My last forklift adventure
This is not exactly a trucking story, though I was a driver at the time. It’s about an incident on a loading dock. And it was a long time ago.
I was a driver for a company called Nassau Cabinets in North Brunswick, N.J. They built custom kitchen cabinets cheap. They had a process, a kind of assembly line, to turn out many sets of cabinets every day. Most went into inexpensive new homes. They still built inexpensive new homes – that’s how long ago it was.
It was on a Friday, and I was loading my truck with cabinets for a Monday run to Westchester County, N.Y., when another driver backed in with a delivery. He had drums of lacquer. Nassau Cabinets used tons of the stuff along with lots of wood, of course.
Growing business, start of a career
Nassau Cabinets was a rapidly growing business. It’s the place where Elwood, the boss, conducted my driver’s test by pointing at the truck and asking if I could drive it. I had lied and said yes. I spent a rugged first day jumping curbs but not actually hitting anything. It’s also the place where another driver and I made an unsuccessful bid to bring in the Teamsters Union. We failed. Pretty amazing they took me back after that fiasco, but they did.
When I started, Nassau Cabinets was a series of shacks, but Elwood had spent a year constructing a brand new building around the shacks even as they kept turning out cabinets. The shacks were finally gone, and it was now a legitimate factory at the end of Ridgewood Avenue, then a dead-end street.
Anyhow, that Friday I helped unload and signed for the freight, and here my memory fails me. I don’t recall why I was on the forklift or why I had the forks up so high. Whatever the reason, the top of the forklift mast was near the ceiling. It caught on a pipe flange or something. The next thing I know, there’s a big commotion inside the building. People are shouting and running around.
Turned out I had caught a piece of the sprinkler system and given it a good tug. A pipe had broken inside, and water was showering everyone in the hardware department. It took a while for someone to find the water turnoff valve for the building. Since the building was new, so was the sprinkler system. Elwood knew how to turn it off. Eventually, the rest of the place had water.
I was in trouble with Elwood, of course, but he didn’t fire me. But things would get worse. Much worse.
Left for the weekend
I finished loading my truck for Monday and went home. I lived alone in New Brunswick at the time, and on weekends I often went back to North Jersey, where my folks lived and where my friends were. That’s what I did that weekend. Since I had no car, I took the train from New Brunswick to Newark on Saturday morning. I took the train back late Sunday.
Monday morning, I woke up as usual and caught the Livingston Avenue bus up to Ridgewood Avenue. There, as usual, I went into the deli for a container of coffee and a buttered roll. Behind the counter, Sal gave me a curious look and asked, “What are you doing here?”
I said it was Monday, and I was going to work. I asked why he would ask that question.
“You’ll see,” he said, then went on to the next customer.
So I took my coffee and roll and began walking up Ridgewood Avenue.
Something was strange. Up ahead, people were standing in the street. It was still a couple of blocks away, but as I walked I got an uneasy feeling. The people were milling around outside the factory.
And the factory was smoking.
When I got closer, I could see the steel roof beams. They were twisted and pointing at odd angles. Then I saw places where the cinder block walls had collapsed. Elwood’s brand new cabinet factory had burned to a crisp. Everything was gone.
And it was all my fault.
I stopped. Elwood had to be among the people up ahead. But he wouldn’t fire me, I thought. Not this time. This time he would kill me.
I turned around, walked briskly back to Livingston Avenue and kept on walking.
The end and the beginning
That was the end of my first driving job. But I knew it was what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t find another driving job for another three years, but then it was for a Teamsters LTL and the beginning of a genuine career in trucking.
As it turned out, Elwood didn’t blame me. The sprinkler company had been there Saturday and fixed the damage I had caused. The sprinkler system was working. It simply wasn’t able to put out the blaze that had started near the spray room later that day. The fire spread quickly to nearby cabinets and stacks of stored wood. It finally exploded all those drums of lacquer and other highly flammable stuff.
The Nassau Cabinets fire was spectacular. You could see flames and smoke for miles, they say. It had even been mentioned on the radio news out of New York. I just hadn’t been listening that weekend. LL