Friday, October 11, 2002 8:31 PM Joe Coluccio

10-24 UNC or 10-32 UNF some threads of my life.

Jim Mackey was a gray haired man who came to work in denim overhauls and a Casey Jones railroad engineer’s cap and carried his lunch down from the streetcar tracks in a black half cylindrical metal box.

In the summers, fifth, sixth, seventh grades I would go to work with my father. South 6th and Bingham Streets, one block north of East Carson Street. Souse Side Picksburgh Penn-syl-van-eye-ey, Hey! We ate lunch and breakfast at Sarah’s before she became famous and the word yuppie was whispered, certainly before she disappeared into South Side legend, a block on the right passed the wonder of the 10th Street suspension bridge.

The place was called Beighley Hardware and Tool. The less than presumptuous block building stands today and houses a similar business called Plant Services. Long time competition Standard Machinist four blocks toward the Smithfield Street Bridge on the lower levels of the Terminal Building and Lappe Supply the other side of the original Birmingham Bridge have long been retired to mechanical heaven.

My old man would take my mother to work, Mayflower Coffee Shop across from Rosenbaum’s next to the Loew’s Penn Theatre which had honest to god knights in shining mail jousting at you on the way to the basement men’s room. Downtown Pittsburgh was vibrant with smoke, grime and life. Then he would cross the Smithfield Street Bridge, stop at the Triangular Service station and talk to Bill who would hawk tobacco on the cement while he pumped gas and then take me to work. Sometime afterward he would go on his way making sales calls.

Jim would come in about fifteen minutes after I was settled in with a loping loose limbed gate and stop in front of the scarred desk that sat in a dark corner of the shipping dock and place the contents of his lunch box in a drawer, place the box under the desk and say, “Good morning, sonny!” with a grin that was sincere but looked as fake as his teeth. Then he would walk over to the plywood and two by four shipping table that lined the entire front wall of the room and start his days work.

He would grunt, mumble and hum as he worked and click tongue to his teeth over a back ordered shipment that would be met with his kind but stern disapproval. “Don’t have those Allen Hex Keys. Can’t ship this yet” Jim was a Zen master of repetition. We hadn’t had those damn Allen Hex Keys for two weeks and weren’t expecting them for another two, but every morning he would lift the merchandise that was neatly placed atop a goldenrod copy of the shipping order and intone the same lines with the same inflection, move on to the next order and categorize the missing portions of the order, offer comment to the gods of freight. Jim Mackey taught me everything I know about shipping and receiving (which is considerable). I mumble and hum as I ship or receive, make the incantation of the back order and swear. I learned the swearing from my old man who took strings of invective to altogether new heights and delights.

Lunch time. Jim would retrieve his cup from the desk and walk down the steps to the bathroom and fill it with hot tap water. As he poured the instant coffee powder into the cup he would say, and I mean everyday he would say, looking up at me to be sure I was paying attention, “You know, sonny, once in a café I saw a sign that said, ‘Don’t laugh at our coffee you may be old and weak yourself some time.” Then he would laugh and sit down to eat his pasteboard sandwich prepared by Mrs. Mackey, who I never met, but imagined must look as kindly as Mrs. Claus of the Pole, and soften it with luke warm ersatz instant caffeine as he chewed thoughfully with ersatz teeth.

Mid afternoon mid week, I was given a task that has set a weird reverberation of order and fitness to my entire life. At the beginning of the week the company would get a request for cadmium plated nuts, bolts, machine screws, hex head cap screws, you name it. I would pull the order, literally hundreds of little hundred count boxes packed into two or three large containers. The driver then took them to a tin plater over on Butler Street. Round about Wednesday they would return. The technique of plating the hardware demanded that my neat stacks of boxes, would be carelessly emptied into a metal basket and placed in some electrolytic bath that would coat all with dazzling cadmium plate. The driver upon triumphant return would set the sad empty boxes looking dead on the floor and pour the glittering hardware, more silver that Solomon’s, in a large chaotic pile in the center of the table. It was my job to separate count and place them back into boxes.

I can still pick a 10-32 National Fine x ¾” round head machine screw out of a stack of similar length oval head 10-24 pan head 6-40 hex head ¼ - 20 screws nuts and bolts. My mind would groove. I would start to whistle. Jim would mumble, hum, grunt then say, “Say, sonny, I knew a man who blew his teeth out whistling too hard.”

He was a fine man of habit to whom I now raise my glass! I’ve still got my teeth.