...
Someone asked me about the
name of this website: "Why 'WORKS'"?
For one thing, I
answered, it is named for places where I once worked.
Like many who
grew up in Phoenixville, PA, I worked during a couple
of summers at the Phoenix Iron Works. In 1950, after
my first year at Ursinus, I spent part of the summer
on the Labor Gang. We jackhammered the slag out of
the pits in the Blooming Mill and shoveled steel
leavings from around the open hearth. After a while,
I moved up to the position of Brakey on the Blooming
Mill engine and continued there for the remainder of
summer. Wearing heat-resistant gloves, I had to
couple and uncouple the small rail cars that carried
the still-hot blooms to the steelyard. After getting
out of the Army in the spring of 1955, I was trying
to earn as much as I could before going to graduate
school in the fall. That took me back for a second
summer at the Iron Works, where I worked the whole
time in the Labor Gang.
As I remember
them, my Iron Works days rise beyond the everyday.
They link my small experience to the saga of the
American blue-collar class, with which I identify.
They give me entrée into the vast romance about
making the hard materials upon which America built
and fulfilled itself.
Some years later, when I
was in the workforce for real and not just for a
summer, I took a job at another
"Works"--the Philadelphia Gas Works. By
then, I wore a white shirt and tie and worked in an
office not a pit. The Gas Works had a romance of its
own, dating back to 1836, when carbureted water gas
first lit city streets, replacing whale oil. In my
position as supervisor of employee communications, I
got to know scores of people who lived and worked
throughout the city. Through them, I tapped into the
stories of meeting a basic public need in a venerable
metropolis.
These stories
gave the Gas Works and the industry their own brand
of romance. The old holder men best symbolized it,
perhaps. They manned the huge distribution holders
visible at strategic locations throughout the city
(all the holders are now gone because of new
technologies). On snowy days, they would climb atop
the holders, a hundred feet or more above ground, and
shovel snow from the sloping tops of the holder
tanks. This would relieve the holders of weight, keep
them balanced, and allow them to continue to ride up
and down, depending on the volume of gas within. Risk
combined with a sense of ownership to make the work
of the holder men a kind of life.
"WORKS",
then, connects to places of work that gave me
significant experience and a sense of the mythical in
the menial. I was predisposed to see work that way, I
think, because I grew up during the Great Depression.
The whole decade of the 'thirties was a lesson in the
value of work. Work was precious to adults because it
was scarce. Kids sensed that if a person had work, he
had better perform well and hold on to it.
"Whistle while you work," the Seven Dwarfs
sang to us from the screen.
Later, when I
went to work at the Iron Works and the Gas Works and
elsewhere, I knew (like most of those my age) how to
behave toward my job. Don't complain. Just shut up,
do the work, and be grateful you have it. Ours was
the last generation of Americans, I suspect, who
internalized the work ethic and acted it out with no
conscious irony or resentment.
But the "WORKS"
website is not just my droll memorial to labor.
Although the name has roots in that old soil, it
nevertheless resonates today because work came to
mean something much more to me. Before I came to
Ursinus as a freshman, I discovered the pleasures of
reading and writing. I did not tell my pals how much
pleasure I took from these secret doings because they
seemed to have no place in a working world. Ursinus,
happily, taught me that reading and writing were
okay--indeed, to my amazement, were among the highest
callings. They were the best work.
My world of
labor and world of reading and writing thus came
together in the word "works"--as in
"collected works." In college I read the
works of the greats in English and American
literature. From that experience I realized finally
that I was enjoying the fruits of a different kind of
labor. In fact, in the work of the likes of Keats and
Hardy and Thoreau and Hemingway I saw
"working" elevated to the level of secular
myth. A "collected works of…" on the
shelves of the library meant that here was evidence
of the labor of a lifetime. Here was a testimony
about the possibilities of the human race--named
"works."
"WORKS"
thus squares the circle of my life. Work, as with a
jackhammer, is important, central. Reading and
writing are work too. They are therefore as
important, central, as work with a jackhammer.
Okay--vastly more
important. But related. Both varieties of work mean a
kind of life.
I also named the
website "WORKS" in defiance of the
conventional attitude toward retirement. People say,
"Now that you're retired, what are you
doing?" I tell them, "Working." They
smile--rrrrright. But as you see, I am
working.
"Did you
get the idea from Hollywood's 'DreamWorks'?"
someone asked. No, I said. I'm not sitting around
dreaming. This is real work.
