During our last episode (Aug. 25), third generation Portlander Ed “Nardie” White completed his education at the now-defunct West Kentucky Technical School in Paducah. He had grudgingly applied for a director’s position at the Parkland Boys and Girls Clubs, and to his surprise he got the job. The only hitch was that he needed a college degree, so he studied commercial art and photography at Jefferson Community College.
“I really didn’t know what I was going to do. So, you just wandered. I said, if I’m going to go to school, then I’m gonna study photography. And that led me there. I got a job, which killed photography for me, because it became work. It became production. We were making catalogs. I took a job at Paul Schultz’s companies as a photo assistant, and then worked my way up to a staff photographer. I don’t know if you remember Service Merchandise? That was an industry. Service Merchandise was the top of the chain. But there were regional stores, like Romar-Gleeson. I don’t know if you remember them. There were all these mom and pops all across the country. And this guy, Paul Schultz, had been a merchandiser for Romar-Gleeson, and he saw the need for the catalog. He understood the catalog business, and he said, ‘I could produce these catalogs for a cheaper rate.’ So he was able to have probably 50-60 shops selling the same stuff in one catalog, and he made a mint.
“Until Walmart showed up. When Walmart showed up, that’s what killed that business, because a lot of that business was in small, out of the way markets. It’s just like…what made Sears was that catalog, so they did that formula. But when Walmart came in and started putting stores in those places, you know that killed it. They couldn’t keep up.”
White was still finding his place in society, working a variety of jobs in different industries. Years earlier, he had an after-school job at Goldstein Brothers, a uniform shop which was located downtown, on a bustling city block that is largely non-existent now. In addition to providing custom-made uniforms for the Louisville police department, Goldstein Brothers had a sporting goods wing which produced plaques and trophies for various sporting leagues around Louisville, including the manufacturer International Harvester, which had a plant on Crittenden Drive. Goldstein said the work was hard, but the money was good, and he could get him a job.
“We were making parts for John Deere, tractor parts, manifold parts. That’s when International Harvester had…remember the Scout? And they had Cub Cadet. So basically, in the foundry, it’s hot metal, you know, and we would do these molds. You add all these components to make the manifold. Once it goes down to the line, it goes down to the pour section. And then you got these guys that are basically pushing a dolly. It’s like a scooter, and it has a ladle. It’s got a ladle full of molten metal. And so this guy is rolling this thing around, and he’s pouring this hot metal into this mold. And then there’s a big pot about maybe as big as this room. And so he drives his ladle up to the big ladle, and the big ladle pours the metal into his ladle. And then they have this one man, his job is to chill it, because it’s too hot. So they take a regular other piece of iron and put it into this metal to cool it off. Yes.
“I never tried to get a job back in there. Never, never, never, you know, because you see those sparks are flying. I mean, just flying. They were some of the toughest men you ever want to see, especially in the summertime. It’s hundreds of degrees back there, you know, and they would go on breaks, and then would, you know, pass out.
“I had one job, ‘knock off’. After the parts went around the factory and come down to us, whatever sand that was still left, we had to knock it off. They gave us these wooden platforms to put on your shoes because we were standing in hot sand.
“So now your in all of this metal, and your underwear would turn brown. So I had a set of underwear that I wore, t-shirt, underwear that I wore because basically, your underwear would rust. It would rust. Yeah, I mean, they would just be brown.
“I’ll never forget. One guy’s name is Pound Cake. He’s a white guy. He came from way down in the country. You had people come in from 50-60 miles away. They were farmers, so they would carpool up here to work, to offset whatever was coming off the farm. And this good old country boy, he was something. They would drink alcohol. They’d be in there drunk as I don’t know what. They go out and would drink. They go out and smoke weed. And then the foremen would know, and they would catch ‘em. It was like, ‘No man, I’m not fooling with y’all.’
“This one guy had this shop rag in his back pocket. You know, everybody had a rag cause it’s hot. They was all laughing, joking…so a guy slipped up behind him, set the rag on fire (laughs). And I looked down there and saw his ass running trying to get that rag out his jeans. I said, ‘I told y’all, that’s how they play. You ain’t the first one to have your rag pulled and set on fire.’
“You sit on break time, don’t set your coke down. They take and put some salt all in your coke…take a drink, and you get a mouth full of damn salt.”
It was when his unemployment nearly expired in the mid- ‘80s that the position at the Parkland Boys and Girls Club was open, and next time, we’ll learn more about his time there, as he developed his skills as an arts nonprofit leader, which led to the beginnings of the River City Drum Corp.
Read previous entries in this series here: https://portlandanchor.com/tag/nardie/
