Kelvin's Revenge

The breathtaking sunset cliff of maturity (oh please!) affords us a slightly better view of the scenery below where we've been wandering. A better view than when we were in it - for sure.

It is so very apparent now, that much earlier in our work careers, Kelvin - the vengeful god of refrigerators (VGoR) - had it in for me & my pal Chuck.

No mechanical objections here - I love this century and I love fresh food and believe refrigerators have certainly contributed mightily to my health as a growing american kid in the 50's & 60's. And now too.

OK, back then we were pitched poisons like "Wonder Bread" (shame on you Buffalo Bob) but the prevalence of in-home cooling machines and "real" food (grandma type) helped keep us all going in better than historical health & longevity.

You gotta have 'em. Modern life without would be way more inconvenient and way less healthy and besides, from a classroom point of view the "weather-machine" pressure-temperature science is fascinating.

I even went to refrigerator school in Manhattan for a while and learned about the "latent heat of vaporization". (my dad was a refer-mechanic - thought I'd try it out.)

Maybe Kelvin was angered because I did not finish school. hmmmmmm I donno.

Back to the past!: 1968
(wheeeeooooo noises and wiggly vision if you like.) We're going to zoom down to street level from space as the planet sluggs slowly around to the USA & central East Coast Florida - Vero Beach.

Right after the time when you could walk down any beach at night to find darkness and right before the time the whole coast was lit up with ocean view condos.

Not savy enough to figure out the political/economic why, we just noticed a lot of building going on at the coast line - a condo boom right when my best friend and I were in our late teens and finding it very necessary to have money and therefore employment.

Vero (true) Beach is @50 miles south of Cape Canaveral (ne Cape Kennedy) on Florida's east coast. For years, a quiet little burg with a High School, a bank, a movie theatre and two drugstores.

Everything closed Wednesday afternoons & Sundays. A few unique structures were on the ocean side made of Driftwood. Fishemen & tourists were the scenery - pretty "Norman Rockwell" for sure.



However, You can't stop change.



One of the first new beach$ide developments was "John's Island".

Originally, the island site was a primitive early local settlement with some stone foundations, rotted cabins and more than a few spooky gravesites.

Since then and until recently, it was a steaming mosquito-owned, gator-rented, prickly jungle mudhole about 300 yards off the Atlantic up on A1A a few miles north from beachside Vero.

The far-sighted big money guys first bought off the local historical objectors, then the muck itself and built hi-rise condos on the ocean side of A1A and a Bluenose gated housing development on the Indian River side.

Time Break:
Years later I worked the homes on that river side as a "Pool Keeper" wearing my uniform - blue Shorts White shirt & bowtie - (in the tropical daytime heat yet) and dragging an armful of hoses & aluminum pipes and a few buckets of chemicals around to perform swimming pool maintenance. (I've had a bunch of interesting jobs.)

Every home had to have a pool - Come on! That close to the ocean - gleeps! It's a must! "Gotta keep up with Brad & Muffie!" (say that last line aloud to yourself with your teeth tightly closed)

One time midweek I was stopped by the gate guards and my service truck was searched. They weren't mean or rough they just didn't tell me what was happening until they finished going through all my stuff.

OK, the problem was that some high-dollar dog-napping was going on in the neighborhood (poodle pinching?) and I, among other service folk, was suspect.

Innocent and more curious than inconvenienced I went back to work on my service route - no pups on me.

A week later they (gate guards & wildlife cops) found the dogs (kind of), some empty 6 oz. coke bottles and a half digested shoe in one of the large older alligators that had not been informed of the territorial regime change and was frequenting the cement pond that was now where it had used to hunt. Sorry gator, sorry pups - victims of progress.
Time Break Over:

On John's Island Atlantic side, the condos were several 3 story buildings right off the dune line at angles to each other - I guess so they could all get the semi-tropical ocean breeze? Looked to me like they could go over like dominos in a strong storm.

Anyhow, our boss Brian, at Brian's Appliance Barn, had snagged a contract to frige all the apartments in one of the larger condos with minis. Brian outbid his competition by cutting his profit to a minimum.

The minis were nifty little GE 5 cubic foot jobs - with freezers. they stood about 4ft tall by 3ft wide in the box and Weighed @ 70 lbs each. Brian bought around 200 of these machines.

