I met Lucy on my first day of work as the second shift foreman of the small parts machining department of Pelligro Industries. As factories go, Pelligro was small -only about two hundred employees - and made hydraulic components for the heavy industrial and agricultural market. A small part of the factory also made replacement parts for the aircraft of World War II. These parts were very low volume runs, as one might expect, and were sold primarily to aircraft museums and a few people with more money than they could spend who restored these warbirds of the past and flew them in aircraft shows. Pelligro was the only company that still made FAA approved parts, and that was because Pelligro had made the originals during World War II.
I was, as I later heard Lucy said of me on that first day, "still wet behind the ears", and could not possibly know enough to tell her how to do her job. I couldn't really argue much. I was twenty-six and she was forty-seven. I was a self-taught machinist and I'd never worked in a factory. She'd worked in aircraft parts for twenty-two years.
All my experience, what little there was of it, was gained in my uncle's tool shop. I'd started working there on weekends when I was sixteen. Like many young men in the 1960's, I was drafted into the Army three months after I graduated from high school. I went through Basic Training in Ft. Polk, Louisiana and was certain that like most draftees, I was headed for Advanced Infantry Training and then to Vietnam. Either because of my technical background, or more probably, some bureaucratic error on the Army's part, they sent me to school to be a vehicle mechanic. I ended up doing a year in Korea in an Infantry Company Motor Pool before being discharged.
After the Army let me go, I worked for my uncle for almost six years. He turned sixty-five in 1974, decided to retire, and couldn't find anyone with enough money to buy the business outright. He sold off the equipment a piece at a time and finally sold the building. Grant Tooling was only the fading, painted name over the door of the old brick building and the fading memory in all the former employees, most of who were at retirement age anyway.
I was out of a job, and needed one badly. I had a car payment to make, rent to pay, and thought it would be nice if I could eat once in a while as well. The city unemployment office sent me to Pelligro to apply for a foreman's job. I wasn't sure what that would entail, but it would be better than moving back in with my mom and dad.
After a lengthy interview with the Personnel Manager, and a tour of the facility, I left without much hope. He'd asked if I'd ever managed people before, and I figured my answer of "I was a squad leader for a short time in the Army" killed my chances. I was surprised by the phone call a week later telling me I'd gotten the job as second shift foreman in the aircraft parts department. I was to start on the first of the month as long as I could pass the mandatory physical. My salary would be a little over nine thousand a year, I'd have health insurance, and I'd get overtime pay if I worked on the weekends.
Jack, the first shift foreman, stayed over and walked me around the aircraft parts department to introduce me to all six of the workers. I was more than a little surprised to find all but one were women and those women were all in their late forties to early sixties. I was going to be supervising a bunch of women at least old enough to be my mother, and a couple were as old as my grandmother. The lone man ran only one special lathe job because as Jack put it, "he's the only one who's ever been able to do it right."
When Jack left, I walked back around the department to get better acquainted. It was an interesting first night.
There was Martha who ran the biggest turret lathe in the shop even though she was only about five feet nothing and couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She was so short she had a special box to stand on so she could reach the lathe controls. Her hair was silver and her smile was contagious. I pictured her baking cookies on Saturday and playing with her grandkids on Sunday...well, until I talked to her.
"I'm glad they didn't promote Mark from Hydraulics Machining. He doesn't know his dick from a broom handle, and he'd get everything fucked up like Hogan's goat. You're young enough we can teach you what's what so we can live with you. Oh...and don't go grabbing our tits or patting us on the ass like the last asshole. If we want our tits grabbed or our asses patted, we'll tell you."
There was Wanda, who was divorced and about fifty. At one time, judging by the color of her eyebrows, she'd had auburn hair, and her face was pretty enough she'd have been a woman any man gave a second look. I gave Wanda a second and then a third look. Her hair was that bright red color that can only come from a trip to the hairdresser. She stopped working, put one hand on her cocked hip, and grinned at me.
"You got a girlfriend?"
I said no.
"You like older women?"
I said I supposed it depended on how old.
"Well...How about fifty? I'm around that age."
She winked at me and grinned.
"I'd be fun."
Wanda would have been interesting, I thought. She wore tight, knit shirts to work, her breasts were huge, and she seemed to always get the front of her shirts dirty. At the start of her shift, she'd start out clean, but by lunch, she'd have hand prints under and on each breast. She made those handprints herself. Janey told me it was because Wanda couldn't find bras that fit very well so she kept adjusting things to be comfortable.
