out. No one was seriously hurt.

The next day my neighbor went to get his mail and saw his mailbox and post in the weeds across the road. It was very heavy and had not been moved. His house was far from the road. Several days later when we talked about it he said he didn't hear the commotion. He asked me if I would make him a new one. That was the first mailbox I made. The second one was for my mother’s stepsister who was building a new house further down the same road. The architect of that house lived in another township. He ordered one and right after that four people who lived near him did also. The lady who was building the new house told another lady who mentioned the mailbox in the last paragraph of a column she wrote for a Cincinnati daily newspaper. The column was about hard to find things. Many people called to get one. By then I had lost my regular job. I started making mailboxes full time in the Apple Barn.

There was a 70-year-old industrial size wood working band saw that had been in the Apple Barn for several years. It had 32-inch wheels and weighed over 1000 pounds. When my uncle who liked guns lived nearby he bought it to make duck decoys. When he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia he left it there. He said the decoys he made were too big. He said a drake would have to be crazy to land near one of his hens. The band saw didn't have a motor.

The red tractor had a spine shaft coming out the back and it became the power source. The band saw was used to cut the rounded shape of the mailbox door and back.

All the square pieces of steel were sheared at the steel service center that sold me the steel. The first time I went to that place an inside salesman came to see me in the lobby. He heard my ideas and recommended the kind of steel to use. He made arrangements for me to get a few pieces to learn if they were the right size.

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There was also a 70 amp. 220-volt electrical outlet in the Apple Barn that the Peterloon farmers had installed years earlier for a welding machine they had. The least expensive welder at the welding store was a little red unit that was informally called a "buzz box". It used stick electrodes. The instruction book said, properly done welding should sound like eggs frying. It also said a "6013" stick was an all position electrode that could weld through paint and grease. The mailboxes were made from new steel, but if a 6013 stick could weld through those kinds of things I thought it had to be good. I called it the "farm electrode". At the local home and garden show an accomplished welder was amused by the weld drips on the back of the mailbox. I told him it sounded just like eggs to me. Another person looked at the mailbox, and then at me. He said, "I could make one of them," and I said to him, that is only half the battle. The other half is selling it.

With a welding machine, the band saw, a hand held disc grinder, several locking pliers, and other hand tools I had all I needed except a way to bend steel. To make a mailbox that didn't look like a battle ship the metal had to be bent, and that required 20-tons. I remembered someone real or imaginary said, "If you build me something to stand on I can lift the world". That made a lot of sense. 20-tons of pressure was easy to get. A hydraulic jack would do it, but if that much pressure was exerted in one direction there would be an equal amount going the other way. That week near where I lived a thick wood utility pole got hit and broken by a car. The utility company replaced it and left the old one on the side of the road. When I asked the utility company man in charge if I could have it he said if I wanted it I could have it for nothing as long as I removed it entirely. Four 4-foot pieces of that pole, 12 six-foot pieces of 3/4-inch threaded rod and a 20-ton hydraulic road service jack were put together to make a contraption that would bend steel.

I set up a playpen for Whit in the Apple Barn. If his diapers were dry, and he had a bottle to feed on he could cry all he wanted, because the only way I could get work done was do the work. When we had lunch he would play outside in the long grass. He would go with me to install mailboxes. He learned the meaning of work at a young age, and to this day he is a good worker. He gets it from his Dad. One day after several years had past I looked over at the playpen, and it was empty. He had climbed out, and was looking around the outer room. That was the last day we used the playpen. The Rabbit was under a car cover. He would take naps in that car on blankets bundled across two seats. Once he found a nest of newborn mice. He tried to get them going with warm milk and an eyedropper. They all died. They got a very elaborate funeral such as no mouse ever had.

