How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 35

A man with a fat run--lower berths all occupied, with at least a smattering of riders in the uppers, night after night--ought to be able easily to put aside a hundred and fifty dollars a month as his income from this item. There are hundreds of porters who are doing this very thing; and there are at least dozens of porters who own real estate, automobiles, and other such material evidences of prosperity.

A tip is not necessarily a humiliation, either to the giver or to the taker. On the contrary, it is a token of meritorious service. And the smart porter is going to take good care that he gives such service. But how about the porter who is not so smart--the man who has the lean run?

As every butcher and every transportation man knows, there is lean with the fat. And it does the lean man little good to know that his fat brother is preparing to buy a secondhand automobile. On the contrary, it creates an anarchist--or at least a socialist--down under that black skin.

Here is Lemuel--cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality. Lemuel runs on a "differential"

between New York, Chicago and St. Louis. Every pa.s.senger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials--as the roads that take longer hours, and so are permitted to charge a slightly lower through fare between those cities, are called--have had a hard time of it in recent years. It is the excess-fare trains, the highest-priced carriers--which charge you a premium of a dollar for every hour they save in placing you in the terminal--that are the crowded trains. And the differentials have had increasing difficulty getting through pa.s.sengers.

It seems that in this day and land a man who goes from New York to Chicago or St. Louis is generally so well paid as to make it worth dollars to him to save hours in the journey. It is modern efficiency showing itself in railroad-pa.s.senger travel. But the differentials, having local territory to serve, as well as on account of some other reasons, must maintain a sleeping-car service--even at a loss. There is little or no loss to the Pullman Company--you may be sure of that! The railroad pays it a mileage fee for hauling a half or three-quarter empty car over its own line--in addition to permitting the Pullman system to take all the revenue from the car; but Lemuel sees his end of the business as a dead loss.

He leaves New York at two-thirty o'clock on Monday afternoon, having reported at his car nearly three hours before so as to make sure that it is properly stocked and cleaned for its long trip. He is due at St.

Louis at ten-fifteen on Tuesday evening--though it will be nearly two hours later before he has checked the contents of the car and slipped off to the bunking quarters maintained there by his company.

On Wednesday evening at seven o'clock he starts east and is due in New York about dawn on Friday morning. He cleans up his car and himself, and gets to his little home on the West Side of Manhattan Island sometime before noon; but by noon on Sat.u.r.day he must be back at his car, making sure that it is fit and ready by two-thirty o'clock--the moment the conductor's arm falls--and they are headed west again.

This time the destination is Chicago, which is not reached until about six o'clock Sunday night. He bunks that night in the Windy City and then spends thirty-two hours going back again to New York. He sees his home one more night; then he is off to St. Louis again--started on a fresh round of his eternal schedule.

Talk of tips to Lemuel! His face lengthens. You may not believe it, white man, but Lemuel made fifty-three cents in tips on the last trip from New York to Chicago. You can understand the man who gave him the Columbian antique; but Lemuel believes there can be no future too warm for that skinny man who gave him the three pennies! He thinks the gentleman might at least have come across with a Subway ticket. It is all legal tender to him.

All that saves this porter's bacon is the fact that he is in charge of the car--for some three hundred miles of its eastbound run he is acting as sleeping-car conductor, for which consolidated job he draws down a proportionate share of forty-two dollars a month. This is a small sop, however, to Lemuel. He turns and tells you how, on the last trip, he came all the way from St. Louis to New York--two nights on the road--without ever a "make-down," as he calls preparing a berth. No wonder then that he has difficulty in making fifty dollars a month, with his miserable tips on the lean run.

Nor is that all. Though Lemuel is permitted three hours' sleep--on the bunk in the washroom on the long runs--from midnight to three o'clock in the morning, there may come other times when his head begins to nod. And those are sure to be the times when some lynx-eyed inspector comes slipping aboard. Biff! Bang! Pullman discipline is strict. Something has happened to Lemuel's pay envelope, and his coffee-colored wife in West Twenty-ninth Street will not be able to get those gray spats until they are clean gone out of style.

What can be done for Lemuel? He must bide his time and constantly make himself a better servant--a better porter, if you please. It will not go unnoticed. The Pullman system has a method for noticing those very things--inconsequential in themselves but all going to raise the standard of its service.

Then some fine day something will happen. A big sleeping-car autocrat, in the smugness and false security of a fat run, is going to err. He is going to step on the feet of some important citizen--perhaps a railroad director--and the important citizen is going to make a fuss. After which Lemuel, hard-schooled in adversity, in faithfulness and in courtesy, will be asked in the pa.s.sing of a night to change places with the old autocrat.

