CHAPTER 1 - MORNING IN AMERICA

By the time I was hired at Cumberland-Swan Drug Company in March of 1983 the economy was in a noticeable recovery. Inflation was on the way down. The real estate market and the automobile industry were recovering. The job market was also getting better and by this time I was a believer in Ronald Reagan and I was a proud Conservative. Before Ronald Reagan a Conservative was bad, and a liberal was good. After my conversion to conservatism the term liberal represented all that was wrong with America to me. Today I realize that a true liberal is actually a good thing. You can have a civil debate with a liberal. The leftists are the crazy people and either the real Communists or the "useful idiots". I am a classical liberal as were the Founding Fathers. Before Reagan I was a conservative and just didn't know it. I believed that if you were a liberal it meant that you were open-minded on everything. That you were for the working man, against the evil rich and open-minded on the subject of race. After Reagan I realized how wrong I had been.

Actually, the ones who control the Democrat party today are Marxists or Communist if you will. The modern Democrat party is basically the Communist Party U.S.A. A true liberal loves America and believes in the rule of law. Although I disagree with them on most things, I would list people like Ed Koch, Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz in that category. Leftists do not love America or the rule of law. They only follow the law or the Constitution when it works to their advantage. The end justifies the means. When the ends justifies the means you will do anything to take power and to maintain it. Up to and including violence and murder. Like Obama, AOC and so many others they want to destroy America by transforming this great country into a Marxist utopia. Karl Marx's favorite saying was "Everything that exists deserves to perish". Alexander Trachtenberg, a famous Communist, said the following "When we get ready to take the United States we will not take it under the label of communism; we will not take it under the label of socialism. These labels are unpleasant to the American people, and have been speared too much. We will take the United States under labels we have made very lovable; we will take it under liberalism, under progressivism, under democracy. But take it we will". \

 When I was hired at Cumberland-Swan I went to work in compounding. They manufactured various over the counter drugs, and packaged them. We made all kind of drugs, cleaning, beauty products. rubbing alcohol, peroxide, aspirin, non-aspirin, saccharine, cough medicine, nail polish remover, merthiolate, mouthwash, citrate of magnesia, and household cleaners. We received raw materials in bulk like petroleum jelly and epsom salt. The long list of products that we manufactured are just too numerous to mention. We also manufactured our own plastic bottles for the production lines. One important fact that I learned while working at Cumberland-Swan was that off brand products are of the same quality as the brand name products. When you bought aspirin with the Swan label at a much cheaper price, you were getting the same aspirin that was sold by the big companies like Bayer and St. Joseph. They all have the same ingredients, corn starch, Empompress, and acetylsalicylic acid. Bufferin has a 4th ingredient which is an antacid to coat the stomach since regular aspirin can make your stomach bleed on an empty stomach. This is the only difference between the Bufferin brand and regular aspirin. Read the ingredients on all off brands and you will find that they are usually the same as brand name products. We are simply paying higher prices for the brand name.

 I was hired to make aspirin and saccharine tablets in three rooms. An aspirin blending room, a saccharine blending room, and a room with presses that made the tablets. Cumberland-Swan was on land that was the old Sewart Air Force base that closed in 1970. The area that I worked in was the old commissary building and a newer building adjoined the commissary building. Cumberland-Swan was quite possibly the most dangerous place that I ever worked. It was an accident waiting to happen and there were many. I went to work there in March of 1983 and left in October of 1987. 

 God must have been watching over me. Not long after I started working there I came into work one morning and the saccharine blending room was completely destroyed. The first thing that I noticed was glass strewn through the hallways from the plate glass windows that had been blown out. We had two ovens that were used to dry the saccharine so it could be ground into a powder that was then poured into the hopper of the saccharine presses. One of the ovens had blown up and the pieces were scattered all over the room. Pieces of the oven were embedded in the concrete block walls along with shards of glass. The block wall that separated the room from the hallway was moved off it's foundation by about a foot from the force of the explosion. The room looked like a bomb had gone off and it had because the oven became a bomb. By the grace of God it did not go off while I was in the room because they would have been scraping me off the walls and no one else was killed or injured. 

