.....In the late 1940's I found myself sitting at a punch press at Athens machine shop. There was the smell of oil vapors and metal in the air and I was sliding a thin strip of brass into the punch with my left hand and operating a foot lever with my right foot. Wallah, A tiny little ladder would fall out of the punch into a box under the machine. This little ladder would end up soldered to the side of a boxcar on an N gage train. I think I punched out a quarter of million ladders a day and another hundred thousand at night after I fell asleep.
.....A few feet from my machine was a pretty girl with a knockout figure. There were two interesting things about this girl besides her looks. She was deaf and dumb (now it would be called physically impaired but in 1948 it was called deaf and dumb) and she did a job that no one else could do as well. In front of her was a three foot wooden ramp pointing down at a steep angle and mounted on the ramp was a three foot piece of N gage railroad track. She would take a hand full of little axles, with wheels pressed on them, and feed them onto the top of the track. The wheel assemblies would come rolling down the track, spaced about one inch apart. If any of the wheel assemblies did not run smoothly, the space between it and the wheel assembly behind it would shorten. Whenever she saw a slow wheel assembly she would flick it of the track with her right index finger. Her dexterity, speed and looks where amazing. The deaf and dumb girl's only means of communication was some homemade sign language and a Big 5 notebook.
.....The Big 5 notebook was a wonderful thing. It started out costing five cents and by 1948 it was fifteen cents but they still called it the Big 5. The notebook cover was bright red, as red as you could print on dull pulpy paper, and had a giant five in the center. The paper inside was oatmeal colored and had occasional chunks of wood in it. You would be writing away and and all of a sudden your pencil would stub it's toe on a chunk of wood. What the Big 5 lacked in quality, it made up for is sheer size, it was very thick.
.....This girl, who never spoke, would work eight hours at lightning speed and when the quitting horn sounded, she would grab her purse and coat, and go out to the street. With one food on the curb and one foot in the street she would put her thumb in the air and instantaneously brakes would screech, and she would have a ride. No one knew anything about her, nor would we see or hear from her, until the next morning. One night she hitched a bad ride and no one ever saw her again.
.....The silent girl was not the only thing that was to disappear from our lives. As the years passed other things started disappearing like the Big 5 notebook, tutu's, SenSen, The Helms Man and accordion lessons.
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