When he was up and around which was most of the time he was constantly told not to touch the mailboxes. They were on the floor in the outer room. The paint was from a hardware store. It took a day to dry. I said, "don't touch it" so much I suddenly realized he had practically never touched one in his life, and I was touching them all the time. Several hundred mailboxes had gone out of there by then. The neighbor who had the first one traded up and got one that was new and improved. With a fresh coat of paint the old one became Whit's mailbox. He could put a saddle on it, grapple with it, hit it with a hammer, drool on it, and in general do anything with it he liked. In a short time it looked as used as any mailbox ever did.

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Whit's nickname at that time was Wiener Schnitzel, which soon became Veeders. At the very beginning I cashed an U.S. Savings Bond that was given to him at birth by a grandmother on Jenny's side of the family. That and my unemployment checks bought enough hand tools, and other gear to start making mailboxes. Without knowing about it, Whit paid to start the business. I named the business Veeders Mailbox.

A company paid by the big company to find me employment sent me to an interview at another big company. At the interview the interviewer asked me a simple question about my former job. I rattled on and on about the people there and what a mind altering experience it was. I didn't get the job, and they never again contacted me. They probably scribbled in the margins of a form that I was chronically unemployable.

At first making mailboxes didn't take much of my time. I got a temporary job as a laborer at a building under construction. The building was more than half-done. Often the superintendent was away at another construction site, and he would tell me what to do until he got back which was mostly keeping things clean, dig a hole here or there, or stack things. Much of the time another person who drove an earthmover and me were the only ones there who worked directly for him. There were independent contractors all over the place who did things like install electrical wires, hang ceilings, and paint, but they didn't work directly for the builder. One time the Superintendent drove in just as I was walking from the building with an armload of trash to put in a large container. He called me over to where he was and said I walked, "like a slew footed nigger." That was his way of saying I should move faster.

One of the electrical contractors threw an old screwdriver covered with goo out on the floor, and I swept it up. He said he didn't want it any more. I cleaned it up like new. It became my screwdriver. He knew I worked for the builder, but not much else. One day he said, as if he just found out, I was nothing. A few days later when I didn't do something correctly the superintendent fired me. After that I got a lot more serious about mailboxes.

Jenny quit working at the Riverboat Company several weeks before our second child was born. Her health insurance was going to expire not long after that. If the child was born before midnight on a certain day it would be free to us. After that we had to pay for it, and if there were complications it would be even more. We didn't have that much on hand. If the cost did come to us we would have to get in debt. Oddly enough the insurance agent who sold the health insurance policy to the Riverboat Company was a childhood friend of Jenny's. He explained the situation to us. The doctor knew the situation. The night before the insurance expired. Jenny went to the hospital and labor was induced. A boy was born who we named Samuel Langhorne. Sam was a name we picked out of the blue and Langhorne was a family name on my mother’s side. Neither of us knew it at the time, but it was also the first and middle name of a famous American author who lived in Hannibal, Missouri.

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Making mailboxes didn't provide us with enough money. On some weekend days when it was sunny I would put a few of them on a trailer, and take them to an outdoor market where anyone could display something for sale. Many people walked past in both directions to see if there was anything they wanted to buy. The mailboxes were expensive compared to other mailboxes. Some days no one would buy one, but most days I sold at least one. I took other things to sell like old starter motors, tow chains, or carving knives.

One time I displayed a cheap reproduction of a famous painting that hung in a museum in Paris, France. No one even stopped to look or ask what it was. I could have been the artist himself sitting there in a folding chair with bright yellow webbing. A hundred years later my painting would be in a museum. I didn't feel so bad on days when I didn't sell any mailboxes.

Making mailboxes was like going through a meadow after being in a tunnel. The customers were the same as a boss, except if they were awful I could tell them, and they could not fire me.

All the financial responsibilities were mine. Paying bills was difficult. I got into debt buying things I didn't have to have like new outdoor furniture and a boat. The attraction to those things was strong. If the person selling the item said it was possible for me to have what ever it was, that was enough for me.

Time flew past. When I saw Whit in a welding booth putting one together it seemed like yesterday he was happily sitting in a playpen while I made the mailbox.

