PINNICK KINNICK HILL: AN AMERICAN STORY

Chapter Nine

PINNICK KINNICK HILL It was more than a week before I was able to get back on him. By now scabs had begun to form on my sore rear-end. I had to go for short rides until I could sit on him with ease. Even with the padding, it was painful to ride for any length of time. Zorro was getting to be an animal you could trust. Although he would leave the yard and roam around the area, he would always return to the barn later in the day. This was going on day after day, until the gypsies returned to Coe’s Run. When they left town, Zorro must have gone with them, for he disappeared the same day. Chapter Nine W hen I was fourteen I got my first job in industry. The Belleport Lamp Chimney Company was going to start operations after being idled for several months. My cousin Angel went there early on a Monday morning . Mr. Durkin, the superintendent, was walking from the warehouse to the furnace where the glass was melted. We asked him if he would give us a job. He said, “You,” pointing to me, “go talk with Monty over there. He needs a finisher .” He pointed a finger at Angel and told him, “I’ll have him call you maybe in a week.” The man started toward the melting furnaces. Then he turned about-face and said loudly, “Wait just a second. Aren’t you the altar-boy at St. Francis Borgia Church?” He was looking Angel up and down as he asked the question. Angel said, “Yes, sir.” The man looked at me. “You come next week. I’ll see you get on with Jack Humphries.” And then he told my cousin to go to Monty; he could start working for him that morning. I was disappointed. It wasn’t fair to send me home when he had hired me. Now I would have to take the chance of maybe not being needed the next week. But the following week I returned to the factory and was given the job. Mr. Humphries was an old glass-blower who had come to America from Germany many years ago. At that time there were 15 shops. Each shop was comprised of three persons : the blower, the gatherer and the finisher. The gatherer would walk to the furnace and insert a long pipe through the small aperture until it touched the molten glass, then he would turn it rapidly to accumulate a gob of the glass on the end of the rod. He would walk swiftly to a marble slab where he would let the mass flatten out as he let it slide over the surface of the slab. Then he would hit it against an iron bar on the brick floor and break the cooling gob off the pipe. Now that the marble slab was hot from the operation he had just performed, he returned to the furnace to get the second gob of molten glass. This time he would turn it rapidly over the marble until he had formed a cone-shaped mass on the end of his pipe. Then he would let the end of the tapered cone go a little 67 PINNICK KINNICK HILL past the slab, turning the pipe dexterously all the time, until it formed a knob on the end. After a light blowing into the pipe to keep the mass from becoming a solid piece of glass, he would toss it to the blower. The blower blew into the top end of the pipe and let the glass stretch a few inches. Then he would raise it, blow into the pipe and let it touch down on a flat slab of iron or steel on the floor. After letting the bottom out of the now-beginning -to-form lamp chimney, he would continue to blow so the body would expand. All the while, he would turn the pipe to form the size and shape object he wanted. After this operation, he would let the end of the chimney get to the melting point again and would sit on a bench that had arms so that he could place the long bar with the chimney on his right. As he rolled the bar up and down the arms of the bench, he would loosen the knob on the end by first using a pair of pincers. Then, with a deft stroke, he would knock off...