We are all Slave now.

[ferrets_bueller]

Thread One: Unions.

In the summer of 1965, I came home from my freshman year in college. No summer job prospect. My parents dropped me off one morning in a small manufacturing/warehouse district on Long Island, told me to knock on doors and ask for a job. They said they would pick me up when I called from a phone booth (Phone booth?) with a job. On the 4th place I asked, I was told I could be a substitute for packers and order-pullers in a warehouse for glass containers. Each regular employee would take two weeks off in the summer, and I would do his job for those two weeks. I got to know those no-collar guys pretty well. World War II vets. They gave me a lot of crap about being a college boy. I went back to school in September.

Summer of 1966, I went back and worked at the same place.

The Teamsters organized the warehouse in the winter of 1966. The men I worked with raised my situation with the Teamsters, of their own volition, and asked that the business be allowed to hire one, and only one, student, as a summer replacement during the period from Memorial Day through Labor Day. That student would NOT have to pay union dues.

I worked there each summer until 1968. I'll never cross a union picket line, anywhere, ever.

Thread Two: Cars.

I am not a car guy. But I got very lucky with gently used hand-me-downs, and on a couple of occasions, a used car steal. A '59 Oldsmobile in 1969, which then went to my younger brother, and '62 T-Bird (a swing away steering wheel!) in 71. This was a golden era in American tuna boats.

I then went trough a lifetime of "compromise cars", of American manufacture with varying, and generally deteriorating, quality. Example: I confess to having owned two Dodge Caravans.

When it came to buying a car for my daughter, in 1994 I bought her a gray market European model 1976 Mercedes 280 the size of a garbage truck. The car was the same age as my daughter. She used and abused it for six years. My mechanic, a friend, literally waved me off as it billowed plumes of white smoke from the exhaust. I loved that old beast.

In 2012, I bought a six year old Mercedes SLK that my children will pry from my cold dead hands, or until I can no longer clamber out of it, whichever comes first.