The Robfogel Paper Warehouse

     I was back in Rochester following a most successful freshman year at Lowell Tech—in fact, it would prove to be my only successful year at Lowell Tech, but who’s counting? The point is, I needed a job.

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.  

At the two extremes were the cubic-foot sized boxes of bond paper—one of the heaviest products known to man, and paper straws, which came in larger but deceivingly lighter boxes. The actual number of bond-paper boxes that could fit in a boxcar was as mind-boggling as it was back-breaking.

The array of boxed items falling between these two products included paper towels and toilet paper, paper napkins and sanitary napkins, construction paper and wrapping paper, paper dishes and paper cups, and plastic knives, forks and spoons. They all came in numerous sizes and colors, not to mention, in the case of toilet paper, plies.

For the most part, the job was nothing more than manual labor with the romance of working in a boxcar thrown in at no extra charge. That’s not to say there weren’t occasional opportunities to exercise brain over brawn. Were it not for my Robfogel experience, I would have never been introduced the fundamental science of stacking boxes on pallets.

Stacking boxes of various shapes, weights and sizes was critical to performing the next facet of warehouse work—stacking the pallets. Do the pallets right and you were rewarded. On the other hand, errors made at the pallet stage could lead to nightmares in the warehouse.

Stacking pallets four high, usually two on two, called for precision and a dose of fortitude. The spaces were small; the margins of error even smaller. Anytime you got a load in place without everything crashing down on you, you earned your pay.

As rewarding as emptying a boxcar was and as much fun as driving a forklift could potentially be—both of which were new experiences for me— getting to know and hang with the drivers was a very satisfying side benefit of the job.

Each of them was a stereotype, a cliché, but for me they were new clichés. Two or three of them were just what you’d expect and nothing exceptional. They were scruffy looking, smoked a lot and while appearing to be physically out of shape were at the same time physically capable of doing heavy lifting—if they didn’t have union rules to protect them.

There was one slim, sandy blond guy in his early 30’s that stood out. He wore buttoned-down shirts, sleeves neatly folded and rolled halfway up his arms, and was always, always reading a paperback novel—generally a western or mystery. When he wasn’t reading one, it was stashed in the back pocket of his jeans.

The most interesting driver was a young kid who didn’t appear to be much older than Red and me. He constantly talked about saving his money and one day buying a rig of his own. Every single guy that I knew back then, was in college.  I didn’t know anyone that was planning to be an independent trucker. In fact, I didn’t know anyone my age that actually had a real plan—other than graduate from college and have a job fall into their lap.

While I don’t remember most of these trucker’s names I can picture them plain as day, sitting in the office each morning waiting for their assignments. The only one I still wonder about is the kid. I wonder if he ever got his truck, and if he did, where it took him.  

Red and I occasionally left the warehouse to accompany these drivers on local deliveries. Most of the time, though, when we weren’t working in the main warehouse, we accompanied an old-timer named Frank to a second downtown warehouse. It was an older and a dirtier building than the main warehouse. Frank and it were a lot alike.

Frank was shabbier looking than the other drivers, walked with a bowlegged limp and was, to put it mildly, loonier than all of them put together. He babbled on continuously and little of what he said ever made sense. Like a restaurant’s daily special or a tavern’s house whisky, Frank sort of came to represent Robfogel’s, and possibly the whole warehouse industry, in my mind.

I don’t have any real bad memories of working at Robfogel’s, but to be honest, most of the good ones have been blurred over through the years. There is one, though, that remains as clear in my mind as the day it happened.

Red and I were working with Frank one day at the State Street building, where they kept some of the overflow. There was no forklift in the six-story building because there wasn’t a level floor in the whole place. In fact, many of the floors had holes in them or boards that were popping up. The old, decrepit building was easily 20 or 30 years passed its prime.

At one point, we rode the freight elevator up to the top floor to pick up a load of bond paper. Let me give you an idea of just how old this building was.