Janey was just as nice as nice could be. She ran a row of drill presses making holes in throttle control levers and she was fast. She always smiled at me when I walked by. I always smiled back. Janey liked her jeans tight and her tops cut low in front. She never came on to me or any of the other men in the place, but she had all of us staring at her deep cleavage and the way her hips made a seductive little up and down motion when she walked.
The other women were just your normal, average woman. They were there to earn an income. Some were single or divorced. Most were married and building savings and social security credits for retirement. I got along with them well and they got along with me.
Then there was Lucy.
Lucy was a pretty brunette though she didn't have a great figure. She had a few pounds on her ass that made it look a little wide, and though it was hard to tell for sure because she always wore loose, button-up shirts, and her breasts weren't all that big. Lucy also seemed to have an attitude. That first night, when I walked up to her turret lathe, she ignored me and kept on turning out valve pin blanks.
I cleared my throat to let her know I was there. She turned, looked at me, and said, "Can't talk now. I'm on piecework." Then she went back to spinning the hand wheels and indexing the turret of her lathe.
I understood. Piecework meant a machine operator had a target quantity to make in a shift. If they exceeded that quantity, they were paid a bonus per piece based on the percentage they made over the target. A good operator who worked efficiently could earn ten to twenty percent over their hourly wage, and Jack had said Lucy was one of the best.
I didn't catch up to Lucy at the first break. As soon as the buzzer rang, she headed off to the ladies room and stayed there until just before the buzzer rang again. I did find her in the cafeteria during lunch. She wasn't much more talkative.
"You're the new foreman, huh?"
"Yes. I'm looking forward to working with all you ladies. Jack say's you're a great crew."
"Yeah, like he would know. He's been sucking up to the big boss for years. Used to be a stock boy, and then all of a sudden he's a foreman. He gives all the good jobs to Marion because he's sleeping with her. I oughta tell his wife, but it's none of my business as long as he's on first and I'm on second."
I tried to play nice.
"Well, I don't know him at all. I'll try to help you ladies out all I can. If you do well, I'll do well too."
"Yeah, that's what the last guy said too. Hey, I gotta eat my lunch. Do you mind?"
}{
I learned a lot during my first six months there. The women had all been doing the same jobs for years. A few, Martha and a couple others, were the last remnants of the "Rosie, The Riveter" era, and they were all proud of that.
I learned a lot more about them as well. I had to be careful when I walked past Wanda's lathe. If I didn't, she'd pinch me on the ass. The first time she did it, I jumped about a foot. Wanda just giggled.
"Told you I'd be fun."
I learned why Janey dressed like she did but never had anything to do with any of the men in the plant. Wanda told me Janey liked girls and was trying to convince Barbara, a tall, slender woman who worked in assembly to try girls too. Wanda said she knew this because Janey had told her after they'd spent the night together.
"If I hadn't had a boyfriend at the time, I'd have spent more than one night with Janey. You wouldn't believe what she can do with her fingers and tongue. I guess that's more than you needed to know, isn't it? Well, on second thought, maybe not. You pretty good with your fingers and tongue? I am too, if you know what I mean."
Martha proved to be the grandmother I'd first thought. Every Friday she'd bring in a sack full of cookies or a cake or a bunch of cupcakes for the department. She was a great cook and a really nice person, once you got past the way she talked.
They were very proud of their quality record. As Michelle, a still cute little woman of sixty six told me, "During the war, they always told us if the airplane stops running, the men can't just get out and walk home. We made sure that never happened, because our boyfriends and husbands were over there fighting."
Their quality record wasn't because the women never made mistakes because they did. There were just enough inspection points that none of the mistakes ever made it through the process. It was one of those mistakes that let me get to know Lucy a little better, and I think was the start of her beginning to like me.
A lot of aircraft parts, the small ones anyway, were made of stainless steel so they wouldn't rust. Stainless steel can be a bitch to machine, and I knew this because my uncle's tool shop did a lot of work in stainless steel. It takes the right type of tool with the right type of grind to make everything work.
Lucy was spinning away at her hand wheels and turret one night and had just given a tray of parts to one of the inspectors. Marsha brought two parts to me along with the gauge she used to inspect them.
"Lucy has a problem. All these are bad."
I tried her gauge on the parts and she was right. The parts were about ten thousands of an inch too short. I went to stop Lucy so we could fix the problem.
"Lucy, stop. You're making bad parts."
She looked at me with fire in her eyes.
"I can't be. I'm checking every ten parts."
"Let me see you check one."
Lucy fished a part out of her parts bin, wiped it off, and put into the length gauge sitting on the table beside her lathe. It measured very nearly nominal.
"See, my parts are fine."
