The Phantom Hero

Writing about my days working for Big Eddie brought memories of those days bubbling up.  We were employed by a sub-contractor, doing design and engineering work for the company building photographic modules for Project Apollo. This was a rush job built around the nine-women-can-have-a-baby-in-one-month model.  We worked long hours in rather primitive conditions, but were well paid.  The revolving-door personnel practices meant vetting new hires involved little more than checking for a pulse, and resulted in some very, let's say interesting, characters reporting for work every Monday.

There was Annie, who sported the wardrobe and vocabulary of a lumberjack, and drove a big Ford flatbed truck.  She lasted longer than we expected, given her frequent shouting matches with the bosses. She actually left on her own, broadcasting an x-rated farewell toast as she headed for the door.  There was dead silence in the room after her departure, but we were silently applauding and cheering Annie for having the guts to say what we were all thinking.

Another hero of ours was the guy who forced the issue and shamed the company into enlarging the rest room from three-stalls to eight, in order to better accommodate the two-hundred digestive tracts in regular service to the work force.  Finding an unoccupied stall was a real challenge, and Eddie would physically remove anyone he found waiting for a vacancy in the toilet room.  "You're not being paid to stand around! Out!"  Then he'd pound on the stall doors and strongly suggest to the occupants that they should make it happen or he would squeeze it out of them. 

Nothing helped. The stalls were mainly being used as a hideaway for naps, or for reading the morning paper, which back then took far longer than the downsized editions common today.  Sooner or later it had to happen, and one day it did.  Someone with an urgent need simply could not wait a moment longer, and he left the evidence of his plight on the floor, along with his underwear.  News of this reached the top levels of management seconds after the discovery, and if there had been a fan in that dank, airless room...

Eddie's boss, a buzzcut-wearing squinty-eyed grouch who spoke in machine-gun bursts, went insane with rage.  He stood on a chair and demanded the guilty party step forward so he could "Rub yer *&%$#* nose in it!"  When no one did, he gave the order for every male in the place to "drop 'em" so he could check for missing undergarments. No one complied.  His nostrils flared and spewing smoke, he jumped down from the chair and double-timed towards one of the stunned employees, shouting, "OK, I'll do it for you!" but Eddie, in a rare display of decency, stepped up and quietly informed his boss that "you can't do that, you'll get us all in trouble."  With that, they both left the room.

The next morning, we found a work crew moving the rest room wall so plumbers could bring in another half-dozen seats. Two days later, we could stroll in anytime of the day and find an open stall.  No one ever learned the identity of the superhero who sacrificed his skivvies for our comfort.  It would have been fitting to name the refurbished facility in his honor.