And the old autocrat, riding in the poverty of a lean run, will have plenty of opportunity to count the telegraph poles and reflect on the mutability of men and things. The Pullman Company denies that this is part of its system; but it does happen--time and time and time again.

George, or Lemuel, or Alexander--whatever the name may be--has no easy job. If you do not believe that, go upstairs some hot summer night to the rear bedroom--that little room under the blazing tin roof which you reserve for your relatives--and make up the bed fifteen or twenty times, carefully unmaking it between times and placing the clothes away in a regular position. Let your family nag at you and criticize you during each moment of the job--while somebody plays an obbligato on the electric bell and places shoes and leather grips underneath your feet.

Imagine the house is b.u.mping and rocking--and keep a smiling face and a courteous tongue throughout all of it!

Or do this on a bitter night in midwinter; and between every two or three makings of the bed in the overheated room slip out of a linen coat and into a fairly thin serge one and go and stand outside the door from three to ten minutes in the snow and cold. In some ways this is one of the hardest parts of George's job. Racially the negro is peculiarly sensitive to pneumonia and other pulmonary diseases; yet the rules of a porter's job require that at stopping stations he must be outside of the car--no matter what the hour or condition of the climate--smiling and ready to say:

"What s.p.a.ce you got, guv'nor?"

However, the porter's job, like nearly every other job, has its glories as well as its hardships--triumphs that can be told and retold for many a day to fascinated colored audiences; because there are special trains--filled with pursy and prosperous bankers from Hartford and Rochester and Terre Haute--making the trip from coast to coast and back again, and never forgetting the porter at the last hour of the last day.

There are many men in the Pullman service like Roger Pryor, who has ridden with every recent President of the land and enjoyed his confidence and respect. And then there is General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional Limited, for twenty-four years in charge of one of its broiler cars, who stops not at Presidents but enjoys the acquaintance of senators and amba.s.sadors almost without number.

The General comes to know these dignitaries by their feet. When he is standing at the door of his train under the Pennsylvania Terminal, in New York, he recognizes the feet as they come poking down the long stairs from the concourse. And he can make his smile senatorial or amba.s.sadorial--a long time in advance.

Once Forrest journeyed in a private car to San Francisco, caring for a Certain Big Man. He took good care of the Certain Big Man--that was part of his job. He took extra good care of the Certain Big Man--that was his opportunity. And when the Certain Big Man reached the Golden Gate he told Henry Forrest that he had understood and appreciated the countless attentions. The black face of the porter wrinkled into smiles. He dared to venture an observation.

"Ah thank you, Jedge!" said he. "An' ef it wouldn't be trespa.s.sin' Ah'd lak to say dat when yo' comes home you's gwine to be President of dese United States."

The Certain Big Man shook his head negatively; but he was flattered nevertheless. He leaned over and spoke to Henry Forrest.

"If ever I am President," said he, "I will make you a general."

And so it came to pa.s.s that on the blizzardy Dakota-made day when William Howard Taft was inaugurated President of these United States there was a parade--a parade in which many men rode in panoply and pride; but none was prouder there than he who, mounted on a magnificent bay horse, headed the Philippine Band.

A promise was being kept. The bay horse started three times to bolt from the line of march, and this was probably because its rider was better used to the Pompeian-red broiler car than to a Pompeian-red bay mare.

But these were mere trifles. Despite them--partly because of them perhaps--the younger brethren at the terminals were no longer to address the veteran from the Congressional merely as Mr. Forrest. He was General Forrest now--a t.i.tle he bears proudly and which he will carry with him all the long years of his life.

What becomes of the older porters?

Sometimes, when the rush of the fast trains, the broken nights, the exposure and the hard, hard work begin to be too much for even st.u.r.dy Afric frames, they go to the "super" and beg for the "sick man's run"--a leisurely sixty or a hundred miles a day on a parlor car, perhaps on a side line where travel is light and the parlor car is a sort of sentimental frippery; probably one of the old wooden cars: the Alicia, or the Lucille, or the Celeste, still vain in bay windows and grilles, and abundant in carvings. For a sentimental frippery may be given a feminine name and may bear her years gracefully--even though she does creak in all her hundred joints when the track is the least bit uneven.

As to the sick man's tips, the gratuity is no less a matter of keen interest and doubt at sixty than it is at twenty-six. And though there is a smile under that clean mat of kinky white hair, it is not all habit--some of it is still antic.i.p.ation. But quarters and half dollars do not come so easily to the old man in the parlor car as to his younger brother on the sleepers, or those elect who have the smokers on the fat runs. To the old men come dimes instead--some of them miserable affairs bearing on their worn faces the faint presentments of the ruler on the north side of Lake Erie and hardly redeemable in Baltimore or Cincinnati. Yet even these are hardly to be scorned--when one is sixty.