Several years after I started making them the maximum shipping weight of a package was raised from fifty to seventy pounds. That meant the mailboxes could be sent long distances as easily as small packages. A few months before that I went from brush painting to spray painting. That saved much time, and made them look more professional. I then got a letter from an executive at a large mail order company located near Cincinnati. He saw the mailboxes at a local housing show, and in so many words he wrote that his company was considering selling them. The mail order company put a picture in their catalog, and sold them to people all over the country.

During that time our third and last child was born. That one was a girl we named Gretchen. When she was older I had to be careful what I said to her. I sometimes spoke gruffly to the boys. If the same comment were directed in the same way to Gretchen she would cry, and it wasn't a female affectation. She was different from the boys.

The farmhouse was small. When the third child arrived I began to feel like I lived in a shoe. The attic went the length of the front part of the house or about twenty-five feet. It was about ten feet wide. That space became a child's room. The ceiling sloped down to a knee wall that was less than three feet high. Along the center it was slightly over six feet high. The entire area was already surfaced with tongue and groove pine boards. The space behind the boards and behind the knee walls got filled with cellulose insulation. I sanded all the boards, puttied the cracks, and painted clear polyurethane coating to bring out the color of the wood.

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A neighbor who was replacing the carpet in their house gave me their old carpet. I put the best of it wall to wall in the attic room. The entrance was through one of the bedrooms. On both sides of the stairs the walls were painted a light aluminum gray color. I made a galvanized steel railing to go around the floor opening at the top of the stairs. There was a small window on each end of the room. It was a good child's room.

In the spring of every year there was a "home show" in the convention center downtown. People who lived in houses would get ideas on how to improve their home situation. The mailboxes were on display in a booth. At first I would talk with everyone who came into the booth. By the end of the night I was loosing my voice. An experienced person selling central heating and air conditioning units said I should "screen" first by asking the individual if they had a roadside mailbox. When I asked that question more than half didn't even have one. The people who did unfolded great tales of woe. It sounded like there was a war or a contest between the homeowner and the mailbox vandal. As time went by I learned most mailbox vandalism was casual vandalism done on through roads where the mailbox cannot be easily seen from the house. If someone on a short residential street with houses close to the road has mailbox problems they are being picked on. Statistics show they are a schoolteacher, or there is a teenage girl living in the house. When the police catch mailbox vandals usually it is Friday night, and they are juveniles driving their mom's car.

One person at the home show told me a story that a man who lived on a farm happened to see a car stop at the end of his long driveway. He stood there watching and moments later his mailbox burst into flames. He jumped in his car, the other car sped away, and there was a chase. The car being chased crashed. A parent of an injured passenger sued the farmer for causing the injury.

The most damage from mailbox vandalism happens when someone takes it personally. One man new to an area thought his mailbox was getting repeatedly hit because of his interracial marriage. I told him mailbox vandalism was a fact of life, and that everyone on his road had that problem. He bought a mailbox from me, and said he would see what happened. I said I would like to hear from him, but I never did. After awhile I went to where he lived, and drove past his house. I could see the marks on the paint where the mailbox had been whacked many times. Who ever did it continued on their merry way, and the mailbox stayed in fine shape.

Another person said once a week he would take his garbage cans to the end of his driveway. A large truck would come the next morning before dawn to pick up his garbage and everyone else’s on the road. He said several weeks in a row during the night a car would knock over one of his cans, and send garbage flying everywhere. This person telling the story said he finally filled the garbage can closest to the road with concrete. In the middle of the night he awoke to the sound of a crash. It was his best friend's son in his best friend's car.

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One man was full of ideas. He said he had given it a lot of thought and as a result he wanted to put coils of sharp wire like the kind on prison fences all around his mailbox. Another person took a ballpoint pen, and a piece of paper out of his pocket. He drew a picture of a World War II tank trap. He said his idea was to make a modified version of a tank traps for a mailbox post. The picture he drew showed a vertical piece of steel coming out of the ground. Under the ground three other equally heavy pieces of steel were welded at right angles to the vertical piece. He said when a car pushes over the mailbox post one of the pieces of steel under the ground would come up through the bottom of the car.