Henry Flagler - Standard Oil + opened up the state of Florida historically by running a railroad down the east coast to Palm Beach & Miami. The early roads were occasionally impassable but the trains always ran & Florida boomed.

Our cooling units came to town in a railroad boxcar - a big Red-Brown slatted car with a faded and angled "Union-Pacific" logo stenciled in white on the sides.

Before the East Coast FEC railroad hassels (union bombers etc.) you used to be able to count a hundred or more of these cars with all kinds of colors & logos while automobile waiting at an RR crossing.

Our boxcar was parked on a sidetrack by the feedstore across the main tracks from the municipal water tower, where many a rail car loaded with seed, critter feed & supplies had been parked before.

2nd Time Break:
I worked at the feed store too. Part-time teen labor a few yers before. A memorable mix of horticultural smells. Piles of 40 & 50 pound sacks, piglets, baby chicks, etc. - all that kind of rural stuff was the personality of the Store. Purina checkerboards peeking out from different colored bags of Rabbit Chow, Dog Chow, Chicken Chow & Etc. Chow.

They had a 6 cent Coke machine - anybody remember those? It was red of course and had a metal "flush handle" in the front center.

You put your penny in the slot first (as per the printed instructions), then the nickle, then you flushed the handle down and your cold 6 oz.coke would come out a square hole at the bottom. Usually this square hole had a hard rubber stopper to arrest the gravity drop flight of the bottle.

This one didn't and the good-ole-boys would spit tobacco with delight at the unsuspecting newbie getting weightily whacked in the shin with his first "Pause that Refreshes". (that was me one time)
2nd Time Break Over:

Our initial Herculean labor in the mini-frige saga was to unload that railroad boxcar, one pickup truck at a time, and cart them down a thick white dust dirt road to the storage wharehouse.

In those days the Central East-Coast Florida climate was very much like equatorial Africa. Hot enough for all reptiles to listen to their inner voices and take midday shade while foolish young boys labor for pay.

Shirtless & pouring sweat rivlets thru the caked on dust, we took load after load into the hot dark rental wharehouse, We packed the room darn near solid with stacks of machines in cardboard boxes.

4 courses high "DO NOT STACK MORE THAN 4 HIGH" was written on each cardboard container - so we didn't.

Weirdly, we wanted the chore to go faster (or maybe just end) not realizing that the longer we took - the more $ we made (too young & inexpierienced to "milk" the job - we learned that dishonest trick way later in life).

To that end, we ciphered that if we piled more boxes on each truckload the job would go faster (than if we didn't - simple math - not too far over our VBHS educated heads).

We managed to stack 15 of these boogers in two layers in the bed of the Chevy pickup. A careful drive down the eye choke dustlane to storage and we had a successful improvement in our routine.

It would have taken 13.3 trips to store 200 GE's if we had done our calculatons first but a few mindless trips were made before we began to think. So about 10 or 11 rides back & forth later we were done for the day.

Honest dumb teen labor. At day's end we looked like the gray dust covered Bluecoats in "The Good Bad & The Ugly". We went straight to the beach, used the outdoor "Shower" (shower head long gone - now a pipe on a pole in the air) to fresh water-roll the crud off & hit the ocean. A pretty good relief from dirt & the heat of the day.

On the way out, I recall we encountered a happy old man heading for The Blue (like me now.)

"Hi Boys!! How's the water?
"Great! But watch out for pykosts!"
"What's a pykost?"
"About 79 cents!!"
"Ha Ha! You rascals!!"

The next morning we were to deliver the whole mess up A1A to the John's Island beach side condos.

Friday morning 8 o'clock and we loaded up the truck. Not so many per load as when we packed the storage facility. 10 was a safe load at A1A hiway speeds and the condos were @ 10 miles north of town.

The day was total tourist gorgeous. We pulled up to the seaside boardwalk before heading up the road, just to have a look at the ocean. Absolutely beautiful. A light offshore breeze, Turquoise blue water near the shore and gradually turning darker navy blue as the water deepened out.The gradient mix of blues was shimmery with the a.m. sun sparklies totally covering the surface and the little placid waves were running about a 1ft. morning break.

You could still see schools of fingerlings - small fish feeding near the shore and a flight of pelicans was single filing south about 5 inches off the surface. Can't beat it.

