I WAS 'MUSTERED OUT" at Fort Dix, NJ - and returned to live with my parents in Riverside. Ceily had departed for Pembroke (in those "segregated" days, still the Women's College of prestigious Brown University in Rhode Island. At least one member of the family was "making it" in the Eastern Schools...). As is said, one never knows where one's replacement is in this world, but somehow sisters are not usually foreseen in this role... Oh well...

Dad had left the War Renegotiations Board in Washington, and was at last enjoying life as a Wall Street banker, commuting to lower Manhattan every morning. >P?It was decided (I decided) I must "go to work." The schools were awash in returning Veterans, and there was just no point in trying to get accepted till at least Fall. Somewhere I had picked up the vague notion that "Science" would be an attractive career - whatever "Science" was, and whatever "Science" could use such a mathematics and "tums tables" cripple as I. I hit some way upon "chemistry." LOL! Shades no doubt of a long-ago chemistry set I had as a kid....

A few miles away, up on the Post Road on the Stamford town line, was the imposing edifice of the Research Laboratories of the American Cyanamid Corporation. So thence one fine day repaired I - to make inquiry as to suitable employment as a "chemist" and application therefor. (Might as well start right at the top, no? I had been on the Bottom of the Barrel long enough: see previous). The interviewer, a rather burly chap himself, did not seem at all dismayed with my somewhat dubious academic record, nor with the non-applicability of "armored car gunner" most recently added to these attainments. He seemed rather more taken with my size and over all fitness instead, and wondered if I "...would have any objection to loading steel drums and carryingheavy loads about from place to place?" Why no, said I. "Not at all.".... "Sir!" (Military habits die hard). He liked that.

And how did I feel, about "...danger on the job?" "Danger?", said I. "What danger? Can't imagine what danger there could be around here! Ha-ha-ha-ha!" He joined in with a hearty bunch of "Ha-ha-ha-ha's" of his own (had I only known!) and said, "Fine! You will do just fine! Report to the Catalytic Lab tomorrow morning!"

A real job! I had a real job! Not for me the returning Vet's perennial curse of insufficient funds - wholly dependent as many of my pals were, on the old "52-20" club (a government handout we all automatically got of $20 a week for one year - and then you were out on your own for sure! No more Uncle Sam in the breach for you!). Actually, my mom nipped my 52-20 in the bud anyhow, and I never collected a single check anyhow: her reasoning was simple: "There's never been anyone in our family on Welfare yet - and we are not starting with you!"

It was American Cyanamid - sink or swim! And it looked like I was on top of the water (at least for now). The Catalytic Lab was actually a separate building - set off from structural linkage with the rest of the really huge and complex housing here. It housed something called the "catalytic ops" and an additional sort of "secret" place in back known only as the "High Pressure Lab." (Had I but known, a peek into the latter might have served as omen for what was ahead: strange apparatii - known only as "rocking autoclaves" stood in batteries on the reinforced concrete floor, each surrounded with a boilerplate shield, not unlike that which protects gun crews servicing the light armament on decks of warships). Signs were everywhere: "Do Not Approach Stopped Autoclaves!" (or) "Report All Stopped Autoclaves At Once!" Ominous sounding caveats like that, you see.

Eventually I was to learn that these two "operations" were so explosively hair-trigger, that they were housed separately from the rest of the complex - in case they should either of them "blow." I really had no idea what was going down - but I didn't need to. With several peers, my duties consisted indeed of rolling heavy steel drums of acids and all kinds of goo to and fro about the vast concrete floors and learning to hook up strange hoses and valves and lines and whatnot so as to "charge" all manner of Frankenstein-like lab apparatus. This was in the early days of plastics research, and they were working on "styrene" here. Styrene was "cooked" or boiled somehow in small, maybe 10-gallon kettles or pots down at floor level, and on top of these sat great glass "columns" that went up sometimes as high as two stories into the perpetual gloom overhead. (I was also given to understand we had a special roof in "Catalytic": it was designed to blow right off - up, up!... and a--w-a-y... sort of - if anything "blew" down below. (Like nothing so much as the similar "roofs" on Dupont's Powder Works down on the Delaware, and powder magazines everywhere) Hot Dang!

This styrene cooked around the clock for days and days it seems... and various thermocouples and wires and gadgets led down from points on the "column" to meters and dials on the instrument panels (extensive) down below. Our job was to "charge" and "recharge" these pots and unload the goo from them (sort of like taffy it was - and you reached in and pulled it out with your bare hands as the older hands taught us all). Until one day Dr. May, puffing his pipe, as all true industrial research chemists do (an occupational safeguard against the world of unpleasant smells they inhabit) looked over my shoulders and like all true chemists, he hummed and hawed and puffed and puffed, and then he said: "You doing that with bare hands? My! I wouldn't do that... we have found that stuff causes cancer on the bare skins of mice..." Puff! Puff!

