The Last Year Part 2

1968-1969 Safeway Box Shed (Part Time):  Ok, now the fun begins. Pretty much right towards the end of my senior year of high school, I got a summer and part time job at the Old Box Shed at the Safeway Distribution Center. I worked the 2 AM to 10:30 AM Shift.

Most produce in those days came in wood or in some cases cardboard boxes. Mostly wood. There were a lot of types and sizes of boxes, and all of them had to be separated, stacked on pallets, tied up and moved out. They were sold to local farmers for them to refill and send back to the produce warehouse. There was lots of money involved in those boxes. Each box had a name, a specific way to nest or load on a pallet.

The trucks coming back from the stores had this stuff stacked haphazard on pallets. In this first year of my working, it was in the Old Box Shed, a fairly small area near the main produce warehouse. It was no where near big enough. The truck drivers shoving the pallets in one end had a single goal, to empty the trailers so they could be loaded again. They didn’t care so much if they were shoving the stuff in faster than we could stack it and get the stuff out. I still remember the voice of this rather large Italian unloader shouting a warning “I’m A Gonna Push!” If you ever want to know the names and description of the boxes we sorted back then, just ask, I think I can still name several dozen.

A companion job associated with the Box Shed was the cardboard baler. The machine my first year was a real bear to work. You needed 2 guys to lift these big burlap squares onto a platform, and dump on a belt. Two other guys pick through the cardboard looking for things that didn’t belong in the recycle cardboard. The cardboard then went through a chopper and was blown up and fell down into a machine that compressed the paper into a bale (Hence the name baler). This first generation machine had to be stopped each time a bale was complete and metal bands were shoved through slots in the ram, and the bales was tied up. A forklift took the bale and stacked it. You earned your pay working this job.

After I started classes at the UW, I worked Friday and Saturday nights. Pretty decent pay at the time for a part time job.

1969-1982 (?): New Box Shed: They built a new, much larger facility after my first year. Maybe 24 trailer docks as opposed to the 4-5 at the old shed, a ground level belt for the much larger cardboard baler, that also had a ramp from the main shed level. The box shed (it was still called that) was divided about half and half for unloading trailers, and a side to load up different trailers of the various things we separated that came back from the stores. The design had a major mistake, in that a ramp to ground level was right in the middle of the building, making a narrow bottleneck when we were taking pallets from the unloading end to the reloading side. In future years, this design flaw as fixed.

Like the Old shed, trailers from the stores needed to be unloaded so they were empty and ready for a new load. They had all of the produce boxes as before, plus Wire Cribs (A fence like thing that attaches to a pallet to make a big box), meat lugs (Aluminum things about 18 inches wide and about 4 feet long and a foot deep. They nested together and were heavy when you had a bunch of them. Add glass returnable pop bottles, metal bread trays, wood milk cases, returned products that went to a salvage department, stacks of pallets, broken pallets, junk (that shouldn’t have come back), wooden banana tubs (About the same size as the Meat lugs), Egg cases, and store size bales of cardboard.

All this stuff came back around the clock as the new shed was a 6 ½ day, 24 hour facility. Only late Saturday to Sunday was quiet.

My first years there were pretty much limited to working the boxes, or the paper. The box job was the same as across the street at the old shed, just more room. They would still saturate the larger space with pallets of boxes during busy days. Mondays were the busiest by far as the stores sent back all of the empties from the weekend.

At the paper end, there were two ways to process the cardboard. The hard way, was to work on the ground behind this mountain of the square burlap bundles that the truck drivers huck onto the ground. The squares are tied up with steel wire ties to hold the bundle together. SO, you grab a bundle, cut the wires with a pair of diagonal cutters, and pull a corner of the burlap to dump the paper onto the belt. You had to spread the paper out a bit as if you had it too thick, it would choke the chopper. That’d be bad.

Another was to feed the baler was up on the shed floor, where the store bales were pushed to the opening, the wires cut and the layers of cardboard dumped down the ramp, just past the poor guy working the burlap bundles.

When the chopper jams, the 100 HP motor still tries to turn it, and the belts squeal, and if the power to the motor isn’t cut like in seconds, the motor can and did burn itself up. Very bad. The chopper was a big shaft that had these steel pieces, think of a 18 inch 1x4, that pun between a second set of steel pieces that chopped the cardboard into smaller pieces. A very large fan then sucked the paper past a set of water sprayers, then into the fan, up a chute to the roof, where a silo deal caught the paper and it fell down another chute into the baler proper.

This baler was a continuous feed type. As the paper was compressed and shaped into the bale, every 12 feet a big rubber divider would drop as the baler went into a special cycle to push, back off a bit, open the trap door to let the divider drop, than continue to bale the next bale behind the completed bale. The guy working the machine would go around back and force round steel wires through slots in the divider to the front. Back at the front, he would take the ends and use a air driven tier to twist and cut the wires to tie up tie up the paper. Next he’d grab the loose ends of the 4 wires, he’d pull them the length of the machine, and push them through the rubber divider so they’d be ready in back for the next complete bale.

While all this was happening, he needed to push a completed bale down a set of rollers, and use a fork lift to stack it. That would cause the divider rubber to fall down, where it had to be dragged to a little lift gadget to get it back up on the top of the machine over the trap door ready to drop again the next time a bale was ready. All the while the other crew people were sending cardboard through the choppers, so it was a continuous cycle. No rest for the weary. This was another job where you knew you earned your pay.

More Later!