Traveling north, once you leave the beachside town limits and pass the last 7-11, either side of A1A is miles of solid real jungle. No monkeys but everything else.

Scrub oaks that grew gnarly thick & short from the constant wind and more than occasional storms. Stands of Saw Palmetto (they call it "saw" because of the very sharp spikes along the stems) filling the gaps between oaks,

Gobs of long spikey cactus - mostly "prickly pear", Sand Spurs (the Florida bane of bare feet), and a tiny white 5 petal flower on a hairy stem - stinging nettles!! Yarp!

First time I kicked one I thought I was snake bit!! Waves of hot/cold pain flash across your body. I can still get a "body memory" from that 1st whack.

Then there are the ambient critters - fire ants, other bugs galore, Lizards, snakes, turtles & in the wet spots - alligators.

Unless there's a well worn path to the ocean on the east or the Indian River on the west, you ain't getting there from A1A. I can't imagine the hell original Florida expolrers endured.

The pavement was safe enough, though way hot by midday. The trips went pretty well. At first the Gate Guard checked each load (Gosh! Were we trying to sneak poor people in?) and by the afternoon he had gotten used to us and waved us on to our delivery area.

Near day's end we had a load and a half left so we piled them a bit higher and roped off the top course. I can't remember who was driving but the last load and the nearness of chore's end may have had some bearing on our speed.

False confidence from the first part of the chore filled us both and we kind of hurried down the last few miles.

Kelvin clobbered us with our own stupidity.

As our speed gradually increased so did the wind shear forces on the load on back of the pickup truck.
(You know what's coming, don't you?)

The boxes jostled & shifted just enough to slide the rope off the top. We didn't notice until the two top boxes of refrigerators on either side of the back began to rock in slo-motion.

The invisible physics line had been crossed. Nothing we could do but stare - too late to slow down and "undo" the event. The inexhorable forces had been released.

We both turned and helplessly looked thru the back window.

Tipping up on their respective outside corners, in Peckinpaugh slow-mo, rotating in the air, arching up through the blue sky with puffy white clouds as a background - like depth charges popped off a PT boat - the top outside two boxes peeled off the load, then the slo-mo stopped...
and they bounced - then rolled to either side on the sandy shoulders of A1A.

We stopped the truck safely (not matching our panic), turned it around and drove back to the murder scene.

We may have had some dim hope that we could reload these escapees and continue our job as if nothing had ......
Nope!
The closer we got to the accident, the more obvious it became that we were doomed and the victims were dead dead dead.

The rolling & bouncing had defeated the internal bracing of the heavy cardboard boxes. Both containers had their lower corners torn open and exposed a bit of black shiny compressor and (the best part) both boxes were issuing a hissing pressurized greenish mist into the late afternoon air.

There was some brief discussion about how much we could get for the undamaged rest of the load and the truck in the next town and then leave the country with that $.

A dream of a way out but not practical at all. We were just as dead as the GE minis.

Reloaded and driving way way slower, we brought the last load to the Gate Guard. He knew us by then and was not very attentive. We got out of the truck and walked to the back. As we spoke to him we both casually leaned on the damaged boxes with our elbows covering the tear holes.

We actually, probably, maybe could have delivered the broken units and claimed we didn't do it - that they had been damaged after delivery. But that would have compounded the karma and even at that tender age - we knew better.

Finished the delivery and headed for the shop with two dead friges and our doom waiting.

The first phase of this cartoon ends with our heros standing in shame and a black circle slowly closing in on Brian's facial expression of combined disbelief & fury. (We had significantly reduced his profit.)

Don't know how but We kept our jobs.
(This statement presumes keepin our jobs is a good thing - it was actually cosmic punishment.)

The next day our only delivery chore was to bring a new frige to an old 3 story red roofed stucco apartment building by the High School in town.

As a matter of Brian's policy, if the frige was not new to the home, we alway picked up the old one and hauled it off as a courtesy.

It was a pretty nice apartment on the top floor of the building. We strapped the new unit to an appliance dolly (they have 2 sets of racheting cloth straps to hold big units in place while rolling over varying terrain.) and entered the 1st floor of the building.

A short hallway to rooms on the left and the stairs began on the right.