Needless to say, I amended my ways at once, 'scairdy cat that I am, and devised a sort of iron hook that I used thereafter - but many of my fellows continued to blissfully use their hands. I hope they still have them. (The hands, I mean). Dr. May was the epitome of the Industrial Chemist (whose lifestyles and concerns were beginning to pale on me). His face was, like so many of his kind, blown full of little pits and scars - much like a survivor of the old Smallpox epidemics of yore. Being occasioned, you are to understand, by countless "Erlenmeyer flasks" (you know your Erlenmeyers, do you? Good on ya!) blowing up in their faces as they held them up before their noses (and smoking pipes!) to inspect the boiling witches' brews within at close quarters! Sort of a badge of honor of the trade, you might observe...

In time, I settled in as a trusted member of "staff," if only in my (usual) spot of low man on the totem pole. We worked three shifts around the clock, rotating in turn. Heck, my experience as a newsie in now long-ago Amarillo, had accustomed me to work in the wee small hours, and guard duty on Death Row back in the Fatherland had only further inured me to myriad nocturnal activities of all sorts - so I was right at home! Best of all, with my mustering out pay and wages coming in, I had splurged and bought an old centerboard cabin sloop, which I was keeping up in Greenwich Cove, just in the lee of Sand Island and off the tip of Grassy Island, and had taken up once again the carefree life of water-rat, along with former discharged pals who surfaced daily from here and there - and we all sailed - and drank beer! - every free moment we had. After eight hours on the midnight shift, I would get home around breakfast time, eat, beat it down to the Cove and by mid-morning we'd all be aboard with "grinder" sandwiches, lotsa bottled beer, and maybe a stray girlfriend or two as some of us were now in process of acquiring along with other impedimentia of adulthood...Sigh!

But those were days of "Wine and Roses" and never to be forgotten!

With no sleep then, and baked in a broiling sun all day, and soaked in booze - I would then report around 4:00 p.m. to the Catalytic Lab for the next night's operations. The "law" said that there had to be a minimum of two of us on duty in there at all hours. Much of our time was taken up with just sitting in front of these instrument panels and every 15 minutes or so, we would have to take readings, you see, and note them down in the "log book." This latter tome was always to be left on the instrument panel table under pain of death (! ha-ha-ha-ha-ha), and it had two of the heaviest covers you ever saw, one of which you had to actually lift back to open to the current page of entries. To my idle question one night, of "Why in hell do they make this log book with such heavy covers?" - my older, more experienced partner simply looked at me with glassy eyes and said, "That's so as to protect it. When the explosion comes that takes us all off, you see, they will dig through the rubble you see, and find this log book with its lead covers intact! That way they will know what went wrong and who to blame!"

Jeezul!, I thought. What kind of "career" is Industrial Chemistry" anyhow? Why, you might in all innocence open the wrong valve some day, and blow the whole works - and yourself skyhigh! Then some idiot would find the "log book" in the ruins, and there would be your recording of whatever it was you did wrong - so they could then sue your survivors for your last-ever derelictions! Maybe Karl Marx had been on to something after all!

"Another thing," my mentor continued, "ever notice how some nights after May and Saunders (Dr. S. was head of the whole works) and the other biggies go home, they start calling back in every 20 minutes or so - asking how things are going?"

"Yeah," I said. "Noticed that. At least they are conscientous guys and dedicated to their work..."

"Dedicated, schemedicated," said my pal. "When they call back in like that, Tex (see earlier), it's 'cause that particular thing we are watching for them that night is extra-dangerous, and they skedaddle out of here and go home, then they sit there and call in every 15 minutes or so just to see if we are even still here!"

My blank look must have dismayed him. "Like, goddamit, I mean if there is even any here here..." I thought I understood, and gulped and nodded. In that order.

(I decided that I was going to re-double my efforts to get into college and "better myself" as they say, and perhaps cast about for some other career than Chemistry...).

The doors (in rows along the side of the building) to the Catalytic Lab all opened outward only: you had only to approach them on the blind rush if necessary - hands out in front of you (if you still had arms!), and push them anywhere and the whole shebang opened out onto wood porches with short stair-flights down to an open, grassy field... Just inside the doors hung a large hoop of iron on a chain just about at head height. If your misfortune included being sprayed with acid (say,) or tainted with the anti-mouse styrene goo - you could blindly grasp at the ring and an instant water shower, rather like Noah's Flood, descended upon you and helped wash you out and away through the open doors...

