November/December 2000
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
You could call it fate that I ended up with a career devoted to the scrap recycling business. My first job, in fact, was at a small textile recycling business. This is how it happened:
It was one of the Depression years, and snow had been falling over New York’s well-traveled streets, transforming many rickety neighborhoods—like mine—into a ghostly all-white zone.
It was January, and the cold seeped through my sweater and mended shirt. Those of us who were fortunate enough to have radios could hear the reassuring words of President Herbert Hoover promising that life would surely get better.
The same wintry bleakness filtered into my family’s small apartment, as if echoing the mood of the outside world.
My father had his job cut back to one day a week, drastically reducing the family income. He was a printer whose union was cutting its members’ work schedules to keep everyone employed. But it was only minimal employment.
College beckoned, though I knew I’d have to attend evening sessions at City College. And indeed, I began to attend school after dark, walking through Harlem (as I did for seven years) to reach the subway.
The big question on my mind, however, was: Where can I find a job?
Most midnights, I waited for the morning edition of the New York Times so I could scan the want ads. When the paper was delivered to the local candy store, I turned not to the sports section, as I would have liked, but to the small-print employment ads.
There weren’t many, but I marked one or two that seemed promising.
It was a cold subway ride from the north Bronx to Manhattan at 12:30 a.m., and I was huddled inside my coat in a corner of the car together with perhaps about a dozen or so young men (very few, if any, women) sprawled on the seats, several of them fast asleep.
One ad called for “a diligent young man to assist in a reputable jewelry establishment.” While it didn’t list the salary, the thought of jewelry led to a fantasy of a sparkling environment of gold and silver pendants, chokers, and earrings, making this midnight ride a bit more tolerable.
When I got out at Fulton Street,
I found myself suddenly in a jostling crowd of young men, all appearing from nowhere, all apparently bound for the jewelry establishment that wouldn’t open its doors for interviews until at least 8 a.m. It was then 1:15 a.m. And as I neared the address listed in the want ad, my eyes focused on a line stretching for several blocks.
There must have been at least 500 applicants for this one job. They stood in eerie silence.
It wasn’t like a line waiting to get into Yankee Stadium or the polo grounds, where neighbors easily struck up conversation. Here, the young men stood withdrawn from one another, not speaking, almost enemies.
It was a wasted evening, one of many throughout the year. Night after night I joined the job-searching packs, haunting the darkened streets of lower Manhattan, only to arrive home empty-handed. The job opportunities were scarce and never very tantalizing. Menial work was offered with the proviso “six days a week,” which meant working Saturdays. But we job-seekers clutched at straws.
One day, my luck changed.
An ambiguous advertisement caught my attention because the address was in my neighborhood, within walking distance of my home. That evening, I left before midnight, taking along a novel for company. It was a chilly night, and a February wind from Canada penetrated my jacket.
I located the anonymous storefront, its windows painted so no one could see inside, depressingly alone on a deserted street. But it appeared that for once I succeeded in being the first person on a job-waiting line. The night dragged on as I read my novel by the dim light from some nearby street lamps. By 2 a.m., there was a line of applicants. By 4 a.m., the line snaked around the corner. As morning sneaked in, several curious residents opened their windows and looked out on the congregation of young men on their block. Nothing happened until 8:30 a.m. when a short, balding, rather ill-tempered man bustled through the crowd to the store’s entrance. Without a word to anyone, he opened the door and slipped in. In that moment, I caught a quick view inside at a floor that was piled deep with bales.
Bales of what? I wondered.
At 9 a.m., the door opened again. The owner was now in shirtsleeves, looking glumly at the long line in front of his store. “You there,” he motioned to me, “inside.”
Other than a small ramshackle desk and two chairs, the store was filled with enormous bales, one atop the other.
“Rags,” the owner said brusquely when he noticed me studying them. “Mostly wiping materials used in machine shops and automotive maintenance shops, wherever you have to clean machinery.” He eyed me carefully. “Where do you live? At home?”
“Yes,” I answered, which seemed to be a plus.
“Go to school?”
“CCNY at night,” I said.
“Hmmm,” he pondered, “that’s good—you’re not a bum.” He looked me in the eye. “If you get this job, you have to work straight through from 8:30 to 6—you eat your lunch inside and you don’t open the door or talk to any of the neighborhood kids.”
“Sure.” At that moment, I’d have said anything to get the job.
He explained that he was not only the company’s owner but its salesman as well. “I’m out all day. So if you get the job, you’ll have to answer the phone and take orders. Later, when you know what you’re doing, you may be able to help me sort the wiping materials.”
The job paid $10 a week, with the first week’s salary held in escrow until I left.
Then, fixing me with a baleful look, he inquired, “Are you one of those communists who thinks the worker should have as much as the boss?”
“Me? No, sir.”
He was worried, though. With more than 100 young men waiting to be interviewed, how would it sit with them if he hired the first person in line?