Up 1 flight then turn left at the first landing. Up the second flight and a right turn to the 2nd landing then straight up to the third floor apartment door.

An older building, the stairs were narrow and it was a 2 man job - one above pulling, one below pushing.

Sweating, grunting and cursing as only teenagers can, we got that new Avacado Green 14cubic ft. Westinghouse all the way up - one step at a time and opened the door (the rental was between tenants, we were given the key).

It was a nice airy apartment, lots of windows and a view of the town and the top of a big live oak full of cardinals, bluejays & squirrels - pretty Florida idyllic.

Then we saw the old unit that we were to remove. It was a genuine antique - a Crosley. These things were almost the original home refrigerator,

Made to run forever (it was still functioning but the landlord wanted it out) and constructed of used WWII tanks & battleships. The heaviest plate steel known to man.

We had no idea of the impending disaster that gravity and Kelvin (VGoR) were to visit upon us shortly.

We unstrapped the Westinhouse close to the old frige. We unplugged the Crosley and slid the tip of the dolly under the front and after a series of small pulls, got it out enough to slide the whole blade under.

We bumped it out enough to strap it in tightly and after cleaning that spot that never gets cleaned underneath, we rolled the new unit into place, plugged it in and there's now a happy new frige in the top floor appartment. Yeah.

If we thought the new unit was heavy. The old unit was multiples. It took two of us to tip it back on the dolly wheels to get a rolling angle.

We rolled it out the door and up to the first step down and knew we'd have to have one man on each side again. This time the low man is pushing again but now to keep it from going down more than one bump step at a time and gaining any momentum.

OK, We carefully keep the angle and bump it down the 1st step (big wood bump noise!). then, still very carefully, the second.

I'm on the top side bracing the weight against a plunge down the flight with both legs straight and my right arm anchored into the uprights on the bannister.

Chuck, my stronger partner is below, stiff-arming the monster to keep it from advancing while I pull for the same reason.

Another step BUMP! It's only the 3rd step. The Behemoth has 3 flights down to go.

A few more straining steps and our spindly teen bodies are beginning to loose it. My legs start to burn, wobble & vibrate involuntarily. I watch. My anchor arm is slowly being dragged out of safety because my legs are not holding in place.

Chuck looks up & spies the unfolding catastrophe and I can see the choices quickly going over his face. He looks to the side, the stairway is against a wall on one side and 2 floors on the other - no way to jump.

The frige is somehow getting heavier, my legs are turning to rubber and I can't hold it alone - so ......
I give out with an audible "ARRRGH!" as the dolly & steel cabinet tear slowly out of my grip and then I helplessly watch it begin to aggressively bump down steps in front of me while picking up speed & momentum.

"Bumpity Bump" went to "Bammity Bam" and then to a full tilt "Whammity Wham". Unstoppable Steel Clad Isacc Newton barrreling down in full force.

Just as my body gives out and I know I've killed my best friend with weakness & stupidity - he elects to run.

All the running I'd seen to date had been on flat ground.
On tracks - starting blocks, nice even gravity. Backyard games,etc. - Florida was notoriously flat & level.

Chuck was actually running full out at an angle - down stairs while looking back over his shoulder with the fear of death on his face. Though an unparalleled athletic feat - we both knew he was a gonner in a few seconds.

The now speeding metal block went heavy bumping through both landings with Chuck somehow maintianing the distance up front - amazing - but nowhere to go. Can't open the front door fast enough. For that matter we can't aim the juggernaut either.

It was going to catch my partner on the fly and shove them both through the stucco front wall of the building to the sidewalk and then into the street.

Kelvin must have had some opposing minor gods - Chuck sidestepped at the bottom and slammed into a wall with his hands flat up to stop himself.

Instead of plowing through and making a person/refrigerator sized hole in the wall and continuing on, the Crosley monster came to the last step and dust-cloud slammed solid upright, still in place strapped to the dolly, and stood stopped - unmoving with a few flies circulating the final dusty scene.

We couldn't believe our luck. We didn't have a second disaster in two days - we didn't crash a hole in an apartment building with an appliance and we might get the old Crosley loaded and out with no one the wiser.

Whew!

This part of the cartoon ends with our heros back at the beach not even thinking about work.

Kelvin has been relatively kind since then. There were many tomorrows after that - more later.

Big Love to All