Now we had this one "pressure vessel" or pressure cooker whatever it was, that stood to one end of the lab. One night it was gurgling away and an "...extremely important" experiment of some kind was taking place in its bowels. It was surrounded in turn by the gun-shield armament plate, and a thick jacket of asbestos. This asbestos moreover was not "bound" or molded into any shape or form: it was primary, snowflake-like asbestos - raw - and it was shoveled or dumped in by the bag into this jacketed retainer wall around the pot. It was maybe four feet high and ran around the pot all the way - which was maybe about twelve or fifteen feet across in diameter. This was all in the days previous to Johns-Manville and the great asbestos scares of later times...

Right next to it, was Dr. Saunder's desk. It was a large desk, with a polished and waxed composition top, and he kept it ever clear (a priviliege of bosses everywhere as Life has taught me). Now what we had taken to doing was to let one or another of us sleep on duty here - so long as at least one guy was awake and watching the instrument panel at all times. And the best place of all to stretch out for a snooze was Dr. S's desktop! But.... complications and suspicions had arisen you see ... For Dr. S had found by minute inspection and other means - that one end of his desk consistently showed light scuff marks and rubber-heel burns you see, when he arrived in the mornings - and had correctly deduced that someone was sleeping on the desk, and on the job. At a Staff Meeting we were advised that this would not be tolerated any further, there was to be no sleeping anywhere, anytime - on or off his desk - and if he found anymore heelmarks thereon, heads would roll.

Bear with me, if you will, for I am coming to the point of my little story here soon...

Now Jack Skelton, the local veterinary's son, and I, were highschool pals, and Jack lived in Riverside, too - and it had come about that both of us worked here and on the same shift. And Jack was a prankster, if nothing else.

So darkness descended, everything was humming along, the night watchman on his rounds had come and gone - and I got sleepy. So Jack said, "Why not tuck in on old Saunder's desk there and catch a few?" This seemed like a good idea at the time (as they say)... so as to further thwart old S in the morning should he be nosing about, I took off my shoes and stretched out on the desktop in my sock feet. Soon drowsiness overcame me and I dozed peacefully off...

The next thing I knew was ...total bedlam! As I came awake to distant shouts (Jack at other end of the lab - all by design!) "Look Out! Look Out! Run! Run" - I was lying on my back looking up into the steel structure work overhead and I seemed to be at the center of a whirlwind of snow! Flakes of snow sparkled in the harsh glare of the lab lights far overhead and spiraled upward. No! No! Not snow... It was... asbestos! I turned my head and saw a huge fountain of asbestos dust mounting skyward right beside me - the jacket around the pressure vessel! A loud and persistent hissssing! filled the air!

"Gawd A-Mighty! I thought. "The pressure vessel has blown! Outta here!"

I hit the concrete floor running (in my sock feet). By the time I hit the swing-out doors, Jack (later) said, I must have been doing at least 50 mph! Nevertheless I got one quick pull on the chain and about a 100 gallons of cold water engulfed me from head to toe. By now I was out on the wood porch. I didn't even bother with the stairs - I just sailed off full tilt into the dark. When I landed, I was already well out in the field and sock feet and all I made it clear out to the Post Road before I fetched up, wringing wet and shoeless! Behind me, I could hear Jack's faint shouts (and laughter) back on the wood porch...

It was all an elaborate prank! (We played many such on each other to pass the tedium there - so I cannot complain). He had run one of the lab air hoses down into the asbestos jacket you see and then, when he had seen I was fast asleep , he had turned it on full bore and given a few warning shouts....

My sleepy brain supplied all the missing details and my taking a shower on the way out and making it clear to the Post Road in sock feet in record time became Catalytic Lab lore in later days...

I remember other derelictions: one of the guys had a motorcycle, and when the bosses were gone home, he would wheel it right into the lab and proceed to wash it down and degrease it with acetone by the bucketful - which we had in the lab... Another time, an impromptu game of "pickup" with a pair of pliers (Mon Dieu!) as the basketball, played out in front of a forest of fancy glass pipes and tubing running up a couple of stories - and a misdirected shot went astray and off into the glass forest shattering any number of tubes on the way and gallons of mercury (!) ran out and down and onto the floor. And down the drains therein. To the lowest point - where it then blocked said drains permanently, until the floor had to be jackhammered up and the drains replaced...Sigh. Actually both Saunders and Mays were good sports themselves to put up with such highjinks as they did and I wish them well wherever they have got off to...

But things were changing. One being I got accepted by the University of Connecticut! At last! And affairs at Cyanamid were changing too - I can't remember: the styrene project terminated and some of the chemists' got transferred. The Lab was decommissioned maybe or something... Anyhow, I decided I was not cut out for Research Chemist and removed this desideratum from my resume. Onward and Upward!