On Merritts Avenue, in downtown Atlanta, not far from the Varsity drive-in restaurant and Georgia Tech University, squatted a old white-wood house. It wasn’t dilapidated, but it never received a fresh coat of paint, either. This was the home of Eveready Plastics, a laboratory for making ear molds for hearing aids, my father’s mail-order business.
In my teen years, and again, later, I worked in that old house, as my father's employee. After the long drive from our rural home, always leaving early enough to start work at 8:00 am, he would park the old Oldsmobile in the back of the house. We entered through the basement, where a mean-looking German shepherd growled and barked and leapt against the wire of his large cage. This was no pet, but a thoroughly frightening guard dog. I kept my distance.
At first, in my early teens, I worked with Bobby, the secretary, in the small room to the right of the front door. She taught me how to file business papers and correspondence and advised me to learn shorthand as well as typing. Later, when Bobby was gone and I was secretary, I worked in the larger, brighter room to the left of the front door. By now it was my office. I opened and sorted the mail and took the day’s orders for ear molds into the lab, laying the little boxes with impressions of each customer’s ear in a row on the workbench and the order form under each one.
I learned how to write a business letter and how to patiently uncoil tangled rubber tubing, and I cleaned out and organized the files. The reward for that otherwise undesirable task was the many letters I found to my father from business associates, praising his integrity.
The large center room of the house was the lab itself, with its noisy electric tools and acrid smell of hot plastic. Everyone in the lab worked on equal footing—my father, the boss; Henry, a black man (at a time in Georgia when such a thing was not done); Woody, an alcoholic until my father urged him into AA; the Georgia Tech students, working part-time—six or seven employees at the height of the business. They were a jovial bunch, laughing and easy with each other. There were no women in the lab, but sometimes, if time was tight for getting all the orders out by the end of the workday, my father would call me in for the final step: buffing the ear molds to a glowing shine. The machine I used shined my fingernails at the same time.
Behind the lab was the kitchen, with a tiny screened-in porch at its back side, one story above the Oldsmobile parked below. The refrigerator was fully stocked with Coca-Colas, in glass bottles, for anyone to have at any time. We ate our lunches at the wooden kitchen table, all of us together. Sometimes my father sent me next door to pick up a lunch for us from what he called the Greasy Spoon. Sometimes we all had steak, which Henry cooked, smothered with onions and gravy.
At one point in my growing-up years, my father bought the Atlanta Stationery and Printing Company and moved the printing presses into the basement of Eveready Plastics. One of those presses was a machine for printing numbers onto hard plastic disks. When an order for these came in, the job fell to me. As I pressed the handle of the machine, repetitively, to burn a series of white numbers onto a black disk, I forestalled boredom and practiced my French by saying the numerals in French.
The house of Eveready Plastics was musty and old. It smelled of hot plastic, smoke from fried foods, old wooden walls, decades of papers. The basement smelled of dampness and dog and printer’s ink. I liked the old house and my work there. I knew I would never be a career secretary, Bobby’s mentorship notwithstanding, and maybe I was given a break with the work because I was the boss’s daughter, but I was learning skills that would stay with me the rest of my life—typing, filing, business relationships (but not shorthand, which I quickly forgot). My boss didn't mind if I read a book when work was slow. The employees were polite and mildly deferential to me.
In my teen years, and again, later, I worked in that old house, as my father's employee. After the long drive from our rural home, always leaving early enough to start work at 8:00 am, he would park the old Oldsmobile in the back of the house. We entered through the basement, where a mean-looking German shepherd growled and barked and leapt against the wire of his large cage. This was no pet, but a thoroughly frightening guard dog. I kept my distance.
At first, in my early teens, I worked with Bobby, the secretary, in the small room to the right of the front door. She taught me how to file business papers and correspondence and advised me to learn shorthand as well as typing. Later, when Bobby was gone and I was secretary, I worked in the larger, brighter room to the left of the front door. By now it was my office. I opened and sorted the mail and took the day’s orders for ear molds into the lab, laying the little boxes with impressions of each customer’s ear in a row on the workbench and the order form under each one.
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| The cardboard mailing box and the plastic box the ear mold went in |
I learned how to write a business letter and how to patiently uncoil tangled rubber tubing, and I cleaned out and organized the files. The reward for that otherwise undesirable task was the many letters I found to my father from business associates, praising his integrity.
The large center room of the house was the lab itself, with its noisy electric tools and acrid smell of hot plastic. Everyone in the lab worked on equal footing—my father, the boss; Henry, a black man (at a time in Georgia when such a thing was not done); Woody, an alcoholic until my father urged him into AA; the Georgia Tech students, working part-time—six or seven employees at the height of the business. They were a jovial bunch, laughing and easy with each other. There were no women in the lab, but sometimes, if time was tight for getting all the orders out by the end of the workday, my father would call me in for the final step: buffing the ear molds to a glowing shine. The machine I used shined my fingernails at the same time.
Behind the lab was the kitchen, with a tiny screened-in porch at its back side, one story above the Oldsmobile parked below. The refrigerator was fully stocked with Coca-Colas, in glass bottles, for anyone to have at any time. We ate our lunches at the wooden kitchen table, all of us together. Sometimes my father sent me next door to pick up a lunch for us from what he called the Greasy Spoon. Sometimes we all had steak, which Henry cooked, smothered with onions and gravy.
At one point in my growing-up years, my father bought the Atlanta Stationery and Printing Company and moved the printing presses into the basement of Eveready Plastics. One of those presses was a machine for printing numbers onto hard plastic disks. When an order for these came in, the job fell to me. As I pressed the handle of the machine, repetitively, to burn a series of white numbers onto a black disk, I forestalled boredom and practiced my French by saying the numerals in French.
The house of Eveready Plastics was musty and old. It smelled of hot plastic, smoke from fried foods, old wooden walls, decades of papers. The basement smelled of dampness and dog and printer’s ink. I liked the old house and my work there. I knew I would never be a career secretary, Bobby’s mentorship notwithstanding, and maybe I was given a break with the work because I was the boss’s daughter, but I was learning skills that would stay with me the rest of my life—typing, filing, business relationships (but not shorthand, which I quickly forgot). My boss didn't mind if I read a book when work was slow. The employees were polite and mildly deferential to me.
Most of all, those were years of getting to know my father, aspects of him outside the family, his relationships with other kinds of people. I saw the traits he deliberately tried to instill in his children—respect, equality, generosity, honesty—manifested in the ways he behaved in the real world. Whatever has happened by now to that old white house on Merritts Avenue, it is in my memory a house of merit.
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