How I arrived at the Robfogel Paper
Warehouse escapes me, like so many other details from that now ancient, but
still revered by me time known as the sixties. It must have been networking to
some extent because I didn’t even know there was a Robfogel Paper Warehouse.
Shipments of all sorts of
paper products arrived at the warehouse to be repackaged and redistributed to
local businesses by the small cadre of Robfogel truck drivers. A railroad track
ran right up to their back door and every three or four days, a boxcar filled
with paper products was dropped off at the warehouse.
I was hired along with a guy I knew only as Red, who
was going into the marines at the end of the summer. Our job was to load the
trucks each morning and then unload the boxcar, stack its contents onto pallets
and stack the pallets in the warehouse.
With a great deal of
anticipation, we’d break the seal and push the large door aside to discover
what products we’d be unloading. If our boss knew, he wasn’t letting on. Every
job began the same way—find a box at the top, in the middle, pry it out and
then work our way to both ends. The two of us went home each day looking like
we’d spent the day in a sweat shop, which wasn’t that far from the truth.
All through high school, I had worked as a janitor at
Annunciation, both the school and the church. I always enjoyed the physical nature
of the work—pushing and pulling those heavy old-fashioned mops across 10-foot swaths
of hallways and classrooms. What I discovered working at Robfogel was that I
really didn’t know what physical work was.
I also discovered just how big a boxcar is—about 6,000 square feet, and
how much paper stacked bottom to top, end to end, one can hold. I also learned
just how all encompassing the term paper products could be.
