“Yes. And no matter how bad a worker you are, you couldn’t be any worse than him. That’s a relief, anyway.” He drew a deep breath and started into the aisle between the barrels. Johnny and Sam followed.
The fifth floor of the leather factory was a vast place. It contained several hundred machines of various kinds, rows of long work benches, thousands of barrels containing leather findings and huge leather drying racks. Machines stamped and pounded, screamed and whined. It was a place of vast confusion and wonderful efficiency.
Leather came here, raw from the tanneries, huge, wrinkled, irregular sheets. Machines stamped out heels, counters, shankpieces, outer and inner soles. Other machines split the leather, trimmed and shaped it. Huge vats of glue soaked the leather, made it hard and tough, waterproof. Machines molded and shaped the pieces and at last they went into boxes and barrels and crates and were shipped to shoe factories all over the world.
No shoes were manufactured here, but all the parts were made and sold to shoe factories which merely assembled the various pieces, sewed and nailed and merchandised the finished product as shoes. A leather counter went out at six or seven cents, a heel the same, a sole twelve or thirteen cents — all the parts necessary for a pair of shoes brought less than two dollars, but when assembled by the shoe manufacturer and placed in a store, they cost the consumer $9.95.
Johnson led Johnny and Sam to the rear of the great floor where a bench, fully a hundred feet long was set up against the wall. The bench was divided into sections nine or ten feet long and before each section a man sat on a high stool, sorting leather counters, those U-shaped pieces of leather that brace up the heels of shoes. Behind the benches, and suspended from the ceiling, were wire drying racks, each containing three or four hundred pairs of counters, molded wet from glue and wax the previous day by tremendous molding machines.
When the counters were sufficiently dry, they were dumped on the sorters’ benches. It was the duty of each man to sort the counters for heavy, medium or light grades, trim off imperfections with sharp leather knives and finally bunch the counters for packing. Four counters were nestled together, then inverted and pushed into another nest of four counters. These bunches were piled up on the bench and finally put into used sugar and apple barrels that held ten or twelve hundred pairs each. The barrels were covered with burlap, stenciled as to their contents, then either put into “stock” or shipped to a shoe factory.
At the head of this long sorting bench, Johnson turned Johnny and Sam over to Karl Kessler, the assistant foreman, a middle-aged Austrian, who spoke with an accent.
“A couple of new men for you, Karl,” Johnson said. He looked down the long bench. “Don’t put them next to each other. They’re pals and they’ll gab all day long.”
“Sure,” agreed Kessler, “I see they don’t talk.”
Johnson walked off and Kessler looked brightly at Johnny and Sam. “All right, fellas, now we get to work, huh?” He stepped to a near-by section of bench that was unoccupied. Johnny and Sam followed.
He picked up a leather counter. “Know what these are?”
“Hunks of leather,” Sam returned.
“Sure, that’s right, they’re counters, the things that hold up the backs of the heels. This bunch is 2 MOXO, that means Grade 2, Men’s Oxford, Size O. They’re seven iron—”
“Iron?” asked Johnny.
“Leather thickness is measured by irons; forty-eight irons to an inch. Now, here’s what you do. You sort these for heavy and medium, like this...” He smacked the counter into his left hand, squeezed it. “This is a heavy.” He picked up another counter. “This one, too.”
“If they’re all seven iron,” Johnny asked, “why aren’t they all heavies?”
“Because no two pieces of leather are the same. Counters are cut from all around the hide; here’s one from the shoulder, this one’s a headpiece and here — here’s the best of all, from the bend...”
“Bend?”
“That’s a strip about a foot wide, over the back. Usually the soles are cut from there. Shoulder stock is next best. Worst is head stock; spotty, hard one piece, soft another. Ain’t nothin’ wasted on a cow, it’s all used for somethin’...”
“What about the moo?” Johnny asked.
Kessler looked blankly at him. “The moo? What’s that?”
“The moo from a cow.” Johnny mooed.
Kessler laughed uproariously. “Ha ha, that’s funny. Ha ha...” Then he broke off and grabbed up a counter. He slapped it into his left hand, caught up a knife and began trimming the flange on the counter. Johnny looking over his shoulder, saw a man bearing down on them, a tall heavy-set man in a blue serge suit.
“ ’Morning, Karl, ’morning,” the big man greeted Kessler, cheerfully, as he approached.
Kessler looked up and pretended to see the man for the first time. He bobbed his head, actually bowed from the waist. “Good morning, Mr. Towner. Thank you, Mr. Towner...”
Mr. Towner stopped. “How’s Elliott doing?”
“Fine, Mr. Towner, fine. Best counter sorter we’ve ever had.”
“Glad to hear it. Don’t favor him. Treat him just like anybody else...”
“Sure, Mr. Towner, sure. Thank you, Mr. Towner.”
Mr. Towner smiled pleasantly and walked off. Kessler grabbed up a counter and fumbled it, from sheer nervousness. “That’s Mr. Towner,” he whispered. “The big boss.”
“The guy who owns the works? Democratic, ain’t he?”
“No, Republican.”
Johnny, looking down the line, saw Mr. Towner stopping at one of the benches.
“That’s his son, Elliott,” Kessler whispered hoarsely. “Don’t look at them.”
Johnny picked up a leather counter, squeezed it. “You mean the old boy owns the joint and he makes his son work here?”
“Sure, Mr. Towner did that himself when he was learning the business. Old Harry Towner started the company. When this Mr. Towner — Young Harry — graduated from college, the old man put him here in the factory — a week in every department, to learn how each piece of leather was made. Then he sent him out on the road as a salesman. Now Elliott’s learning the business. We got him this week, next week he goes into the heel department. In three-four weeks he knows the whole business and starts selling.”
Johnny shot a furtive glance down the line of benches. Young Elliott, a handsome young man, was wearing overalls, a tan work shirt and a cotton apron like the other counter sorters. His father was conversing jovially with him.
Johnny exhaled heavily. “Is he really the best counter sorter here?”
Karl Kessler gave him a quick look. “Are you kidding?”
Johnny chuckled. “Oh, like that, huh?”
“Comes in at ten o’clock, takes two hours for lunch. Goes to the club down on Michigan Avenue—”
“In that outfit?”
Kessler grunted. “Takes a half hour to wash and change his clothes. Young Harry wasn’t like that. We used to work eleven hours a day in those days and Harry came in at seven in the morning like everybody else...”
“You were here then?” exclaimed Johnny.
“You kiddin’? I been here thirty-nine years...”
“Johnson said he started to work here thirty-nine years—”
“Yeah, that’s right. He came to work about six months after I did. Just a punk. I broke him in. Used to kick him in the pants...”
“Still do it?”
“Huh? He’s the foreman, now.” Kessler risked a look off to the right, saw that Mr. Towner had left his son’s bench and gone elsewhere. “All right,” he said to Johnny, “you can get to work here, now.” He nodded to Sam Cragg. “You come with me.”
He led Sam down the line to a vacant section of bench, adjoining that of Elliott Towner. Johnny shook his head and picked up a counter. He squeezed it as Karl Kessler had shown him, put it down and squeezed a second counter. Not that the squeezing meant anything to him, but that seemed to be necessary.