This is a story about jobs that, by and large, simply don’t exist in the United States anymore. Or if they do, are holding on by the fiber-optic thread that will soon extinguish the occupation for good.
Some are ancient history, like the iceman who has not cometh since the Eisenhower Administration. And others – including the minimum wage Wal-Mart “greeter” - were here just yesterday.
A LESS DISPOSABLE TIME
At The Sun newspaper of Baltimore – where many wonder if reporters will eventually go the way of the typewriter (and the skilled folks who repaired them) – there used to be an aged, exceedingly polite elevator operator named Barney Barney.
[Yes, his first name and his last name were – inexplicably - the same.]
Though extraordinary buildings like the Space Needle in Seattle still use an elevator operator, the job largely disappeared in the early 1950s with advancements in lift technology. But The Sun kept Barney on into the mid-1970s because he was considered part of the founding A.S. Abell company family, which owned the paper until 1986.
Corporations still say they treat employees like families, but those types of ties – like the technology that stays relevant for an entire century—is mostly a thing of the past.
Not the sweet stuff made of apples and peaches and latticed with fresh dough. The guy who runs the shoe repair shop and makes the old new again.
Cobblers have disappeared as shoes have become disposable. You can’t fix a pair of athletic shoes or anything else in which the sole and the heel is a single piece of rubber. You can wipe off a pair of gym shoes with Formula 409 – as some enterprising youngsters do on city streets for a buck – but they won’t take a shine.
As one descendent of a Hoosier cobbler said: “Most shoes just aren’t worth fixing anymore.”
The New Orleans folksinger Trey Yip, a disciple of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, put himself through college one summer about a decade ago by selling encyclopedias door to door in the Dakotas. The filmmaking Maysles brothers – Albert and David – made a documentary in 1969 about door-to-door Bible salesmen.
Strangers don’t sell anything door-to-door anymore. “Slumber parties” thrown by women to sell sex toys to their friends and neighbors are flourishing, but the doorbell ringing Avon Lady has gone the way of the milkman -- who now services less than half of one percent of American homes.
POST-PAPER
The most recent news of jobs lost because the world doesn’t work the way it used to do arrived just before Labor Day and concerned the products used to make encyclopedias: ink and paper.
According to Business Week, Lexmark International laid-off 1,700 workers around the globe in late August after deciding to get rid of its inkjet printer division.
The reason is the same one wreaking havoc with the United States Postal Service.
Each day, by leaps and bounds, paper is being made obsolete by increased dependence on cyberspace. From 2006 to 2009, according to reports, North American consumption of paper and cardboard declined 24 percent.
Add the paperboy to the list. As long ago as two decades ago, adults with minivans and station wagons began pushing aside the kid who threw papers on your doorstep out of a canvas satchel. As circulation and home subscriptions continue to plummet, there are fewer people of any age tossing the morning paper (evening papers are dead) into the bushes.
Already there are computer-driven algorithms spitting out “copy” that is sold by a Chicago company called Narrative Science to big-time magazines like Forbes.
THE NOISE WE LOST
And finally, a word about how work used to sound.
The American workplace once made a lot of noise. The racket – whether in the bygone shipyard or the typing pool - was constant and as comforting as the jingle bell of a cash register: It meant production.
If you lived near the broom factory, as David H. Klein did in a 1950s childhood in southwest Baltimore, the making of a wire-wound corn broom sounded something like Sly and the Family Stone.
BOOM CHAKA CHAKA! BOOM CHAKA CHAKA! BOOM CHAKA CHAKA!
It was the sound of a machine slapping wooden sticks into place before spinning wire around the broom head to fasten the straw in place. And it permeated cities like Baltimore and Cleveland and St. Louis and Milwaukee and anywhere else hardware stores sold essentials made in their own backyard.
“Everybody was working, everybody had a job” said Klein, raised by a Lithuanian grandmother who labored in a downtown clothes factory in a city that once made umbrellas, straw hats, raincoats, Chevrolets and ships. “You’d go home after work, eat, go to bed and get up and do it again.”
There are still a few American factories making brooms. The short list includes the Libman Company of Arcola, Illinois where the works are run by the great-grandchildren of founder William Libman, who started making brooms in 1896.
But none are so close to the homes of their workers that breadwinners can fall asleep to a boom-chaka-chaka lullaby that lets them know they’ll have a job in the morning.
This leads to the the riddle I heard from the RNC: if Bush tax cuts have been in play for 10 years or so, where's the trickle down? These cuts everybody is arguing over are in place today, yet we dove into recession. It would appear they are not helping.
"Communist" country? You have no idea what that means, it just sounds good for you to say it. Concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of elite is known as an oligarchy, which is slightly left of pure dictatorship fascism. As we have somewhat independent courts and the ability to criticize power without governmental reprisal, we have not arrived at that stage yet. Communism is when the state controls everything. Last I checked, the vast majority of institutions have been privatized, from buses to sanitation. We've never had government airlines or autos (yes you will moan about a 16 month loan that was paid back with profit to the taxpayer.) Schools are being privatized daily. We are the furthest thing from communism. But you heard it on Rush or Fox so it must be true.
The Chinese government allows business owners to keep profits as long as they do what the government wants and do not rock the boat politcally. Get out of line, and you spend 10 years in the Prison Camps with the signature of a police officer. (Forget Trials or civil rights) America is moving closer to that form of totalitarism every day under Obama (And Bush before him), but Obama has exploited the Economic Crisis to put the shift to a centrally controlled economy in overdrive. Obama's economic advisors and allies have openly stated they think the Chinese model is what we should strive for: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204630904577056490023451980.html http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-09/wall_street/30038368_1_chinese-police-china-s-foreign-ministry-chinese-authorities http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/soros-the-world-does-need-order/ The morons who worship this socialist in the White House are what Joseph Stalin used to call "useful idiots" - they are like Shepherds leading the sheep to the slaughter!
Within a few short years, however, the recording industry changed forever with the invention of computerized drumming machines that played more precisely than any human, could be much more easily synced to video, and never got paid for studio time, expenses, union dues, or residuals. That exciting, profitable phase of my career ended for me by the time I was 22 and, although I found other ways to make a living as a freelance musician, I never lived as "high" as I had from 1980 to about 1984. Eventually, ALL instrumentation on any studio recording could be generated by computer and thousands of very talented people who had spent lifetimes honing their skills were reduced to very non-prestigious roles as catering hall musicians. Today, even those jobs have been replaced, in large part, by DJ's. So much of our lives carry a soundtrack comprising all the great music that songwriters were able to create because they could support themselves as musicians. Without the means to survive, the composers of the next generation's "classics" may never even make it into the recording studio.
My recollections of jobs that I remember but don't think exist any more: the milkman who used to deliver glass milk bottles to a milkbox kept outside our garden apartment; the fruitman who used to come to the neighborhood with his truck on a weekly basis and sell fruits (and vegetables?); and, the knife sharpener (also scissors) driving his distinctive vehicle through the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis.
When we first moved here, we had Krug's and Dugan's, selling bread, cookies, cakes. And there also was Charles Chips...believe it or not, selling potato chips! Soda delivery trucks as well. Funny, we still have the "ice cream man" trolling the neighborhood despite our being able to buy ice cream by the 1/2 gallon (well, it used to be a 1/2 gallon) at the supermarkets at about a tenth of the price!
Have you been down Elwood Road? Carlson's and DeLea are two farm stands, and there are other ones around. And that's here, with all the farmland having been sold to housing developers. Upstate, wher4 there are actual farms, there are loads of farm stands. People go to Super Stop and Shop because it's more convenient to make one stop for everything than to make the effort to get good produce.