Several other people said a person that couldn't destroy their mailbox might come up to the house looking for something to destroy. These people were resigned to replacing their mailbox several times a year. They left it there to appease the appetite of the mailbox vandal. Others unscrewed their mailbox and took it in at night.

A lady who grew up in India bought one of my mailboxes. She said she didn't understand the mailbox vandalism phenomena in the United States. She said it was as if there were ferocious lions that came out at night.

I did the home show four years in a row. In the first two years many people asked, "Will it rust?"

I would say, "Yes, if the paint is damaged by a tire iron or a baseball bat the metal will rust". Practically none of those people ever bought one. The third year one of the mailboxes on display was made of totally non-ferrous stainless steel with a gleaming finish. That mailbox was expensive compared to all other mailboxes. I planned to eventually give it to my grandchildren to use as an anchor. When someone asked I was ready, "Yes, but here is one that will never rust. You could throw it in the ocean and it won't rust." I waited for them to ask how much it cost. When I told them there was a long silence. At first I though that would be the end of the conversation, but it didn't slow them down. Many people ordered a stainless steel mailbox.

The last year the mailbox was on display at the home show there was one with a picture painted on both sides. A person wanted to buy the mailbox if the picture was removed. The woman never asked if the picture made it cost more. She seemed to think it didn't cost any extra. That woman was like the other people I talked with at the home show. If they wanted a strong roadside mailbox they didn't want a picture on it at any cost. There was an established company that sold "personalized" mailboxes through gift shops. Not only could a person specify a street address on the mailbox They could choose the picture they wanted from among more than thirty shown in a colorful brochure. Their customer was not my customer.

Before I enacted the pay as you go policy someone wanted me to install one of my mailboxes many miles away in a neighboring county. When I got there she wanted it to be another color. I went back home, brush painted it the color she wanted and then returned several days later when the paint was dry, all at no extra charge.

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There had to be a certain inflexible quality to doing the business of installing a mailbox. Otherwise the householder would find some reason not to pay right away, or I'd be there all day for the price of one mailbox. Upon first arriving I would go to the door, and hand over the bill. It would be understood the bill would be paid when the job was done.

At one place when I asked the householder if there was any place in particular she wanted the mailbox located she said to put it where the old one was. When the posthole was half dug (that is the hardest part) she came running out of the house and told me to put it six feet further down the road. That kind of behavior in various degrees was not uncommon. I said to her, "Mam, I'll bore holes in your yard all day long, but it is $28 a hole." Then she said leave it where it is.

When all my business was local a busy week was when I made six mailboxes and installed them on Saturday. When I got in the mail-order catalogs sometime it took all night to fill the orders. Mailboxes were selling. There was no grand plan. Each day I went ahead and did what had to be done in order to keep it going. The business grew, not in leaps and bounds, but it grew.

Eventually I got someone to help me. I didn't pass economics in school, but I remembered "the law of diminishing returns." It said the more you make of something the less it cost to make that thing. Unfortunately, that law didn't work for me to me. I had to come up with a paycheck every week, and often there was no money left for me. The problem persisted. I think it was because the price of the mailbox wasn't enough. Sometimes it felt like a non-profit organization.

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Chapter 14

Back to Work

As fast as mailboxes were made they were taken to the mail-order company 25-miles away. Sales from the catalog were so great the people who worked there had to tell customers the mailbox was "back ordered". That meant they had to wait. Mailboxes were shipped all across the United States. A product in a catalog had the most demand when it first appeared. Sales would then decrease until the people in charge of the catalog found something else to put in its place. Mailboxes weren’t a typical product. Sales continually increased. What happened with mail order was probably the same as what happened with local installations. One person would get one, and when his neighbors saw how it withstood the slings and arrows of time they also would get one.

