I am slowly writing about people who influenced my life, so my family and the generations that follow can know them. I wrote some of it before my father passed away, and I have written more since. Louis was from Puerto Rico. We had little in common but we connected.
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| Pillow Block and Bearing |
I worked there the summers of 1976 and 1977 and one January in between. We cast anything made of iron that weighed fifteen pounds or less. Bearing housings and pillow blocks. Gearbox and pump housings. Pulleys, flywheels, handwheels. Valve bodies and pump impellers. Machine bases, brackets, covers, clamps, levers. A few decorative pieces. I still dream sometimes about the bins of Fafnir pillow blocks. In the dream I am grinding, the bins keep coming down a track and are always full.
The crew was Polish, Puerto Rican, and a few Russians. Every summer a handful of college kids showed up to save money for school. The language on the floor was Spanish and Polish with English where it was needed. I learned good words in all three. Most of them I cannot repeat here.
Louis was Puerto Rican and ran one of the sand mold machines. He spoke English with a strong Spanish accent. Five or six molders worked at a time. It was noisy, dirty work. The machines shook the floor. I could never believe how fast the molders worked. The cores came to them in a cart from the core room. Some arrived broken, and the broken ones went into a recycle can. I never saw any of them drop one. Louis pulled an overhead handle and sand dropped into the drag, the bottom half of the mold. He set the bottom pattern in the sand and the machine squeezed it tight. He lifted the pattern out and set a good core in the cavity by hand. He set the top pattern in the cope, the top half of the mold, and sand came down from an overhead hopper to fill it. The machine squeezed that too. He lifted the top pattern out and closed the mold. Then he passed the mold on to a pouring deck track. Then he did it again, and again all day long.
He called me Gordo. Everyone else called me Gordie. Gordo is Spanish for fat. I weighed maybe 135 pounds soaking wet. Louis was the first to say it, and it stuck.
He went to Wonderland Greyhound Park in Revere at least once a week. Sometimes he went with friends from outside the foundry. Sometimes he met his pals from Plainville Casting there. He read the program closely and he knew the dogs. One week he won. The next week he was broke. The week after that he won again.
A lunch truck pulled in every day. The crew lined up with their hands still gray from the iron. When Louis had won, he bought lunch from the truck. When he had lost, he brought a sandwich from home. You could read his week at the track in what he ate.
On the weeks he won, his wallet was fat with cash.
Other men played the dogs too. They talked about it at lunch. Who hit, who got burned, who owed who. Most of them told it as a joke. Louis never joked about it.
On nice days in the summer I sometimes sat with Louis on a bench next to the coke pile. The cupola took the foundry's own rejects, gates, and runners, along with old castings, radiators, and machine parts. Coke and limestone went in with them. The iron came out as castings. The pile was black.
We talked about sports, mostly the Red Sox, since it was summer. He talked about his wife and his children. I never met them.
The week he won $17,000, he showed me. He took out his wallet on the bench. It was packed with bills, folded over. He did not count them. He held it open so I could see.
“Look, Gordo,” he said.
I looked. I had never seen that much money in one place. I believe it was more than he made at the foundry in a year. He closed the wallet and put it in his back pocket. Then he went to the truck and bought lunch.
Two weeks later he was eating sandwiches from home again.
The molds came off the same either way.
Louis only talked about quitting after a bad stretch. On the weeks he won, he never mentioned it.
I have never gambled. I have bought maybe five or six lottery tickets in my life, all of them gifts. I never bought one for myself. One day he had a sandwich, and I asked him straight.
“You lose a lot,” I said.
“Sometimes.”
“Then you win.”
“Then I lose it again.” He turned the sandwich over and looked at it. “It is a problem. I know this.”
“Why go?”
“I try to stop. Four times. Five. One week I stop. Two weeks, one time. Then Friday comes.”
“What happens Friday?”
“I say I only go to watch. Then I am there and the program is in my hand.”
“Does anyone tell you to quit?”
“Everybody. My wife. Friends here. It does not help. I tell myself the same thing.”
He ate. A couple of the guys would toss a baseball around at lunch. We watched them.
“Gordo,” he said. “You go to school.”
“Yes.”
“Then listen. Do not gamble. Ever.”
“I do not gamble.”
“Good. Not one time.” He pointed the sandwich at me. “The first time you win is the worst. You think it is easy. You think it will happen again.”
“Did it?”
“Sometimes. That is the problem.”
I said I would not start. He nodded. He told me the same thing more than once that summer, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish. No apuestes nunca, Gordo.
“And you stay in school, Gordo. No matter what.”
The whistle blew and we walked back in.
The foundry is gone. I do not know what happened to Louis.
I never started. I stayed in school, as he told me to. I earned my degrees, worked for a while, and I became an educator. I have told students to stay in school ever since.
Louis knew what the track cost him. He said so to a college kid he had known for a few weeks. Nobody made him. I learned from him that a person can understand a problem completely and still not stop, and that they can still warn someone else.
Years later I put the name he gave me on my website: gordostuff.com
I still think about him.
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