Quit that racket kids. No, turn it off and come over here. We’re supposed to be remembering old Stan today, it’s his big day and tomorrow there’ll be plenty of time for Tick-Tockin’, Row-box or whatever foolishness. Come over here and I’ll tell you a story. No… over here. Circle around.
You see that box over there, no the big one. There. Quit it Sally, I don’t have time for shenanigans. Stanley’s in there, his is body anyway. Yes. Really. Thought that’d make you clam-up.
Now I seem pretty old to you and I am. I’ve seen 52 summers and am proper old. But when I was your age, anybody over 16 wuz a grown-up and that’s how I knew Stan. Stanley was my oldest brother and on the day I was bawlin’ while mother dropped me off for my first day of school he was already put out out to work.
What? I guess he was (one, two three four… ten, twelve) about 16. Yes Sally, that’s too young to work in a factory these days but that’s how it was back then. Pappy ran off and left our mother with five boys to feed and Stanley quit school to keep the rent paid and his brothers fed. Fed most of the time.
Every day he’d pick up his lunch pail and set off for a day of needling torment, teasing and hard labour at the old bicycle factory. The first year was the toughest and some of my earliest memories were of him coming home bent and exhausted, quietly weeping into the shoulder of mother’s dress. Everyone found something important, elsewhere, to do around then.
The thing is though, Ol’ Stanley was a swift one. His teachers had begged him to stay on at school, saying he was meant for bigger deeds than carting bicycle wheels from one end of a warehouse to another and the bosses at the factory must have seen the same thing because pretty soon the torment and teasing stopped and he was training on the company press and lathes. Probably helped that a steady diet of ham-and-egg sandwiches had turned him into a strapping 18-year old with the kind of inside-strength that only hard work brings.
We felt it at home too. Mother didn’t cry so much and we ate meat for dinner most nights of the week. I cried the day he gave me a brand new bike for my ninth birthday. Couldn’t help it.
Sally, have you got ants in your pants or do you need to pee? No? No ants? Thanks.
We all got pretty used to living in the clover so when the accident came it hit double-hard. Stan hurt bad, maybe dead, and rent due Tuesday.
You see, Stanley was pretty much running the floor by that time. There was a foreman but he was a lazy lunkhead not good for more than checking clock-ins and jabbing at men for taking too long in the head. Plus stuff would go walkabout. A man may clock off Friday and find his welding gauntlets missing on Monday. Because of this dingus the plant was in a bad state and accidents were not unknown. Stan took over and set up crews to clean and polish, fix up broken kit with wire and wood and what they had and tell off fools who took risks around the machinery.
That would have been OK, but the trouble was the plant was getting busy. In 1980 when Joop Zoetemelk — thanks Sally, very funny. Joop Zoetemelk came first in the Tour-‘d-France on a Raleigh from Stanley’s plant, maybe worked on by my big brother hisself and everyone wanted one. Extra shifts, faster lines and cut corners could not fill the demand for more and more bikes. The big-wigs were delighted but they had spent dog-all on the factory for so long that things were falling to bits.
Ol’ Stan started on double-shifts, said he had to do it or one of his chums was likely to lose an arm or a foot or worse. The welders was covered in burns for Chrissakes. He raised hell with the managers and they made him foreman, ejecting the space-waster that had been there a decade. “You don’t like it? You do better,” they said and he did.
Stanley moved around the tube-steel cutter so it was next to the assembly belt, got the welders proper leathers, updated the formula for the pickle and a hundred other little changes that were well overdue.
About that time I was in my last year of schooling and sniffing around Stan for a job on the floor but he wouldn’t have it. “None of my brothers are going to work at the plant unless it’s as accountant or engineer,” he said. He said it more than once, to each of us.
Stan was a true leader and wouldn’t let a man do anything he wasn’t ready to do hisself. And he could do it all, having come up from the bottom. He was about 26 and life was opening up for him. Good pay, respect of the men and encouragement from management. Straight, tall and confident of better things to come.
December came, Christmas with it and they couldn’t make enough bikes to sell. Men kept making mistakes, slowing down the line or getting hurt, so Stanley stayed on two shifts a day, for too long.
The machine that makes spokes cuts stainless-steel wire, heats it, an-nealing they call it, and dumps it into a big polisher. Pretty much a ol’ big bin of sand and spokes that gets vibrated for a while to put a shine on the product. In this case, hundreds of hard, sharp bits of 15-inch wire.
It was a coolant leak in the piping over this bin of sand and spokes that Stan was fixing. Normally it would be a job for Neville Hansen but he got hit in the head with an exploding air hose the week before and was eating soft foods in hospital. Stanley knew every man’s job and the line was stopped, so there he was.
I don’t know why he fell in the spoke-polisher but he did and was immediately impaled on dozens, scores, of neatly cut and annealed wire billets.
It was a tough couple of weeks by his hospital bed, I slept on the chair next to it. Nothing could move me. Over the next year he took dozens of operations but some of the spokes had shattered inside him in places too delicate to remove.
The scarring, the disfigurement, was terrible. Yes, kids you remember. Bet you regret makin’ jokes about him now. For the next few years bits of polished stainless steel spokes would work their agonising way out of his body. He had survived, lost an eye, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
One spoke got stuck next to his heart and they couldn’t get out it out without killing him. The X-ray was a terrible thing to see and by the looks of it, one day it would kill him. One day far in the future. Now we know it was a Thursday, last week.
The company big-wigs were painful sorry. They knew that Stan was their top man and that the company would be less without him. They also knew that they faced a revolt from the floor unless they made good.
Luckily, Stanley had a brain and none of the spokes had got in it. He was smart, a good leader and naturally likeable. The scars didn’t matter so much in the days of newspaper and radio and him being pierced by so many spokes had got him in the national news, so people knew Stanley Mason, at least for a while.
Those spokes in Stan meant he couldn’t work the factory floor no more but the owner lifted him up into the executive suite of the little office building next to the factory and from that day on, he was their press and PR man. Real good at it too, until he retired two years ago. The company sure missed him and, Sally, they said he as was a damn fine spokesman.