“Only last week, a man I know had his windows smashed because he didn’t interview enough people,” he said darkly. After a moment’s thought, he added, “When you leave, just say that I interviewed you. Don’t tell them I hired you.”
I left, learning later that he proceeded to interview the next seven in line.
So began my life with Mr. Silver, whose business, I discovered, was beginning to drop off and whose salesmanship needed a shot in the arm.
Each morning when I arrived, there was a scrawled note on my desk.
“Where the hell were you? I called at two minutes to six and you were gone.” Or “I drove by and saw the door was open. Are you playing around with the neighborhood kids? Keep that door closed.”
Since we didn’t see each other during the week, we generated a thick file of correspondence. Mr. Silver was gone by the time I arrived in the morning. He returned late at night after I’d left. His short, salty notes were repetitious and filled with dire threats. But we somehow got along.
When spring came, bringing longer, warmer days, Mr. Silver decided to ask the electric company to shut off the electricity so he could save some money.
“You’ll have enough daylight,” he insisted. “When it gets dark again, I’ll have them put the lights back on.” But when autumn came and the days shortened, the electricity still remained off. One night I left him a note. “If the lights aren’t back on by Monday, I’ll close as soon as it gets dark.”
There was no response.
The following Monday, promptly at 5 p.m., as the evening shadows lengthened across the avenue, I closed the store and went home.
“I was in the office at 5:15,” read his note the next morning, “and there was no sign of you. Are you keeping bankers’ hours?”
But the lights were turned on that week.
Little by little I learned about the reclamation of rags. I gradually began to understand the art of sorting—by hand, of course.
I didn’t know then that textile reclamation was a major part of the scrap material business. The demand for both cotton and woolen rags was high, and the industry was operationally on a par with the scrap metal industry. Little did I imagine that only a few years later I would be an editor of a daily news sheet—named the Daily Mill Stock Reporter—writing market reports on wiping, cotton, and woolen rags. This first job was my initiation into the recycling business, but I had no idea that the scrap business would turn out to be my life’s work.
One day, much to my astonishment, Mr. Silver informed me that he was “an important official” in the Republican Party in the Bronx and would be running for state assemblyman in the next election. Being a Republican in the Bronx in those days was a lonely occupation. Running for office on that ticket was as hopeless as matching an amateur against boxer Joe Louis.
But Mr. Silver was optimistic.
“When I’m elected,” he said expansively, “I may take you with me to Albany as my assistant. How would you like that?”
The idea didn’t exactly thrill me as I had no particular ambitions for a politicalfuture.
“Or,” he mused, “I may leave you here in charge of the store.” In any case, he assured me, there would be something in it for me when election day came.
Alas, when the election results were tallied in our district, they showed that the Democratic candidate had snagged 72 percent of the vote, while Mr. Silver only managed to net 6 percent. He raged at the voting system, the electorate, the Democrats, even at me.
For the following year, there was an uneasy truce between us. In that period, I became more adept at sorting the rags, receiving a “pretty good” from grumbling Mr. Silver.
On a summer day when business had slowed a bit and Mr. Silver wasn’t frantically rushing from one customer to another, I sent him a short note: “I’m giving you notice that in two weeks I’ll be leaving.”
I waited for the inevitable outburst.
He assumed the position of a man betrayed. “Leaving? For what?”
I explained that I’d been offered a more lucrative job as a proofreader in a print shop at $15 a week.
“I’ll raise your salary.”
“No, I’m leaving,” I replied firmly.
“After all I did for you?” He looked as if I’d cut him with a knife.
When I asked for the $10 he’d put in escrow, he shrugged. “I’ll think about it.” For that miserable sum I had to travel downtown to the Legal Aid Society and file a suit against my boss.
The Legal Aid Society lawyer called him and queried, “Why don’t you pay the kid?”
Mr. Silver trumpeted through the telephone, “Don’t get funny with me. I’m a bigshot in the Republican Party.”
“And I’m a friend of Al Smith,” replied the lawyer, invoking the name of the well-known Democratic governor of New York.
Mr. Silver forked over the $10.
Many years later, in the more optimistic 1950s, when I was working for Waste Trade Journal and deep into the scrap materials business, I happened to be walking down that very same street and stopped, with a kind of cognizant shock, in front of an old storefront, its windows still painted white. The door was open to let in the summer breeze, and I could see bales of wiping rags inside, some piled as high as the ceiling.
A young boy stood at the entrance, surveying the street. When I asked about Mr. Silver, he said, “No, there’s no Mr. Silver. A Mr. Ehrlich now owns this store.”
The boy said he didn’t attend college. His aspiration was to open his own business someday.
“Meanwhile,” he said idly, “it’s just a job.” •
You could call it fate that I ended up with a career devoted to the scrap recycling business. My first job, in fact, was at a small textile recycling business. This is how it happened.