Genesee Brewery 1967

      I've written about the Powers Hotel before. The Genesee Brewery is what happened right after the Powers Hotel demolition job.

                                                       

                                                                      Centum utres dolor in muro centum lagenas cervisiae.

                                                                      Si quis forte inciderit utres, quam multa utres cervisie in murum?

                                                                                                                       —from an old Roman drinking tune

I left the $2.10 per hour demolition job at the Powers Hotel—soon to be the Powers Office Building—for a better paying job at the Genesee Brewery. Some would say a raise to $2.30 isn’t worth the trouble of switching a bus route. They might be right. And certainly, when you throw in the $60 initiation fee I had to pay to join the Teamsters Union and the $15.00 monthly dues it really didn’t make much sense at all.

But money isn’t everything.  Maybe I had learned everything there was to learn about tearing down a wall.  Maybe it was just time to move on, to expand my horizons, to learn different skills, to challenge myself.  Maybe it was time to find a job that let me drink beer while I worked.  Yes, I think that was it—and the other stuff, too.

I heard the brewery was looking for a forklift driver and I had done a little bit at the paper warehouse the previous summer so I went down there one day after knocking down another wall and took the forklift driving test.

 

This is what the forklift driving test consists of: You turn it on, level the blades and line them up with a pallet that has about 25 cases of beer on it.  Then you drive the blades into the pallet, tilt them back, lift the pallet up and set it on top of another pallet of beer cases.  Then you repeat the procedure with those two pallets by stacking them on top of two other pallets of beer.  If you do this without dropping the pallets or hooking any other stacks or spilling any beer or breaking any bottles, you’re pretty much in.

I asked the forklift-driving test instructor when I could start and he told me I could begin immediately, explaining that the man I was replacing left for lunch and never came back. I guess I was fortunate that demolition work doesn’t require two weeks notice to leave and forklift driving doesn’t require two weeks of training to begin.

All in all, I did pretty well.  I kept those cases moving, those stacks growing, and the beer flowing.  It was on that very first day that I learned that the real Genesecret was not Hemlock Lake water or even the postcard portrayal of 20 men standing along the shore of Hemlock Lake peeing into it, but rather the part about “Keeping the beer flowing.”

The pallets destined for the warehouse arrived on an elevator and moved onto a conveyor belt from which the forklift operator would pull them off.  Our personal beer came up the same way.  Sending an empty bottle down on the elevator meant a new ice cold one would be arriving with the next pallet. Obviously, this made the job just a little bit more difficult than that first day’s test but it sure did make the work more interesting and did wonders for company morale.

Raising pallets loaded with beer cases 20 feet into the air and attempting to squeeze them into little spaces created by other stacks was an unforgiving task. Doing so after drinking all day was even more difficult. One might be able to get away with a small error here or a sudden slip up there but it was most unlikely.

Just as a boy dressed in his Sunday best might successfully skip Church to hop a fence and go fishing, nevertheless should he hook his pant leg on a rusty nail and rip a long tear in his pants, then he will surely be caught in his act of deceit for there is nothing he can do to make that hole in his pants go away.

So also, should a corner of one pallet hook the corner of another and the two become one super-pallet of shifting beer cases, there is nothing the forklift operators can do except silently gasp at his misfortune. His fate is sealed.

He must jerk the prongs back, cover his eyes with his hands, hope the screen above his head holds up and then wait for the inevitable crash of a thousand or so bottles of beer to fall on him.

Like the boy hooking his pants on the fence, he was a dead duck from the instant the two pallets hooked and locked on to each other.

In the course of any given day practically everyone dropped a pallet or two.  I think I may have dropped more than any one but no one seemed to be counting.  It wasn’t long before I realized that in the complicated world of moving beer from brewery to bar or from vat to family room, dropped pallets, broken bottles and spilt beer were simply one of life’s unavoidable little annoyances that needed to be dealt with. And what better way to deal with it than to drink to it. Breakage was so common, in fact, that there was an old man whose only job it was to go around and clean up the spills—and get this, he got to drink all day, too.

In the summer of 1967 there was a disease going around the country.  There was racial tension everywhere and in a half dozen cities there were riots.  Rochester was one of them. 

The weekend of the riot I happened to be working on the dock loading the trucks.  We had to keep loading the trucks even though there was a riot going on all around us for the very simple reason that riots weren’t going on everywhere and where the riots weren’t going on people still needed beer.  So even though beer played an intrinsic role in the riot—some would say a major role, the mayor and police chief were determined that the brewery itself didn’t become a major factor.

To this end, each forklift on the dock carried something else in addition to the driver and his beer.  Each one had its very own, armed guard.  In those days when a bunch of guys would go out cruising one would always call out “shotgun” so he could sit in the front passenger seat.  For those few nights on the docks of the brewery I really did have someone riding shotgun with me.  The good news for both of us is that he didn’t belong to the Teamster’s Brewery Workers of America Union and so he couldn’t drink.

By August when I was getting ready to go back to school, I had pretty much gone as far as I could go as a forklift driver.  The kicker came one night when I awoke from a nightmare I was having.  In the dream, I was sitting on my forklift trying to get my two pallets into a tight spot.  As usual, I didn’t make it.  I had taken a turn a little too wide, overcompensated and hooked the corner of a pallet of Genessee Cream Ale quarts with the side of a pallet of seven-ounce Genny Lights and everything came cascading down upon me like barrels going over Niagara.

I awoke from the dream and get this.  I was sitting up in bed.  I was actually sleeping at night in the sitting up position dreaming about work.

When it was time to go back to school, my boss asked how I had liked the job.  I told him the story about my nightmare.  He laughed and said he often had the same nightmare. 

“You dream about dropping those cases of beer, too,” I asked somewhat amazed.

“No, no,” he laughed.  “I dream about you dropping cases of beer.  Your nightmare is my nightmare and I have it almost every night.  Have a good year at school.”