Working

by Studs Terkel

  I felt this tremendous heat to my left. I turn around and this whole fuckin’ room was orange, yellow. You can’t see clear through the plastic face piece. You can just see orange and feel the heat. So I open up with this shittin’ nozzle to bank back the smoke. The guys came in and ventilated, knocked out the windows. A seven-room apartment, with six beds and a crib. That’s how many kids were living there. Nobody was hurt, they all got out.

  There was a lot of smoke. When you have two minutes left on the Scott, a bell starts ringin’. It means get out, you got no oxygen. The thing I don’t like about it, with the piece on your face, you feel confined. But as I went to more fires, I loved the thing because I know that thing’s life. Ninety percent of the people die from smoke inhalation, not from burns.

  You got oxygen, it’s beautiful, but you can’t see. It’s a shitty feeling when you can’t see. Sometimes a Scott’s bad because it gives you a false sense of security. You go into a room where you’re not supposed to be. You’d be walkin’ into a pizzeria oven and you wouldn’t know it. You can’t see, you feel your way with the hose. You straddle the hose as you get out. You gotta talk to yourself. Your mind’s actually talkin’. I’m sayin’ things like: It’s beautiful, I can breathe, the fire’s over.

  In 1958 there was a fire across the street from where I live. It was about one ’ in the morning. There’s flames on the second floor. I ran up the stairs and grabbed this little girl. She was burnt on the arm. I ran down the street and yelled to the firemen, “I got a girl here got burnt.” They went right past me. I hated the bastards. Now I understand. You gotta put the the fire out. There’s more life up there you gotta save. This girl’s outside . . . It’s real . . .

  When you’re with the police, it wasn’t real. I heard guys makin’ arrests, they found a gun in the apartment. In the paper they say the guy fought with the guy over the gun. When you know the truth, the story’s bullshit. But in the fire department there’s no bullshit. You gotta get into that fire—to be able to save somebody’s life.

  About two years ago a young girl ran to the firehouse. She’s yellin’ that her father had a heart attack. The guy was layin’ in the kitchen, right? He pissed in his pants. That’s a sign of death. The fella was layin’ there with his eyes open. Angle pushes the guy three times in the chest, ’cause you gotta shock his heart. The son was standin’ in the room, just starin’ down. I got down on his mouth. You keep goin’ and goin’ and the guy threw up. You clean out his mouth. I was on a few minutes and then Ed Corrigan jumped on the guy’s mouth. The captain bent down and said, “The guy’s dead. Keep goin’ for the family.” We took over for ten minutes, but it was a dead man. The son looked down at me and I looked up. He said, “Man, you tried everything. You tried.” You know what I mean? I was proud of myself. I would get on a stranger, on his mouth. It’s a great feeling.

  We had this fire down the block. A Puerto Rican social club. The captain, the lieutenant, and the other firemen took the ladder up and saved two people. But downstairs there was a guy tryin’ to get out the door. They had bolts on the door. He was burnt dead. Know what the lieutenant said? “We lost a guy, we lost a guy.” I said, “You saved two people. How would you know at six in the morning a guy’s in the social club sleeping on a pool table?” He said, “Yeah, but we lost a guy.” And the lieutenant’s a conservative guy.

  You get guys that talk about niggers, spics, and they’re the first guys into the fire to save ’em. Of course we got guys with long hair and beards. One guy’s an artist. His brother got killed in Vietnam, that’s why he’s against the war. And these guys are all super firemen. It’s you that takes the beating and you won’t give up. Everybody dies . . .

  My wife sees television, guys get killed. She tells me, “Be careful.” Sometimes she’ll call up the firehouse. I tell her we had a bad job, sometimes I don’t . . . They got a saying in the firehouse: “Tonight could be the night.” But nobody thinks of dying. You can’t take it seriously, because you’d get sick. We had some fires, I said, “We’re not gettin’ out of this.” Like I say, everybody dies.

  A lotta guys wanna be firemen. It’s like kids. Guys forty years old are kids. They try to be a hard guy. There’s no big thing when you leave boyhood for manhood. It seems like I talked the same at fifteen as I talk now. Everybody’s still a kid. They just lose their hair or they don’t fuck that much.

  When I was a kid I was scared of heights. In the fire department you gotta go up a five-story building with a rope around you. You gotta jump off a building. You know the rope can hold sixteen hundred pounds. As long as you got confidence in your body and you know the guy’s holding you, you got nothing to be scared of. I think you perform with people lookin’ at you. You’re in the limelight. You’re out there with the people and kids. Kids wave at you. When I was a kid we waved at firemen. It’s like a place in the sun.

  Last month there was a second alarm. I was off duty. I ran over there. I’m a bystander. I see these firemen on the roof, with the smoke pouring out around them, and the flames, and they go in. It fascinated me. Jesus Christ, that’s what I do! I was fascinated by the people’s faces. You could see the pride that they were seein’. The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. That’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be.

