Riding my bike through Decatur on my way back from Stone Mountain Park, I paused for a selfie at the football field of Decatur High. 51 years ago this month, I scrubbed every inch of the home side bleachers. (I would've marked the 50th anniversary last summer, but a hernia precluded arduous rides.)
Less than a year before, Dad had purchased West Chemical Engineering Company on Huff Road, not far from Tech. Where townhomes and expensive restaurants now stand, Dad and a couple employees (me included) manufactured soaps, disinfectants, and water treatments in a shed behind an old house. Photo: Dad with Mom in front of the main building at the corner of Huff Road and Ellsworth Industrial Boulevard. A shed with 100-gallon mixers was attached to the back. [For more on work at Dad's company throughout my teen years, see my blog post Prep Kid in a Factory (09/2022)]
But Dad gave me a special mission that summer, when I was between my eighth and ninth grade years. Atlanta City Schools were his customers, and the concrete stadium seats at Decatur high were gray with thirty-plus years of soot. At Sears, Dad bought a piece of new technology called a "pressure washer." With a college kid named Jerry who drove and oversaw my work, I scoured the whole stadium, one one-inch strip at a time, from the upper left hand corner of this picture to the lower right-hand corner. Then I repeated the process to "seal" the concrete with a polymer mix that would keep grime from lodging in the surface.
Here's the "before" picture that Dad took on a cloudy day. In the "after" picture (which I haven't located), the concrete gleams white as vanilla ice cream.
The hardest part of my job was to fill the pressure washer's tank with a toxic soap mixture every few hours. I hauled a five gallon bucket filled with hydrochloric acid from the storage area (lower right) back up the stairs to the pressure washer. The acid has a sharp smell that burns your eyes and lungs. I'd hold my breath, advance ten steps, set the bucket down, run from the fumes, gasp, run back to the bucket, and repeat.
Did I mention, there's no shade there?
But looking back, I'm fond of that time. Jerry had little in common with me, so I had eight hours a day to myself -- good thing, for an introvert. He did have a portable radio, so I heard a lot of pop songs -- "Yesterday Once More" by the Carpenters, "Diamond Girl" by Seals & Croft, "Touch Me in the Morning" by Diana Ross -- songs that bring the whole summer back to me with a smile. Sometimes Jerry would give me leave to cross the street to a hot dog joint.
Something else was fascinating. On the right side of Dad's "before" photo, we can see some of the blocks of public housing. We were the only two white guys in a neighborhood where everyone I saw was black, a new experience for me. The homes had no air conditioning, so all the windows were open, and I heard all day the sounds of lives very different from mine.
I once wrote about those summers working for Dad in my resonse to a study about repetitive work. When workers' "executive" brain engaged in the repetitive action, the rest of the mind was free for problem-solving and daydreaming. Then I wrote: That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.
I didn't see Decatur High again until 2009,when I started riding my bike through Decatur. Aluminum bleachers had replaced the concrete, and the public housing was now expensive condominiums. Time erased my work. But I'm proud to mark the anniversary.
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