The business started with a broken telephone pole. It took three hours to make one mailbox. Over time a new press and better methods were found to do nearly every procedure. The time to make one decreased to an hour. Our in-house motto was “There has got to be a better way”, and our outside motto was, "we aim to please". The first hired person had the job of sweeping the floor and making mailbox parts. I spent more time welding. Soon it was like the song said, "the thrill is gone". It was the same work day after day. Needing money to get by, and being my own boss kept me going. Many mailboxes went out of there, but there was always a pile of over due bills on the table. I must have been doing something wrong.

The parts man died from some disease he tried to torment out of existence. The doctor told him one thing and he did the other. He looked gaunt all the time. I asked him if he was suffering from malnutrition. He had more to say about his latest gas and electric bill. He stopped coming to work and awhile later I heard from his wife and a government agency that he died. The disease won.

Two more people came to work in the Apple Barn. There was a new parts man, and someone I taught to fabricate mailboxes. Once they got familiar with the work I left for Yugoslavia to enjoy my mid life crisis. When I got back there were nearly a hundred mailboxes for me to paint. I told the purchasing agent at the mail order company you couldn’t rush a good thing. Years later they copied the mailbox and passed it off as their own. They had many justifications for their action. They probably would have found a reason either way, but I gave them one. An insider told me when the catalog company first started selling the mailbox the owner of the catalog sent one to a college friend who had a metal fabricating company in North Carolina. His purpose was to find out what it would cost to have the friend make the mailbox. The insider told me when the owner heard the friend would charge twenty dollars more he scoffed and said, "How can he (me) make them for that". The catalog company began as a one-man operation on a folding table in an airport. By the time I sold mailboxes to them it had grown into a multimillion-dollar company. People who worked there were easy going, but collectively as a company they were not the same.

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Years later the insider and another person started a new mail order company. Two big outfits were selling the mailbox. The new company quickly became a financial success. It was then the first company copied the mailbox, and no longer bought mine. The price of the copy was the same, but not for long. The insider who was now doing the new company had his assistant telephone and say a copy was on the scene, and we should meet to discuss "strategy". Jenny and I went there. The assistant was there. We all sat at one end of a large oval table. I said to the insider in an amused way what he had said to me years before about how the owner of the first company sent a Veeders Mailbox to a sheet metal factory to learn if it could be done cheaper. I hadn't talked much to the insider since then. The insider had become the top executive of a financially successful company. When I said what I said about the owner of the other catalog he looked at his assistant, then at me, and said I was mistaken. A pure business meeting was all that remained. If I had a seat belt on my chair I would have buckled up. He wanted to know if I could lower the price so he could sell the mailbox for less. He said the volume of sales would increase with the increased number of catalogs they planned to send out. I told him what we needed in the way of money to pay bills and put food on the table

During the months that followed we made more mailboxes and less money than ever before. The price was too low. The price of the Veeders Mailbox was much lower than the copy, but after a year the price of the copy was made lower than the already low price of the Veeders Mailbox. I knew what it cost to make them. They were trying to starve me out. When I was gone their price would go through the roof. The Veeders Mailbox and the copy looked the same. They even copied the shape of the flag. The flag was a required part of roadside mailbox, required by the United States Postal Service, but ours had a unique shape. I wrote a letter to the head man saying it was business as usual to copy the mailbox, but I didn't think it was business as usual to copy the shape of the flag. I said I always thought he was, if nothing else, a fair-minded person, and not to stop being one now. In my own sweet way I was asking him to dream up his own flag. He never replied, and nothing changed. In his catalog he was quoted as saying other mailboxes were "imitators". That took a lot of gall. It was as if the Veeders Mailbox never existed. Jenny and I realized there was a need to get protection from someone passing his work off as ours. We came up with a "logo", or mark that went on everything we did. It was like a finger print or a DNA test. Gretchen drew it at camp in Indiana. It’s the cover of this book.

For the first time Jenny and I started getting money from our parents. The tax department called it unearned income. The first year it was just enough to get a shiny new motorcycle. The mailbox business was breaking even or so it seemed. The first and last winter I had the motorcycle I kept it propped up on the kickstand in the Apple Barn. I shined it up and sat back to admire it under the lights. Among motorcycle people it was a "full dress touring bike". That year ABS anti-lock breaks were on two models made by that company. No other motorcycle had that feature. I didn't buy it for the breaks, but that might be one of the reasons I didn't get killed when a small truck went left of center causing a head on collision.

