Yes, I was once a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 3154.
I had flunked out of Indiana State University after my sophomore year and had to lay out a semester before I could come back. So I got a job at the RCA TV and stereo cabinet factory in Monticello, Ind.
It was a union shop, so I joined the union. I hated the union because it promoted mediocrity and protected useless employees.
I also hated my job. I worked my way up to being a hand-sander on the production line. That meant I used sandpaper and a wedge-shaped sanding block to smooth out corners and sand off extruded glue from joints in the cabinets as they came down the conveyor line.
If you were around in 1965, you may remember it was the year when the Vietnam War really heated up and thousands of guys like me, who didn’t have student deferments, were getting drafted.
In the interest of having some small measure of control over my destiny, I enlisted in the Air Force on Sept. 22, 1965 and was sent to Lackland Air Force Base at San Antonio, Texas for basic training.
When my flight went to get photographed and fingerprinted for our military IDs, it was discovered that I had no fingerprints on my right hand – they had been obliterated by months of working with sandpaper.
I was called back to the ID shop a couple of times for re-fingerprinting, but they never did get a good set of prints from me, thanks to RCA. I suspect the guys doing the fingerprinting thought I did it on purpose for some nefarious reason.
It didn’t matter, because I got a medical discharge for allergies after a mere 41 days in uniform.
I went back to work at RCA until the spring semester of 1966. When I quit to go back to school, I vowed never to work in a factory again.
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