William Trowbridge: Breakdown

     In the summer of 1960, after my freshman year in college, I got a summer job at Continental Can Company, Plant #5, in Chicago. It was an aging, half-block-sized brick building near Cicero, former residence of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. The plant was a “closed shop,” which meant, much to my corporation vice-president father’s displeasure, I had to join a union, in this case the United Steelworkers. This was my first union membership, and I was happy to belong. Going in on my first day, I noticed a new Chevy Impala in the Cyclone-fenced parking lot had been stripped of its tires, wheels, transmission, and probably more. The thieves had left it propped up on cinder blocks. I was soon to discover my new workplace was also in sorry shape.

      I was assigned to the first shift, which ran from 8 a.m. to 5. The foreman led me into a cavernous room that took up most of the ground floor, where three huge machines unspooled 16-ton rolls of tin plate into sheets to be turned into cans. The machines resembled aircraft carriers, with ladders to the control towers. He took me over to an end of the one he said I was to operate. The noise was almost painful. When I climbed up, I saw an array of dials, buttons, and switches—and tin plate moving rapidly along a conveyer belt. A short, swarthy guy, maybe in his 50s, was there to break me in. His work shirt read “Hubert.” I noticed a reddish scar running from under the side of his Local 47 cap to beneath his shirt collar. Captain Ahab came to mind. He told me he was just back from three months in the hospital. As he was running through what all the controls were for, I asked about the bright red button, which was big as a Caddy hubcap. “That’s the emergency stop,” he said. “It’s big so you can reach it with your foot or head if this fucker starts to make a meal of you. Caught my sleeve on the roller, and my legs were too short to reach it.” He’d smoked the cigarette he held in his yellow fingers down to half an inch. “Never push that button except to save your ass,” he said. “It beaks all the circuits, and it takes the electricians a couple of hours to get ‘em reconnected.” He told the tin plate coming in had been cut into 3×3-foot sheets, which would drop through an opening in front of us and onto a wooden pallet below. When it filled, I was to push a button to slide it to the side and replace it with an empty one—all this before it started overflowing.

       Hubert demonstrated how, every now and then, I was to grab a sheet off the line and hold it up to see if it was bowed. If so, I’d have to adjust the rollers. The sheets had razor-sharp edges, but the company issued only a pair of cotton gloves for protection. There were lots of sharp edges, hungry machines, and heavy objects for workers to deal with, but during my tenure I saw little evidence of adequate safety measures. I had to buy my steel-toed shoes and should have been savvy enough to buy ear plugs. I wondered if Hubert’s injury could have been prevented by proper guards on the rollers and belts.  

     We got 15-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and an hour for lunch. But when I came back from my first break, Hubert told me I’d better take 45 minutes, “like everybody else.” After that, I was careful to learn when to ignore company policy. Lunch was served in a large, Spartan cafeteria that offered the standard menu items, most of which had been cooked in batches hours before. The place reminded me of the ones I’d seen in prison movies, like Cagney’s White Heat. It was segregated, but I don’t think that was company policy: it was just the early 1960s. One time, I noticed a grayish-skinned guy come in who looked like he hadn’t changed clothes for months. Somebody next to me called him “Nick the Greek.” He said to avoid getting on the freight elevator with him “unless you wear a gas mask.” Of course, Nick ate by himself. Sometimes he’d wander back and forth on our floor, occasionally taking the elevator up and down. I was told nobody ever saw him doing any work.

     Shortly after I came back from lunch that first day, Hubert declared me ready to take over and climbed down the ladder, leaving me to deal with tin plate streaking along a conveyer belt at, he’d said, 600 feet a minute. The pallet soon filled, but I couldn’t remember the right button to move it. I stood there as it overflowed until the heavy sheets started to piggy-back and then, catching on a counting bar, took flight. They went up about four feet and then, spinning like Ninja throwing stars, descended on my fellow workers. So I slapped the red button, and the whole machine jolted to halt. No one was hit, though I got called quite a few names. And it did take two full hours for the electricians to reconnect the circuits. I was told to report the next day, and they’d  find something else for me to do. I was embarrassed but also angry that I’d been assigned to operate something so important and complicated with so little time to master the controls.

     When I returned, our union steward led me to my new job: putting rows of cans into rows of cardboard boxes—on second shift, 6 p.m. till midnight. I tried to thank him, but he cut me off, saying, “I’m told to keep members on the payroll, even dipshits.” I was tempted to respond, but I needed the work. And I wondered about the implication that the union protected members no matter what. 

     The cans clattered side-by-side along a metal conveyer. I boxed them in tens, picking them up with a wooden rake that had the tines pointed outward. They rolled non-stop like in that old comedy skit about the sap in the pie factory, where line speeds up till chiffons go flying. I became robotic: rake in, cans out, cans in box, rake out, repeat and repeat. I’d get mesmerized sometimes, in a kind of assembly-line Zen. However, the pace was at the speed some efficiency expert apparently found to be just to the edge of what a human can stand, which would break the spell. A workmate told me that, after the last expert’s visit, the line was running even faster. And it was as noisy there as at my previous workplace. I began to understand why a Boston worker I read about in the Tribune went around shooting people in his plant who wore white shirts. On our floor, nerves also frayed—to the point that, at a jam-up, the ecstatic cry, “BREAAAKDOWN!,” could be heard throughout the floor. Sometimes the event was helped along by a well-placed screwdriver or wrench. 

     I got two letters from the company that summer. One complained about $150,000 in “product spoilage,” which it implied was mostly caused by employees. The other encouraged us to buy stock in the company. Fat chance. Once, I took the elevator up to the third floor, where gallon cans were stored, wrapped in packages of 50. They were stacked five or six high in material the texture of grocery bags.  I got one of the heavy hand trucks up to speed, rammed it into a bottom row, and watched a couple of stacks come crashing down. As the Frankenstein monster might have said, “Spoilage GOOOD!” If the company were so worried about sabotage, I didn’t see any effort on its part to make work there less stressful and hazardous.      

     Summer two was pretty much like the first, but in my third and last one, I was transferred to cleanup duty on the graveyard shift, 12 a.m. to eight. The machines were shut down, the main lights turned off, and the whole floor was occupied by only a foreman, myself, and a co-worker. The silence was a little eerie. I thought of those abandoned factories in horror and crime movies where the final chase takes place. David Lynch would have felt at home. The foreman there, Jimmy, was a good guy, for a foreman. He was short and wiry, with a lot of grit and a thick Chicago accent. He liked to talk about his past. He told us he used to sneak rides on railroad cars during the  Thirties, like other Depression hobos. He said that one time a railroad dick caught him on top of a freight car and, at gunpoint, ordered him to jump off. Since the train was going fast enough to make the jump likely fatal, Jimmy told the guy to go fuck himself. “You’re a smartass little shit, but you’re not worth the bullet,” the dick said, and told him to get lost. Even though Jimmy was a foreman, I got the sense that he thought our employer and the railroad dick had a lot in common.

     The problem with night cleanup, for the company anyway, was too little work to fill more than four or five hours. We only had to do our section of the first floor. Jimmy’s solution was to tell us that, after we finished, not let him see us till time to punch out. So most nights Nick, the other guy on the crew, and I had between four and six hours to kill. Driving back to our homes was impractical. So sometimes, given the hours when we were used to sleeping, we’d find an empty boxcar on the tracks to catch a nap on a couple of cardboard sheets we’d scrounged up. We’d usually fill the rest of the time at the all-night bowling alley across the street. Rainbow Pins had thirty lanes, a long bar, and an arcade room. A Pabst cost two bits, and we’d go three or four rounds—who counts? We couldn’t care less about freeloading off the company. By sunrise, we’d usually go back and doze or shoot the shit till the shift was over. I never got adjusted to the reversal of seeping hours

     I left Continental Can against my father’s view that unions were a threat to American businesses. But the members, myself included, in their hostility or indifference to the company’s welfare, also seemed wrongheaded. I’m no economist, but I think the solution may well be to make employees the stockholders. Of course the pols would howl “Socialism!” So, in most of America, it’s owners vs workers, sometimes leading to inferior products, shipping delays, and even bankruptcy. This mutual antagonism may have helped bring about the closing of Plant #5 in 1973 and the eventual dissolution of the company in 1987. These days, unfortunately, my father’s wish for the demise of unions is close to coming true.

      I was happy to quit my life among the cans. I certainly didn’t intend to return after graduation. A lot of years have passed, but every now and then I hear the din of that colossal machine and see those sheets of tin plate lifting up off the conveyer. And I think of that sap in the pie factory.

Copyright 2025 William Trowbridge

William Trowbridge is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, where he was an editor of The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press from 1986 to 2004. His many books include Call Me Fool (Red Hen Press, 2022).