After the sick man's job? Perhaps a sandy farm on a Carolina hillside, where an old man may sit and nod in the warm sun, and dream of the days when steel cars were new--perhaps of the days when the platform-vestibule first went bounding over the rails--may dream and nod; and then, in his waking moments, stir the pickaninnies to the glories of a career on a fast train and a fat run. For if it is true that any white boy has the potential opportunity of becoming President of the United States, it is equally true that any black boy may become the Autocrat of the Pullman Car.

_(The Independent)_

THE GENTLE ART OF BLOWING BOTTLES And the Story of How Sand is Melted into Gla.s.s

BY F. GREGORY HARTSWICK

Remedies for our manifold ills; the refreshment that our infant lips craved; coolness in time of heat; yes--even tho July 1st has come and gone--drafts to a.s.suage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years--all these things come in bottles. From the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. And as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. We a.s.sume vaguely that it is blown--ever since we saw the Bohemian Gla.s.s Blowers at the World's Fair we have known that gla.s.s is blown into whatever shape fancy may dictate--but that is as far as our knowledge of its manufacture extends.

As a matter of fact the production of bottles in bulk is one of the most important features of the gla.s.s industry of this country today. The manufacture of window gla.s.s fades into insignficance before the hugeness of the bottle-making business; and even the advent of prohibition, while it lessens materially the demand for gla.s.s containers of liquids, does not do so in such degree as to warrant very active uneasiness on the part of the proprietors of bottle factories.

The process of manufacture of the humble bottle is a surprizingly involved one. It includes the transportation and preparation of raw material, the reduction of the material to a proper state of workability, and the shaping of the material according to design, before the bottle is ready to go forth on its mission.

The basic material of which all gla.s.s is made is, of course, sand. Not the brown sand of the river-bed, the well remembered "sandy bottom" of the swimmin' hole of our childhood, but the finest of white sand from the prehistoric ocean-beds of our country. This sand is brought to the factory and there mixed by experts with coloring matter and a flux to aid the melting. On the tint of the finished product depends the sort of coloring agent used. For clear white gla.s.s, called flint gla.s.s, no color is added. The mixing of a copper salt with the sand gives a greenish tinge to the gla.s.s; amber gla.s.s is obtained by the addition of an iron compound; and a little cobalt in the mixture gives the finished bottle the clear blue tone that used to greet the waking eye as it searched the room for something to allay that morning's morning feeling. The flux used is old gla.s.s--bits of shattered bottles, sc.r.a.ps from the floor of the factory. This broken gla.s.s is called "cullet," and is carefully swept into piles and kept in bins for use in the furnaces.

The sand, coloring matter, and cullet, when mixed in the proper proportions, form what is called in bottle-makers' talk the "batch" or "dope." This batch is put into a specially constructed furnace--a brick box about thirty feet long by fifteen wide, and seven feet high at the crown of the arched roof. This furnace is made of the best refractory blocks to withstand the fierce heat necessary to bring the batch to a molten state. The heat is supplied by various fuels--producer-gas is the most common, tho oil is sometimes used. The gas is forced into the furnace and mixed with air at its inception; when the mixture is ignited the flame rolls down across the batch, and the burnt gases pa.s.s out of the furnace on the other side. The gases at their exit pa.s.s thru a brick grating or "checkerboard," which takes up much of the heat; about every half hour, by an arrangement of valves, the inlet of the gas becomes the outlet, and vice versa, so that the heat taken up by the checkerboard is used instead of being dissipated, and as little of the heat of combustion is lost as is possible. The batch is put into the furnace from the rear; as it liquefies it flows to the front, where it is drawn off thru small openings and blown into shape.

The temperature in the furnace averages about 2100 degrees Fahrenheit; it is lowest at the rear, where the batch is fed in, and graduates to its highest point just behind the openings thru which the gla.s.s is drawn off. This temperature is measured by special instruments called thermal couples--two metals joined and placed in the heat of the flame. The heat sets up an electric current in the joined metals, and this current is read on a galvanometer graduated to read degrees Fahrenheit instead of volts, so that the temperature may be read direct.

All furnaces for the melting of sand for gla.s.s are essentially the same in construction and principle. The radical differences in bottle manufacturing appear in the methods used in drawing off the gla.s.s and blowing it into shape.

Gla.s.s is blown by three methods: hand-blowing, semi-automatic blowing, and automatic blowing. The first used was the hand method, and tho the introduction of machines is rapidly making the old way a back number, there are still factories where the old-time gla.s.s blower reigns supreme.