  A female quality assurance worker, along with one of our male compounders, had just walked out of the room when the oven blew up. After an investigation it was discovered that the oven was not OSHA approved for drying saccharine. Both ovens had a ventilation fan that blew out the gasses and the fan on the oven that exploded had stopped working. A build-up of gasses caused the oven to explode. Over the four years I worked there many people were severely injured. My compounding supervisor was working on a steam pipe when it blew up scalding his stomach. I was in the restroom when he walked in and started taking off his clothes. The skin was hanging from his stomach and he appeared to be going into shock when they took him to the hospital. After I left two ladies that I had supervised were reworking nail polish remover, I believe, when the acetone in it caught fire, trapping them in the room. They had to run through the fire in order to escape through the only exit door. Both were life flighted to Vanderbilt but survived their injuries. On another occasion, while I was still working there, a citrate of magnesia glass bottle exploded in a female workers hand cutting an artery in her wrist. She also recovered. Luckily, there were no fatalities while I worked there. 

Swan was growing rapidly and always changing during the time that I worked there and compounding moved upstairs into a newer building. About this time I got a new supervisor who was basically a redneck punk and it was obvious that he didn't care for me. I did everything that I was asked to do but nothing I did seemed to please him. One day I was told to go to the HR office. A very nice guy named Michael was in charge of our Human Resources Department. My supervisor and Michael were waiting on me when I arrived. I was told that I was being written up for having a bad attitude. Michael seemed to be high on me when I was hired but he was caught in the middle on this one. He probably believed that he had to back up his supervisor because I have been faced with similar situations as a supervisor. I asked my supervisor to tell me what I had done wrong and all he could come up with was I had a bad attitude. Whenever someone criticizes me I try to look inward and determine if it is constructive criticism. To coin a phrase I try not to become bitter. I only want to be better. After a serious look inward if the criticism is not warranted, I try to ignore it and move on. In this case it was totally unjustified.

At the time I was working in the aspirin blending room a compounder was lucky if they were able to get a blend and a half done during a eight hour shift. It was considered a very good day if you could complete two full blends and I was determined to break this record. After a few weeks I averaged anywhere from two and a half to three blends a shift. Even my punk supervisor commended me for the work I was doing. One day Michael called me to his office and offered me a promotion. He told me that he was impressed by the way I handled myself during and after my write-up. Michael admired how composed I had been and how I had given such a level headed defense in the face of a false accusation. He said many people would have slow walked or developed an even worse attitude after a write-up but I did the opposite and proved him wrong by working even harder. This is my way of settling a score with people when I am falsely accused of something in the workplace. Another saying that I like is that a person should not allow others to determine how they are going to act. I just go out and prove them wrong but I never expected to be offered a supervisor's job from all of this. At Colonial I never wanted to be a supervisor because I was making almost as much money as they were anyway. Supervisors were on salary and by the time that you figured in their overtime, extra responsibilities, and headaches we were probably making more than they were. Their only advantage was that they were paid whenever they had to be off for sickness or personal business and we weren't.

At Cumberland-Swan taking a supervisors job was a step up over the pay that I was getting as a compounder. My starting pay was going to be 20,000 a year, which was not too bad for 1984. I was one of three production supervisors and about 80% of the workers were women. They were mostly line operators and the men were primarily tow motor operators and utility workers. Utility workers held these jobs because of the physical strength needed to keep the hoppers full of plastic caps, bottles, and the raw materials needed to keep the lines running. Especially in the Epsom Salts room where the salt was in bags weighing 100 pounds and stacked on pallets. I tried to keep men rotated on a daily basis because it was hot and heavy work. First, they had to take a heavy metal bar and break up the salt before dumping it in the hoppers. When I became a supervisor only two women were utility workers and both ladies were strong enough to do the job. At Colonial we only had one older lady in the bakery and she worked for a little while after I was hired but retired soon after. After she retired there were no women working at Colonial for a few years. In the mid to late seventies, however; affirmative action laws regarding women were being enforced and they were being hired. At first the women were getting the easiest jobs, which I felt was unfair.

There were exceptions, however. We had one young girl who had a very physical job in production and she worked that job even after she was pregnant and right up until the time of delivery. This woman never complained about anything and she was a very petite woman but I had tremendous respect for her toughness. Just after I became a supervisor the same thing happened at Cumberland-Swan. The company was forced into hiring women for all positions. Tow motor, utility and compounding jobs were opened up to women. One of my fellow supervisors was a man and the other was a woman. I never felt like they liked me very much. In my view if a woman is hired to do a job traditionally set aside for men they must be able to adequately perform that job. Otherwise they do not belong there. For example when I supervised the salt line, I rotated women in and out of there just like the men. