“Mornin’ Miz Ridenhour.  Box or sacks?”
“Pwuuuh, pwuuh.  Package boys front. Package boys front.”
“Here, Kenny, take the Garvey, and run back there and put some toilet paper up on 5.  And don’t smear the ink!”
“Hey, howya’doin’ Miz Brock?  Good, good.  Oh yeah, the folks are fine. Yo’nt me to carry those out for ya’?  How’s Ed?  He likin’ California?  Awright, you’re all loaded up.  Say hey to Mr. Brock, and y’all stay outa’ tha’ heat.  Thank you, Miz Brock.  Bye, see you next time.”
“Pwuuuh, pwuuh.  Package boys front, please.  Package boys front.”

This day, like most every day at the IGA Foodliner in Wichita Falls, Texas, was pretty much a repeat of the day before and the day before that and all the days before that.  Experience.  Voice of.  Insaniam perpetuum.

Sacking groceries and stocking shelves in a busy grocery store was my third job.  My first attempt at honest labor was unloading lengths of pipe from a boxcar drawn up next up to a Quonset hut at the far end of the White Stores, Incorporated, home office and warehouse parking lot.  It was dingy and dark and hot inside the old hut.  I was sixteen, skinny, pale and spoiled, surrounded by older men easy with the sweat and the work and the grime, and showing zero deference to the warehouse manager’s kid.  When the others lifted and groaned, I lifted and groaned and tried hard to blend in and escape notice.  When a buzzer loudly sounded the twelve-noon lunch break, I was delighted.  The guys cracked open their lunch buckets and began to regale each other with off-color stories.  I informed Billy Keith, the foreman, that my mother had lunch waiting for me at home, and I would be back in thirty minutes.  Lie. Big, Big Lie.  Billy Keith and the boys never saw me again.

Job number two was another valiant attempt by my father to ease me into the great American work force.  White Stores, Inc. operated a gas station and retail store on the grounds of the home office and warehouse.  The store marketed furniture, appliances, and all kinds of auto supplies, and my new job was to learn to sell, sell, sell.  I was pretty proud of my speed-of-light transition from pipe unloader to white shirt and tie salesman of “just about anything y’all need.”  Of course, I never considered that the path to learning to be a great salesman meant stocking shelves, sweeping floors, emptying the trash, and smiling at the customers.  Bottom up work, young man.  After three days of arranging and rearranging taillight bulbs and floormats, after brushing my somewhat longish hair back into place as it repeatedly flopped down over my eyes when I bent over to sweep floor litter into a dustpan, after stuffing my much-too-short shirttail yet once more back into my loose-fitting pants, and after flashing my best wordless silly grin on any who would look my way, I left with the other workers at closing time and never returned for day four.  This time I was careful not to tell anyone I would see them tomorrow.  My sweet parents never fussed or cajoled, but I’ve always been curious as to how my father managed to explain his son to his co-workers.

The edict delivered to me on day one of job three by Ernest, the IGA Foodliner manager, was, “And I don’t want to see you just standing around.  If things start getting slack around the registers, pick up a broom and start sweeping.  Or ask Benny over in produce if he needs any help.  Always be friendly to the customers.  Always ask them how they’re doing.  Always ask them if they want their groceries in boxes or sacks.  And always tell them you’ll see them again.”  I was pretty keen on the last four charges because they often translated into cash.  I found that sacking groceries actually required a certain degree of planning and skill if I planned to make the customer happy, and a happy customer, plus a little light-hearted banter offered up on the way out the door to their car, went a long way toward a tip when the groceries were loaded and a sincere adieu was delivered.

Grocery store work was grunt work.  It was non-threatening work.  It was work among a menagerie of North Texas’s finest.  Gene the checker was tall, good-looking, and a self-described intellectual.  He was also disposed to scratch “Metaphysics Rule” and “God is dead. Nietzsche” with his big Buck pocketknife in the white paint of the paper towel dispenser in the little employee bathroom.  As a Southern Baptist in good-standing, I felt it only right that I should pull out my old Case pocketknife and counter with, “Nietzsche is dead. God”, just below his impiety.  I waited several days, anticipating some reaction to the parry.  Nothing.  So, I upped the ante.  I watched and waited for Gene to take a bathroom break and head back to the stock room to grab a smoke and attend to his mid-afternoon constitutional.  I followed him, and as soon as I saw that he had gone into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, turned on the exhaust fan, and had a seat, I hurried out to the cleaning supplies aisle, grabbed a bottle of household ammonia, and made tracks for Gene, the now unsuspecting and relaxed intellectual checker.  The exhaust fan was humming right along as I crept up to the bathroom door, unscrewed the cap, and released a good-sized splash of ammonia just outside the bottom of the door.  The fumes were immediately sucked inside, and I giggled to myself like a three-year-old, when I heard the expected “Ahhhgggg!” and the sounds of a jangling belt buckle and pants leaving ankles, headed for waist.  I tossed the ammonia bottle in the trash and hustled back to the front of the store, looking for some groceries to sack.  When the stock room swinging doors burst open and Gene came striding out looking for the villain, customers were busily shopping, and we package boys were hard at work.  He never ferreted me out, and the paper towel dispenser ceased to be a sounding board. Then there was Benny, the stoop-shouldered and doe-eyed produce manager who, under his breath, offered his assessment of every female he saw.  The first time we met, Benny smiled and confided to me that “he did it once a day whether he needed to or not.”  Foolish me.  I had just shaken his hand.  I worked hard to keep as much distance as possible between me and Benny and his vegetables.  And old Jess, the assistant manager, prone to blow hard with a wet “pwuuh” into the intercom microphone just to reassure himself that the “on” switch really did work, before he announced to everyone in the store, “Package boys front. Package boys front.”  Jess was graced with a face akin to that of an English Bulldog, and he would chew and wallow a King Edward Imperial around in his saggy jowls until it no longer resembled a cigar.  Oh, and he liked to brag that he was a distant cousin of Elmer Bernstein, the award-winning American composer of musical scores for films like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Magnificent Seven.  I could never make it fit.

I got queasy in my gut when I considered how far I hadn’t come.  High school was history.  Friends were scattered at colleges and universities across the country, working to fulfill their lifelong dreams of leading or teaching or doctoring or lawyering.  And the best I could ever come up with on my freshman registration was “undeclared” as my declared major.  Earlier in my life, I entertained dreams of displacing Frank Lloyd Wright, but I settled for nightmares that convinced me I could never ascend to his level of vision and talent.  Hi there, would you like a box or sacks?

During my three years as a package boy at the IGA Foodliner, I had developed friendly relationships with several regular customers as I sacked and carried groceries out to their car.  Almost all of them regularly slipped me tips.  Some even cared enough to pass on sound advice.  One re-routed my life.

Ted Shaw was the weatherman for KAUZ-TV, Channel 6, the local CBS television station in Wichita Falls.  I spotted him the first time he walked in the grocery store door.  Mr. Shaw was familiar to me because Channel 6 was the only station my mother and father turned to for their news, weather, and sports, so through the magic of television, he was a frequent guest in our living room.  I timed my appearance at the checkout register with great precision, grocery sack in one hand and box in the other, to arrive at the same time as Mr. Shaw and his grocery cart.  I boxed up his groceries, and as we headed out the door to his car, I rambled on about how my mother really liked the new news guy on his TV station and she thought those thick black glasses on that sports guy looked kinda’ silly and she always watched his weather at six o’clock and thought he was pretty handsome too but wished it wasn’t so doggone hot every day and she just might stop watching The Guiding Light if the story was going to be the same every day.  As Mr. Shaw was closing his car door, instead of my well-rehearsed valediction, “See you again”, I offered, “MrShawifthere’severanyjobopeningsoutatattheTVstation pleaseletmeknowI’dreallyliketoworkatChannel6thanksMrShaw.”  Ham-handed palaver at its finest, similarly served up the many times I boxed or sacked groceries for Mr. Shaw.

Then one day the Sun surely stood still and the earth must have shifted on its axis.

“Ken, why don’t you come on out to the station in the morning.  We might have something available.”

Perhaps it was pity.  Maybe my pleadings had finally drained him.  It could have been that he had been down a similar path earlier in his own life.  Eighteen sonorous words.  Two receptive ears.  One grateful package boy.

The next morning, I walked through the front door of KAUZ-TV, Channel 6, wearing blue jeans and sporting a high school letter jacket, ready for my job interview.  Not the best of attire for a potential hire, but I knew no better.  Fortunately, my blunder was overlooked, and I was hired to work on the “floor crew.”  Ted Shaw had swung wide the gate and I was about to enter the magical world of broadcast television.

The first thing I learned to do as a member of the floor crew was to grab a long, 1½” thick black cable, attached to a large camera on one end and to a wall on the other, hold it up off the floor and walk behind a camera operator when he moved the big camera from the news and sports set over to the weather set.  Nothing glamorous, but I was happy to get my hands dirty and drink in how so many things had to work together for thirty minutes, just to deliver news, weather, and sports to the people watching Channel 6 at home.  I also learned to pick up a big dust mop and sweep the television studio floor when it needed it.  Ground floor work once again, but I loved it.

I learned a new language: boom up, boom down, tilt up, tilt down, pan left, pan right, dolly in, dolly back, zoom in, zoom out, tight shot, wide shot, scoop light, key light, Fresnel, video tape machine, film chain, switcher, dissolve, cut, fade-to-black, chroma-key, audio board, “pot it up a little”, “give ‘em 30”, “5-4-3-2-1,off”, and some terms that the Southern Baptist in good-standing came to realize weren’t unique to television but universal to mankind.

In the spring of 1964, we were preparing to record a commercial for a local used car dealer.  The studio lights were bright and hot, the cameras were in place, and the owner was shouting at one of his vassals to move a car from the parking lot onto a large turntable built into the studio floor, when Jon Burkhart, the director, said, “Shut it down, Shaw says we’ve got word of a tornado out near the Wichita River!  He wants us to get a camera outside, right now!”  As I grabbed a camera cable and followed Jim Horky and John Sitler, the camera operators rolling the GE studio cameras out the back door, I remember the car dealer, in a burst of instant anger, hurling a well-sugared and well-creamed cup of coffee into a studio wall. Way to go, big Don.  Nice, nice. Nice brown stain on the wall, and it’s great the way that cup shattered and the pieces fell all over my nice, clean floor.  Thoughts, not words.  His tantrum halted nothing and is probably little more than a footnote in my mind only.  Television programming was interrupted, Ted Shaw went on the air to warn the viewing audience, and KAUZ-TV became one of the first television stations in the country to broadcast a tornado live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycxQnTNWheI

I made the transition from the floor crew to a camera operator for news, weather, and sports shows, and commercials for local businesses like the oh so unpredictable used car dealer.  Other opportunities followed – I ran sound and set up the lighting on the local shows; I was a switcher, inserting local commercial breaks into network programs like The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow; I directed news, weather, and sports programs; and produced and directed many local commercials.  One summer, when the station art director went on vacation, I filled in and had the opportunity to design a full-page, inside the front cover regional ad for TV Guide magazine.  In 1964, I sat in a Wichita County courtroom and drew sketches during the trial of Ham Vance, a local sheriff who was tried and later convicted of perjury and forgery.  The sketches were used on Channel 6 newscasts, and the following year I sold two of them to a true crime magazine.  Several years later, I directed a local noon show, “Donna’s Notebook”, where a short-haired and humble Willie Nelson sang one of his songs.  Very early live Willie.  There wasn’t anything about television that I didn’t love.

During the eight years I spent working for KAUZ-TV, Channel 6, I found that no matter how much I learned about the mysteries of television, I could never learn it all.  I journeyed on to Houston, Texas, and worked another thirty-five years in broadcast television.  Even the worst of days were joyous days, because in those combined forty-three years, I never experienced two days that were alike.  I’m closing in on nine years of absence now, and anytime I settle back and take in the local news, weather, and sports, I can’t help but think that the relaxed calmness I see is probably not a true reflection of what is really happening behind the scenes.  Man-made things have a habit of breaking or wearing out, good people still fail to meet their deadlines, unforeseen things can be counted on to crop up at the last minute, and catastrophic events occur and immediately rearrange the thinking and schedules of everything and everyone.  But, “the show must go on”, and I know that the tight-knit band of lovers of smoke and mirrors and other curious things are hard at it, working to make sure that it does.