  I worked in a bank. You know, it’s just paper. It’s not real. Nine to five and it’s shit. You’re lookin’ at numbers. But I can look back and say, “I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.” It shows something I did on this earth.

  1 E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, The Unknown Mayhew (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).

  2 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

  3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1962).

  4 New York Times, June 10, 1973.

  5 Ibid.

  6 From the preface to Division Street: America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).

  7 From the preface to Division Street: America.

  8 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy.

  9 “Today, because of our struggles, the pay is up to two dollars an hour. Yet we know that is not enough.”

  10 “Since we started organizing, this camp has been destroyed. They started building housing on it.”

  11 A variation of strip mining.

  12 Mineral rights.

  13 A major multilane expressway running through Chicago.

  14 During the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, Friedheim, a public relations officer of the Defense Department, was the Administration’s spokesman in dealing with the press.

  15 “In New York, stewardesses live five or six girls to one apartment. They think they can get by because they’re in and out so much. But there’s gonna be a few nights they’re all gonna be home at once and a couple of ’em will have to sleep on the floor.”

  16 Pronounced “beer.”

  17 A play in which he appeared, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

  18 From Notes on a Cowardly Lion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), John Lahr’s biography of his father Bert Lahr, the highly gifted clown: “Advertisements for potato chips have made more people aware of his face than ever before. He invented a catchword for the product—‘de—lay—cious’—turning his comedy easily from art to marketing. Cab drivers stop their cabs to yell, ‘Bet you can’t eat just one.’ Grandmothers accost him like one of their own to ask if he really eats potato chips. These commercials, amounting to work more easily measured in minutes than days, earns him $75,000 a year, far more than a season on Broadway. . . . He is proud to have survived and succeeded in this newest facet of show business, the television commercial. But he is perplexed. His laughter was meant for people, not merchandise. The paradox has been hard for him to resolve. Even though h
is commercials are excellent and he has devised many of their comic situations, he is suspicious, ‘I wonder if these ads have been good for my career? Here’s a strange thing, John: after all these years of struggle, the biggest success I’ve had is in these trite commercials. It’s stupid.’ ”

  19 The outbreaks in poor black communities following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

  20 Many years ago I conducted a radio news commentary program, whose sponsor was a credit clothing house. I was fired in one week. As the sponsor put it, “For Chrissake, his listeners barge into the store, payin’ cash for everything! Cash, for Chrissake! I need that kind like a hole in the head. I want the element that buy on credit, no money down. What the hell do you think I’m in business for? Get rid of this guy, he’s trouble.”

  21 Deadbeat.

  22 There have been rumors through the past several years that the Syndicate controls these concessions. There is a natural reluctance on the part of attendants to discuss it. A similar phenomenon is the parking lot.

  23 “He” was another washroom attendant.

  24 It was the week of Chicago’s Big Snow-In, beginning January 25, 1967. Traffic was hopelessly snarled. Scores of thousands couldn’t get to work.

  25 The boundary line separating Chicago from the North Shore suburb, Evanston

  26 A realty phenomenon in Chicago: quickly constructed four-story buildings, with an open parking lot as its ground floor. The apartments are mostly one-room and two. Charges have been made by community groups that the material is shoddy and the buildings quickly deteriorate while the fast-buck entrepreneurs take the money and run. Zoning changes, due to these complaints, have, for the time being, discouraged further construction of four-plus-ones.

  27 Illinois Institute of Technology.

  28 Big Bill Broonzy, the late blues artist, frequently told the story of his visit to his mother, who lived in the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas. He was driving a Cadillac. A white policeman flagged him down. “Whose car is this, boy? Ain’t yours, is it?” “No, sir. It belongs to my boss.” “Okay.”

  29 Lower-middle-class white neighborhoods, where blacks are not welcome.

  30 His most recent assignment: guarding an alley behind police headquarters, “It’s their way of trying to humiliate me.”

  31 A note of One Worldism might be in order at this point. A news item: Bangkok, Thailand (UPI)—“Police battled a gang of bandits in southern Thailand Saturday. One bandit was killed. A police spokesman said the battle began when the bandit gang, disguised as policemen, challenged a group of policemen disguised as bandits.”

  32 Several years ago, the University of Wisconsin produced a series of films (in which I was the interviewer) dealing with people who had achieved some form of recognition in their respective occupations. It was for showing before groups of ghetto children. The results of a survey indicated that the most admired subject was the lawyer-realtor-accountant, who spoke of his possessions—and showed them. He was astonishingly inarticulate—or inhibited—about his work. The least popular subject was a distinguished black sculptor, who in his studio enthusiastically talked of his work, and showed it in loving detail. The survey further revealed that the children were avid television viewers and remarkably knowledgeable about the commercials of the moment.

  33 “It’s not a group of people. It’s a division within a corporation. The plant manager came from Van Nuys, California. Production managers came from the South, and one came from the East. They came here with the ideas of how to make a faster buck through the backs of the workers, as I see it.”