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A few years after the motorcycle wreck the second mail order company stopped buying the mailbox. There was no money to spare. Any unearned income either of us got went into the bank and it was rationed out as needed to keep the business going. It always needed some extra cash. Money where ever it came from made it possible for me to come down to this dry, heated, air conditioned, well-lit room in the new mailbox building and write this book. I would do it under a bridge if that were all there was. It scares Jenny when I talk that way. She thinks mailboxes are our life, and when I try to convince her otherwise I can see the look on her face that I might have hit my head too hard on the road.

The mailbox that replaced ours in the second companies catalog was a copy made in Sandusky, Ohio. That mailbox had its own flag shape it weighed much less. The bracket on the bottom fit a four-inch square post. I never considered they copied the Veeders Mailbox the same way the other guy did, although many design elements were the same. They copied the concept of a heavy duty, high-end mailbox. When I started making mailboxes there was the Veeders Mailbox and on the other end of the spectrum there was the regular soup can mailbox. Nothing was in between except possibly one type of mailbox with cardinals that went to a different market. All sorts of copies of the concept have evolved. There are plastic ones and metal ones, ugly ones, and pretty ones, pliable ones, and rigid ones. The Veeders mailbox never appealed to a mass market. It is clean looking, strong enough, simple enough, and more expensive. When people on the telephone ask what it looks like I say it is "lean and mean".

At one end of the Apple Barn on either side there are two big doors. Back in the days when orchards surrounded the place a tractor and wagon could drive in one door, deposit a load of apples, and continue out the other door. In the middle of the building on each side there were two smaller doors. One was shut permanently and one was our entrance and exit door. It took muscle to slide it open, and if a person wasn't familiar with it they would think it was latched. There was no buzzer or bell. A knock was futile. The door was made of tong and groove wood. Occasionally, someone who wanted to get in would pound on it with all their strength, and then we would hear.

Before the mailboxes were copied, and when we were making them as fast as possible, two people came to see us. They were trim and proper looking. Each one of them had a satchel.

That day sparks were flying in two welding booths. I was spray painting in an area designed for that purpose. It had an exhaust fan. I wore a paint suit and paint hood over my head that had a remote air supply. The parts man was standing by a drill press making hinges. It was winter. A 350,000 BTU furnace went continuously when we were working. At night a heat lamp kept the water pipes from freezing in a tiny insulated room where there was a toilet and basin. Those things were always there, but the furnace wasn't. It came from an automobile service station that was torn down to make room for a housing development. The paint hood was connected to an air hose. When I wore it I could only go as far as the hose reached. I had just walked out of the paint room with the paint hood off my head when I saw the entrance door move. I went over, opened it, and there were the two people. Much racket was behind me. One of them said. "I see you're busy. We'll come back at another time". They turned and left. When they said that all I had time to say was, "bye". It was sunny outside; the snow was melting off the roof. I rolled the door shut to keep out the cold. They didn't ask about an over due bill. They didn't say what was on their mind. They just said what they said and left.

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The average time someone worked for me was three years. When I wanted to find a new worker I couldn't do it by simply putting a job description in the newspaper and find a person the next day. Sometimes teaching someone how to make a mailbox took a month or more. My job went from making mailboxes to managing people.

We took breaks from work, and in the course of the conversation I'd hear about cars that didn't work, bills that were overdue, and women who ran off. I had my own problems. Early on I decided when we didn't have any problems it was when we were dead. How we dealt with the problem, not the problem itself, made us what we were.

The people in the Apple Barn were paid well. They had only one benefit, and it wasn't exactly a customary one. An employee could take the day off for no reason. One job didn't depend on another job like in a production line. If we were busy they had to make up the work. At other companies the customary benefits were health insurance, a retirement plan, paid vacations, paid sick days, and paid holidays.