The elevator was connected to a pulley system that was activated not by pushing a button or pulling a lever, but rather by pulling on a rope that hung through the ceiling. Yanking on the rope and then releasing it got the wheel turning and somehow through the magic of early elevator science, the elevator would move up or down. I’m not sure how the thing stopped because I was always so fascinated by how it got started that I rarely paid any attention to how the ride ended.

Anyway, we rode the elevator to the top and preceded to load it. We packed that tin can Lizzie of an elevator car solid, from floor to ceiling, leaving just enough room for the three of us to stand in the front.

Did I mention that there was no door or safety screen on this elevator? You just watched the floors pass by you while making sure to keep your head back from the edge.

When we had the elevator full, Frank came up with a brainstorm. Rather than have to make another trip he figured we could lower the elevator about three feet and load some more paper on top of the screen that served as its ceiling. It sounded like a good idea to Red and me at the time but, really, what did we know? Red was going into the marines and I was just killing time in college waiting for my chance to join the Army and go to Vietnam. Frank was the warehouse man—quite possibly one of the original ones.

So we nudged the elevator down a bit, crammed some more cartons on top of the screen and then crowded into the cage taking our positions in that foot of open space we had left for ourselves.

“Now be sure to keep your heads back once this thing gets going,” said our warehouse wise man. “You lean over to see where you’re going and the next floor will knock your chin right through your brains before your eyes ever see what hit you.”

Red and I pressed our shoulder blades even deeper into the stacks of paper behind us and watched as Frank pulled the rope to get us started. That’s when a funny thing happened.

The rope fell out of the ceiling onto the floor in front of us as we began accelerating at the blissful free-fall speed of 32 feet per second. I knew this, of course, because I was an engineering student. Red just knew we were going really fast. Frank didn’t know how fast we were going but knew it was fast enough to exclaim, “Oh shit, we’re going to die.”

We began our two-to-three-second, 70-to-80-foot descent with a few thousand pounds of paper plus a few hundred pounds of flesh and bones squeezed into our dilapidated elevator capsule. There wasn’t any time to think, but had there been, Newton’s Second Law of motion would have told me that our large load wouldn’t cause us to accelerate any faster, but there sure as hell was going to be a mighty collision at the bottom.

How big of a collision? I didn’t know. I was too busy holding my chin back to keep it from smashing the floors flying past us. All we could do was stand there and wait.

We finally hit bottom—and when I say finally, keep in mind it was about two seconds after we had begun our drop, but it seemed a lot longer. We must have looked like three bobblehead dolls bouncing around in the miniscule space we had allowed ourselves. Remarkably, we seemed no worse for the wear than if we had busted a few boxes of toilet paper open and had a makeshift pillow fight.

What saved us from permanent injury or even death?

American ingenuity. That’s what.

For decades—maybe even a hundred years because there is no doubt in my mind that the building was at least that old—workers were no doubt told to discard trash in the proper receptacles. Nevertheless, for all those years, workers—American workers using American ingenuity—had been ignoring their bosses and tossing that crap into the elevator shaft.

Yes, we were moving fast when we hit bottom, and yes we hit with a tremendous force but what was waiting for us was not a concrete floor or even a gigantic mass of elevator innards and springs, which I’m sure wouldn’t have helped us one iota. What met us instead was decade’s worth of cardboard packaging. We probably didn’t even come within ten feet of the actual bottom.

We looked at each other, speechless, but the looks on our faces were clearly saying, “Well, that something you don’t see every day.”

Frank got on the phone and told old man Robfogel, if there was an old man Robfogel—and if there wasn’t he just told our boss that the company owed him a new pair of false teeth because the old ones, jarred from his mouth in the fall, didn’t work anymore. That was it.

We unloaded the elevator and drove back to the main warehouse. That was my last summer there. I never worked there again—not because of the elevator but because the next summer I got an even better job doing demolition at the old Powers Hotel, which was being renovated into the new Powers Office Building.