Freihofer's Bakery: The Summer of 73

Freihofer's Bakery: The Summer of 73

It was the summer of 1973. Dottie was in our apartment in Watervliet but after the engagement episode I had moved out and was renting a place across the river in Troy. I graduated from Hudson Valley with an Associate in Arts degree. Most of my friends in the area were either schoolmates of Dottie's or non-students I had met in the area. I had made just two friends at Hudson Valley. One was Patty who I had met the first week of school. It was through her that I got a summer job at the Freihofer’s Bakery plant in Albany. Her connection was her Mother who was a full time employee there. In the summer the bakery's business would increase due to all the vacation spots in upstate New York, places like Lake George, Lake Champlain, the Finger Lakes, and Saratoga Springs. This was a union job so it paid very well. It started at $3.56 an hour. The minimum wage at the time was $1.85. Summer jobs generally did not pay much more than the minimum wage. Freihofer's was a sort of upscale grocery store type bakery. Similar to what Entenmann's was in metropolitan New York. I don't know of a West Coast equivalent. I worked in their factory in the sweets division. It was an old building and it did not have air conditioning. The ovens and fryers (for donuts) put out lots of heat to add to the already hot and humid summer heat of Albany. It was assembly line work. The line for cakes would have two rows of cakes. People were stationed along the line (conveyor belt) and each person was responsible for one task. For instance: the first person in the line took a freshly baked layer of cake off a rack of freshly baked cakes and placed it on the conveyor belt, another might put the icing on the lower layer of the cake the next might put the top layer on, the next more icing, the next decoration, the next put the finished cake in a box, and the last would close the box and put it on another rack for shipping out. The regular staff working the lines were all women and hence the conveyor belts were at a rather low level. They were probably set for someone in the 5' 3” range. It was repetitive work and those belts moved at a quick pace. It took a couple of weeks before I was able to keep up enough to be able to talk with everyone while working the line. The regulars constantly chatted among themselves. I was told that I could grab anything I wanted to eat. That sounded great when they told me. I grabbed a roll on my first break. That turned out to be the last item I took the whole time I worked there. After smelling the baked goods all day long, especially the sweet stuff, none of the bakery goods were appealing. In fact, it was the last thing I wanted to eat. Very few people ever took anything. When my first day ended I not only couldn't eat the bakery's stuff, I couldn't eat anything period. I just went home, drank some water and went to bed. The next day one of the other summer hires, who had worked the previous summer, told me he was going to go to the bar down the street and asked if I'd like to go. I took him up on it. I wanted something to drink but it had to be something very far from sweet. He bought me a beer and that beer tasted so good. I had not previously been a big beer drinker, but that summer I became a beer drinker for life. I remember spending evenings after work drinking beer and getting clams on the half-shell at this little place with my new friend.

Our supervisor's name was Doris. She treated us like we were little kids. Instructions were very simple and she tended to present them to us like we were eight years old. She was stern and an all-business type of person. The moment you started to screw up she would be right there to correct you. All the guys dreaded seeing her come their way, especially when it was time for her to find someone to do donuts. There were three or four women who always did donuts but they needed to be relieved when they took their breaks and lunch. Donuts were tough for a couple of reasons. The conveyor belt was lower than the others. The deep fryer spewing out lots of heat was right behind the donuts line making it the hottest spot in the factory. The task was picking up 3 like kind donuts and placing them into their proper place in the box. Given the heat, the small space, the extra low conveyor belt, and the need to pick up three donuts cleanly with the right hand in concert with two other donuts pickers it was considered the most difficult task in the place. To make matters worse, I was left handed.