They didn't get nickel and dime raises either. A worker earned what the work he did was worth on the job market. If they wanted benefits they could buy them themselves. When I became aware how much benefits meant I was more graceful about how I talked like a ballerina with tutu and toe shoes.

A good time to try benefits came when two people quit simultaneously. After that each person got benefits that were paid from their paycheck whether they liked it or not. The take home amount was less. After a year I decided benefits had little to do with a person leaving or staying, and they were dropped. When a person was ready to quit they quit. A job in a building with barn doors and a big cornfield outside didn't have the same allure that a real factory job did on a young man who had never been there before.

People with raw ability, and little else were the easiest to teach. That was not true for someone with all kinds of certification papers, and welding experience. An accomplished welder sooner or later always said they knew a better way to do something. The first few times I heard that I let them do it the way they wanted, but after two or three times it became clear they were wasting their time and my money. I took a new approach. I'd say, "There might be a better way, but since I was making them when you were in diapers give me some credit. Learn my way first. When you are comfortable doing that then show me the better way."

The inexperienced welder was the easiest to teach and to have make the mailbox. Within three years they were experienced welders. I tried not to mind when they left for the big factory job. Everybody had a responsibility to better themselves. It got so when I had a production problem there were many people out there who could make the mailbox, and one of them was always available. They worked weekends, or nights until I got things straightened out. They had a key. Theft was never an issue.

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The number of mailboxes a welder was supposed to get done each day was based on eight hours of work divided by the time it took me to make one mailbox. The worth of each mailbox was determined by what it would cost for an experienced welder to do the same job. If they needed more money all they had to do was make more mailboxes. Everyone, including me, was happier. I never said they had to start before dawn, but usually when I got there they didn't even look up they were working so fast. By lunchtime they were done and went home for the day. If there was a mistake a welder could identify himself by the welds, and had to fix it on his own time.

At the beginning of each week I painted all the mailboxes made the previous week. Wednesday I packaged them and delivered them to the shipping dock of the mail order Company. Thursday and Friday I took care of any essential nonproductive business.

The little insulated room with the toilet and washbasin was by the entrance door. We cleaned it by first scrubbing the plumbing fixtures with a plastic abrasive material and when that was done the entire room, the floor, and everything in it got power flushed with water spray from a high-pressure nozzle on a garden hose. Water on the floor was then swept out the entrance door. On Friday I also cleaned up the paint room and carried in the mailboxes that were going to be painted the next week.

For some reason I wasn't going to be there on Friday. There was only one welder at that time, and I asked him if he would power flush the little insulated room. He was working when I asked him, and he didn't answer yes or no. I thought that was because he was busy. On break the following Monday I said no one cleaned it out, and I told him to do it the following Friday. It was a thrill to clean that way, and I wanted him to experience the feeling. Also, I was afraid he thought he was beyond cleaning a toilet. His work was good. He hardly ever had to make corrections. He made a good mailbox. For a year and a half, like clockwork, without any interruption, he came to work, finished his work, and went home in the early afternoon. He had never cleaned the toilet room, but knew enough about how it was done to figure it out. It wasn't very complicated. I asked him if he rather do it some other day, and without waiting for a reply told him by the end of the day on Friday if that room wasn't cleaned then that would be his last day. I told him if he acted on the assumption I didn't mean what I said it would be difficult for both of us. I didn't take any more breaks that week, and had no occasion to talk with him.

When I was teaching him how to make a mailbox we sat down to drink some water, and he told me he was a Jehovah's Witness. I knew that was a religious group. He said, very soon Armageddon would happen. The story about Chicken Little came to mind, but I didn't say anything. If his religion made him who he was then it couldn't be complete foolishness.

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It seemed all of the young people I worked with had problems of one kind or another. When I kept hearing them my first impulse was to give advice, or help. A few times I would hold up my hand and say I had problems of my own, and couldn't get involved in their personal lives. Then I realized they didn't expect or