One of the great centers of the bottle industry in the United States is down in the southern end of New Jersey. Good sand is dug there--New Jersey was part of the bed of the Atlantic before it literally rose to its present state status--and naturally the factories cl.u.s.ter about the source of supply of material. Within a radius of thirty miles the investigator may see bottles turned out by all three methods.

The hand-blowing, while it is the slowest and most expensive means of making bottles, is by far the most picturesque. Imagine a long, low, dark building--dark as far as daylight is concerned, but weirdly lit by orange and scarlet flashes from the great furnaces that crouch in its shelter. At the front of each of these squatting monsters, men, silhouetted against the fierce glow from the doors, move about like puppets on wires--any noise they may make is drowned in the mastering roar of the fire. A worker thrusts a long blowpipe (in gla.s.sworkers'

terminology a wand) into the molten ma.s.s in the furnace and twirls it rapidly. The end of the wand, armed with a ball of refractory clay, collects a ball of semi-liquid gla.s.s; the worker must estimate the amount of gla.s.s to be withdrawn for the particular size of the bottle that is to be made. This ball of glowing material is withdrawn from the furnace; the worker rolls it on a sloping moldboard, shaping it to a cylinder, and pa.s.ses the wand to the blower who is standing ready to receive it. The blower drops the cylinder of gla.s.s into a mold, which is held open for its reception by yet another man; the mold snaps shut; the blower applies his mouth to the end of the blowpipe; a quick puff, accompanied by the drawing away of the wand, blows the gla.s.s to shape in the mold and leaves a thin bubble of gla.s.s protruding above. The mold is opened; the shaped bottle, still faintly glowing, is withdrawn with a pair of asbestos-lined pincers, and pa.s.sed to a man who chips off the bubble on a rough strip of steel, after which he gives the bottle to one who sits guarding a tiny furnace in which oil sprayed under pressure roars and flares. The rough neck of the bottle goes into the flame; the raw edges left when the bubble was chipped off are smoothed away by the heat; the neck undergoes a final polishing and shaping twirl in the jaws of a steel instrument, and the bottle is laid on a little shelf to be carried away. It is shaped, but not finished.

The gla.s.s must not be cooled too quickly, lest it be brittle. It must be annealed--cooled slowly--in order to withstand the rough usage to which it is to be subjected. The annealing process takes place in a long, brick tunnel, heated at one end, and gradually cooling to atmospheric temperature at the other. The bottles are placed on a moving platform, which slowly carries them from the heated end to the cool end. The process takes about thirty hours. At the cool end of the annealing furnace the bottle is met by the packers and is made ready for shipment.

These annealing furnaces are called "lehrs" or "leers"--either spelling is correct--and the most searching inquiry failed to discover the reason for the name. They have always been called that, and probably always will be.

In the hand-blowing process six men are needed to make one bottle.

There must be a gatherer to draw the gla.s.s from the furnace; a blower; a man to handle the mold; a man to chip off the bubble left by the blower; a shaper to finish the neck of the bottle; and a carrier-off to take the completed bottles to the lehr. Usually the gatherer is also the blower, in which case two men are used, one blowing while the other gathers for his turn; but on one platform I saw the somewhat unusual sight of one man doing all the blowing while another gathered for him. The pair used two wands, so that their production was the same as tho two men were gathering and blowing. This particular blower was making quart bottles, and he was well qualified for the job. He weighed, at a conservative estimate, two hundred and fifty pounds, and when he blew something had to happen. I arrived at his place of labor just as the shifts were being changed--a gla.s.s-furnace is worked continuously, in three eight-hour shifts--and as the little whistle blew to announce the end of his day's toil the giant grabbed the last wand, dropped it into the waiting mold, and blew a mighty blast. A bubble of gla.s.s sprang from the mouth of the mold, swelled to two feet in diameter, and burst with a bang, filling the air with shimmering flakes of gla.s.s, light enough to be wafted like motes. When the shining shower had settled and I had opened my eyes--it would not be pleasant to get an eyeful of those beautiful sc.r.a.ps--the huge blower was diminishing in perspective toward his dinner, and the furnace door was, for the moment, without its usual hustling congregation of workers. I made bold to investigate the platform.

Close to me glared the mouth of the furnace, with ma.s.ses of silver threads depending from it like the beard of some fiery gulleted ogre--the strings of gla.s.s left by the withdrawal of the wand. The heat three feet away was enough to make sand melt and run like water, but I was not unpleasantly warm. This was because I stood at the focus of three tin pipes, thru which streams of cold air, fan-impelled, beat upon me. Without this cooling agent it would be impossible for men to work so close to the heat of the molten gla.s.s.