                           The old Freihofer Bakery plant where I worked in the summer of 73

After a few weeks on the job I needed something to help me through the day so I started joking around with the ladies. When I got good enough I would do things to relieve the boredom. On the cake line I would randomly do a jumping jack, or spin around between cakes. I would start singing “I've been working on the railroad” but change the lines to match the task we were doing. I'd just try to do things to break up the monotony. I even started kind of poking some fun at Doris. I would tell everyone when Doris was coming and say things like “Let's pretend we can't see her” or “Gosh, it's too bad Doris wasn't more my age, then maybe she'd go out with me”. I would ask Doris for tips on how to do the task I was doing better. When I was asked what I did on the weekend I would often conclude my stories saying how much I missed Doris. When Doris would come around for “donut-duty” if it looked like she was coming my way I would flag her down asking her if I could please do donuts today, telling her how determined I was to master that skill. Everyone, especially the guys would laugh. They thought I was crazy but I had watched Doris enough to know when she was coming to get me. I was only asking to be picked when I was about to selected anyway. It was funny because nobody ever volunteered to do donuts.

Donuts: The women in donuts started to like me because of my joking around. I would tell them how I wanted to become a great donut picker, that I admired their skill and that I practiced at home by lining up some donuts on my kitchen table and then picking them up and putting them in a box. I told them that to simulate the environment I would close all the windows, put on my winter coat, and put the oven on. They loved it. They started to help me out by doing my donuts for me whenever I started to fall behind. Of course they did this at the same time they were doing theirs, and in the beginning they had to do this frequently. They were so good at it they could do that. Eventually though, I got good too. When I finally did, I returned the favor. I would randomly announce “Break Time” and I would do each of their lines for 20 seconds (one at a time of course) to give them a chance to stretch. Well, I ended up being the primary summer donuts relief guy. However, I liked working with the women on the line so it all worked out. Everyone was happy about it, the other guys, the donuts gals, and Doris.

Cookies: I never got good at cookies. The women on cookies could be cranky and never fully warmed up to me. One of them complained that I was too sweaty and I smelled. Well I probably had been doing Donuts earlier. Besides cookies were an afternoon activity and that meant I'd already been working in that environment for at least 4 hours. Why would I not be? I later learned that they complained about all of the guy summer hires. The supervisor of the cookies drank at lunch, a bit too much. He just wanted to go home, or maybe that was back to the bar as soon as possible. He would be able to leave as soon as the cookie run for the day was complete. So he'd keep cranking up the speed on the cookie conveyor belt as the afternoon went on (think Lucy on the “I Love Lucy” show). The cookies would come at you on one conveyor belt and right in front of you, at the end of the cookie conveyor belt there was another small conveyor belt that ran left to right with the cookie boxes on them. The cookies were six across. You had to reach over the cookie box conveyor belt and pick up six cookies, 3 with each hand, and put them in the box. If you got behind the cookies would fall into the cookie box conveyor belt and everything would jam up. When he started speeding up the conveyor belt I would get agitated and frustrated and I would sometimes reach out as far as I could and push as many rows of cookies as I could on to the floor. When he saw me he would stop the machine and shout at me, but I didn't care. It was crazy. The women were not all that happy that I was slowing things down because they wanted to get done as early as possible too but they did appreciate me confronting the supervisor. They were not happy with him turning the speed up all the time either. Their complaining about it fell on deaf ears. I don't really think my actions made much of a difference either but I did notice that he would watch me a little more. Luckily I was not assigned to cookies too often.

I became Doris's favorite summer hire. While she never directly laughed at my jokes, I think she found me amusing. She liked my upbeat attitude, that I never complained, and that I readily volunteered. My upbeat attitude was nothing more than me trying to have a little fun in a boring job. My volunteering was just me acting enthusiastic about something I was going to have to do anyway. On slower days Doris would let some of the workers leave early. As the summer wore on Doris began to regularly pick me as the first summer hire to be excused early. A friend of mine, also a summer hire, told me that Doris was disappointed that I had not returned the following summer as she was planning to make me a lead which was not only an easier position, it paid more too. The best part of this experience was I learned the value of keeping a good attitude.

The summer was coming to an end. It was time to address the decisions I had been putting off making. I had to move out of my room in the RPI frat house. So I needed to figure out where I was going to live as well as where, not to mention when, I was going to attend college next. Lastly, what about me and Dottie?

This follows “The Surprise Engagement” and is followed by, but not yet published “Fall 1973”