Labor Day Memories at the Zoo

(In order to start off a little thread about our Labor Memories, I offer this. And we at the Zoo would like to wish everyone a safe and memorable Labor Day)

My first job was as a weekend dishwasher in the Burton Center at Lynchburg College in 1980. I was 14 years old and I learned to punch a clock early in life. We worked in a dish room around an automated dishwashing system full of steam and mostly unpleasant people. I was one of several who weren’t college students earning their way to a better stature in life. I was a 14 year old townie in a Private College sea of the entitled.

JB Allen ran the dish room. He was an interesting man. A large, local man, probably 40 at the time with this slicked back black hair that was always greasy, JB had a beer gut and a pick-up truck with so many rust spots you could crawl thru some of them. He ran the dish room like an ex-soldier would; laid back most of the time, but always no nonsense when it came to showing up for work. He was well liked and genuinely respected by all the workers; student and townie alike. After my parents divorced and my father was gone,he became like a surrogate father figure to me, over the years that I worked there, during the summers of my high school days. And when I was accepted a JMU, I think, in some way, he was proudest of all my true mentors.

When I finally returned to Lynchburg, I stopped in to see old JB and we spoke and drank for hours.

When I came back 2 years later, I went to visit his grave site, and cried for an hour. For an old washed up redneck with a beer-gut and a piece of shit pick-up truck.

The work was hard and fast since the college kids ate in shifts. Thousands of them would stream into the Burton Centers, cafeteria all at once and leave in the same fashion. For hours on end we would sort the various plates and glasses and trays and food garbage, and tuck the sundry items into racks then put them on the belt.

Twelve work stations were required to clean the debris these kids left and JB would put us one rotating shifts to break up monotony of the jobs. He would take his shift right there with us standing side by side with us in “the Pit”.

“The Pit” is where the food was banged off the tray and into this troth and then flushed away to the grinder. It was loud and smelly and even though it was stainless steel, filth would grow up on it. The flies used to hang out in “The Pit” and when you left work after a 12 hour shift of Pit Work, you smelled like nothing I have ever smelled since (except New York after a summer shower would get close).

But we used to laugh and joke the whole time we were back there, finding ways to take our minds off the hours of sweet and stink. I think it is where I developed my sense of humor, really. We would fling horrible crap at one another, till JB got tired of it and barked at us to “quid it”.

It was the best worse job I ever had.

JB invited me to spend a Labor Day with him and his buddies one year. I think I was 16. I got hammered around an old boat out in the sticks of Amherst Va. On a little lake in no-where America, I learned what Labor Day is all about.

It’s about beer and stories and not taking yourself or your job seriously. It’s about getting a sunburn with a bunch of people who should never take off their shirts. It’s about spending a few of the hard earned dollars with people that you would gladly give them to just to show them you would. It’s about family and it’s about friends and it’s about remembering that you aren’t the sum total of the things in your possession or the time you spend “punching in” or “punching out”. But rather what you do in between.

JB Allen worked hard and long and at his funeral, even his children stayed away. But he will always live here, on Labor Day, with me. I drink a cheap beer, and try to remember one of his tired jokes, and thank my lucky stars for my time in the Pit.