  34 In Chicago, the Yellow Cab Company and the Checker Cab Company, under one ownership, use the above described type of car, and comprise most of the cabs in the city.

  35 “Most truckdrivers are generally quite courteous. They’ll drive as far to the right as possible, so if they’re moving slowly other traffic can get around them.”

  36 An institution for the mentally disturbed.

  37 Chicago Transit Authority

  38 “The long hauler, if they give him a pickup to go over to Detroit from Chicago, he feels it’s a waste of time, no trip at all. He wants to load New York. He’d leave Chicago, drop a drop in Cleveland and a drop in Pittsburgh, and peddle the rest of it off in New York. Once a dispatcher told Jim—he’s a little over fifty, been long haul for twenty-five years—‘We have a little box here, not a load, weighs thirty-five hundred pounds, do me a favor, pick it up.’ Jim says, ‘I don’t have room for this box and it’s goin’ the other way. I’ll pick it up next time I’m in New York.’ He was heading for St. Louis. It takes a certain kind of individual that thinks in thousands of miles so casually, as you and I’ll pick something up from my neighbor here next week.”

  39 “That’s a Peterbilt, the Cadillac of trucks. It’s a great, big. long-nosed outfit. The tractor alone costs 30,000 dollars.”

  40 Frank Fitzsimmons, president of the Teamsters Union.

  41 The conversation took place before Jimmy Hoffa was granted a pardon by President Nixon and long before the Teamsters Union came out in support of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

  42 The late U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

  43 Assorted stock.

  44 An upper-middle-class suburb north of Chicago.

  45 It is a local of the UAW.

  46 Her husband, an artist and professor of art at a local branch of the state university.

  47 Carolyn Horton, her mentor.

  48 A far North Shore suburb of Chicago; its most upper U.

  49 “Livermore said, ‘I own what I believe to be the controlling stock of IBM and Philip Morris.’ So I asked, ‘Why do you bother with anything else?’ He answered ‘I only understand stock. I can’t bother with businesses.’ So I asked him, ‘Do men of your kind put away ten million dollars where nobody can ever touch it?’ He looked at me and answered, ‘Young man, what’s the use of having ten million if you can’t have big money?‘” (Arthur Robertson’s recollections in Hard Times (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.)

  50 “The Nixon administration has accelerated the movement toward patient, prudent evaluation, particularly in the office of Economy Opportunity . . . Prominent among the victims was the OEO, flagship of old ways but also home of the new” (Jack Rosenthal, New York Timers, February 4, 1973).

  51 American Federation of Government Employees.

  52 Personnel, Management, and Service.

  53 Pike County Citizens’ Association.

  54 At the time he was pitching coach for the Giants.

  55 Owner of the Minnesota Twins.

  56 The Giants, in first place at the time of this conversation, blew the pennant. In 1972 the Chicago White Sox and the Oakland Athletics, battling for first place, played a nineteen-inning game. It was August 11. On the following night they played another extra inning game. On the following night, the Sox traveled to Chicago and played an exhibition game with the Cubs.

  57 Billie Jean King.

  58 Juniors are eighteen and under.

  59 From interview by Bob Oates, Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1970.

  60 Wide area telecommunications service. A prerogative granted important executives by some corporations: unlimited use of the telephone to make a call anywhere in the world.

  61 Internal Investigation Division of the Chicago Police Department.

  62 A popular Chicago underground newspaper at the time.

  63 The most militant of all the Chicago underground papers at the time.

  64 Patrick Garrard, editor of the Capitalist Reporter.

  65 Mme. Lotte Lehmann often spoke of art and age. She recalled a wistful conversation with Maestro Bruno Walter. In his eighties, he reflected on the richness and wisdom of the aged artist and of the long way the young virtuoso had to go—“but he’s less tired.” It is said that Arturo Toscanini, in his last years, often was thus reflective.

  66 The eminent tenor sax man whose highly creative years were with Duke Ellington.<
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  67 The celebrated motorcycle stunt man. “He broke his back yesterday. Down in Atlanta—jumping. I was just on the phone with him, since he’s part of our group insurance policy.”

  68 An upper-middle-class private elementary and high school.

  69 A public high school attended predominantly by lower-middle-class boys. (It is now coeducational.)

  70 The financial section of the Chicago Daily News had a full-page feature story on him.

  71 Intensive Care Unit.

  72 Teaching English as a Second Language.

  73 A “super” supermarket in the community.

  74 A Chicago area in which many of the Southern white émigrés live; furnished flats in most instances.

  † When I was there last year for a commencement talk, the parents, many of them wives of émigré black lung miners, were attentive. The students were excited and voluble, what with soda pop and cake. A casual look from Pat, momentary silence—in fact, profound attention—and the ceremonies began. Later, I found out that the whispers and giggles concerned me. They were anticipating my surprise and speechlessness at the presentation of their gift—a railroad man’s gold watch, inscribed.