Do you remember . . . ?

Listening to my old air check yesterday got me to reminiscing about the strange after-school jobs I had when I was growing up.

I was a library page; I started when I was so young I wasn’t any more than a paragraph.  By the time I was eight, I was re-shelving and filing card catalogue for my mother.  During high school, I ran the library for a year (and “ran” is the proper term; the librarian had a stroke and had to retire suddenly, early in the year, and the school didn’t hire a replacement until the next year, so whatever back-room accession and repair work was done, I did).

When I was thirteen, I went to work as a projectionist at the picture show.  I worked anything from two to five nights a week, depending on who else the owner could manage to hire and how mad he was at the old drunk who was one of his other projectionists.  I showed a wild mix of third-run shows, good and bad (notable among them Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and Soylent Green), Spanish-language features, touring saturation shows, shows that I wasn’t old enough to pay to see (at 14 I was showing R-rated pictures).

I had to use a pair of 1940-model Super Simplex projectors that stood nearly a foot taller than I did, with carbon-arc lamps that blazed fiercely and made a dry sauna of the projection booth in summer, although in winter, as drafty as the booth was, it was kinda nice.  The projectors had been installed by my great-uncle, back when he owned the theater; they were some of the last ones you could get before the war broke out.  One of them had a worn-out escapement and made a deafening rattle, like a whole deck of playing cards clattering against the spokes of a bicycle wheel.  No matter where in the theater I might be, I could tell which projector I was on by listening for that noise.  The carbon rods had to be manually adjusted between reels so they would burn for the fifteen or twenty minutes each reel took to run, and the projectors had to be switched over by hand at the end of each reel . . . and look out if I missed the “cue spots” at the end of the reel that signaled when to turn on the projector drive motor and hit the sound toggle and the foot switch that lifted and dropped the shutters and cut over the sound control from one projector to the other. Then the audience would get to see the countdown leader flashing “6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3” as it ran up to the start of the reel, and I would swear and vow to cut the cue spots more clearly with the spotting tool once the reel was over.

Film breaks happened regularly, too.  The prints we received were generally old and bad, and had seen too many showings already, so at least once a week I’d hear a snap, and then the projector would start spewing film across the floor at ninety feet per minute (that figure is accurate; I worked it out one night), and I’d have to dash across to stop, untangle, and re-thread the projector as fast as I could go, while yells and catcalls drifted up from the auditorium, and after the reel was over I’d have to cut out the damaged section with a razor blade and then glue it back together with clear nail polish.  (Yes, that is what you use, and very effective it is, too.)

I left the New Majestic (that was the theater’s name; the old Majestic had been on the courthouse square and the New Majestic was half a block off it) when I was sixteen; I had the temerity to ask for a raise from six dollars a night to seven, and the theater owner told me why didn’t I just quit instead.  And I did, and my father pulled a string or two and got me taken on at KCOM as a part-time DJ, working weekday closing shift and weekend afternoons.  The station was barely more than one-horse: 250 watts, daylight-only broadcast, high on the AM band so our signal only carried about twenty-five miles.  Often I was the only person in the building—and it seemed like the only person in the world.

The station’s equipment was about as antiquated as the picture show’s; the control board was a war-surplus ten-pot Collins, the Tapecasters (a specialized kind of eight-track tape player used for recording and playing commercials) were twenty years old, the open-reel tape deck was a HUGE ol’ luggable Roberts 997 from the Fifties that had to be patched in via quarter-inch phone jack when we wanted to use it, and Ghod only knows what the turntables were, except tired.  The UPI teletype from which we got our news, weather, and sports feeds sat in the bathroom, where it clattered and banged and rang bells and generally carried on like something from The Front Page.  (Later on we got a small dot-matrix TTY, barely larger than a desk calculator, that we could let out of purgatory and set on a desk someplace, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the old one.)  The transmitter sat five feet away from me, on the other side of a glass wall so I could see the gauges and lights on it and make sure it was behaving as it should.  It was a post-war monstrosity also, and had to be babied and coaxed when it went temperamental and blew us off the air, which it did periodically.

I learned an awful lot of interesting things working for the radio station.  I learned that five bells on the UPI teletype meant a bulletin was coming across, and I should go see what it was as soon as I could get off the mike.  I learned how to read ad copy so that a thirty-second spot came out to thirty seconds, even when it was twenty-five seconds’ worth or forty seconds’ worth of copy.  I learned to cue up a record tightly so I avoided The Thing Which Must Never Happen in radio:  dead air.  I learned which ad carts (cartridges) wouldn’t play on the oldest Tapecaster, which was notoriously cranky.  I learned that double-stacking spots is OK, but triple-stacking should be avoided whenever possible.  I learned how to let my head rattle even when I had nothing to say, in order to fill up time.  I learned how to start an instrumental playing on “cue” and fade it up right before the network news on the hour or half-hour, so the music ended just as the newscast began.  I learned how to produce round voice tones even when I had an allergy attack or a cold and felt far worse than I sounded. I learned that sometimes you just have to turn off the mike on a radio preacher when he’s gotten all wound up and isn’t watching the clock or your hand signals to “wind it up and get off the air!”  I learned how to get any number of things done, from a bout of vomiting to taking a bomb-threat call, within the limits of a two-and-a-half minute song.

Working at the station also meant that I was now expected, when I went with the EMS team or the fire department on midnight runs (that’s material for another day, though), to get the story and have it ready in time for the Who-Died News the next morning.  Fortunately, this wasn’t much hardship, since I was generally at the scene anyhow, but it did make for some interesting stories to tell in later years.

And you know, I never did have to sack groceries or pump gas or flip burgers or do any of the things kids usually do for after-school jobs.  And that was probably a Good Thing.

A hentai ninja stroked his petunia.  Fnord.