Chapter One

The monster that I saw was called "the sewer-pipe plant." Early on, my father told me, "If you don't learn how to do something, that's where you're going to wind up." And the way he explained it, the sewer pipe was no place for a man to work. "It will kill you," he said. But that was not the end of it. After my junior year of high school, he arranged for me to work there through the summer. That was all the warning I needed.

I went off to college, enrolled as a business student at the University of Buffalo. That ended after two years. A professor arranged for a summer job. He sent me to Philadelphia for an interview. "But you won't be working here," I was told. "You will have to go down south. Maybe to Alabama. There are some large black insurance companies down there. They'll hire you. You know, since you're black, you'll have to work for a black company."

I was crushed. For me, the South was the land of the boogeyman. My parents were from the South. I had heard my father talk of the way life was there for blacks. He had hated it. There was no way I was going down south for anything. Especially not to work. What I was told in the interview that day ended my pursuit of a degree in business, where I had been majoring in insurance. So I ended up back home, which was Clearfield, a small town nestled in the mountains of central Pennsylvania.

"You have two choices," my father said. "You get a job or you join the Army."

I did not like the idea of the Army, and I knew that getting a job surely meant going to the plant where they used clay – plentiful in the mountains of that section of Pennsylvania – to manufacture pipe for sewer lines. They made pipe in all sizes, some weighing as much as a thousand pounds. And there were no machines. You lifted the pipe and you moved them on wheelbarrows. The kilns where they were baked were so hot that the men who removed them, to protect their feet from serious burns, padded the soles on their shoes with rubber cut from old automobile tires. It was a monster of a place to work.

I got lucky. Frank Cardon, my buddy from high school, was sports editor at The Progress, the local newspaper. I explained to him the bind I found myself in, and he said, "There's a job open here in the sports department. I'm sure you can get it. I'll put a good word in for you."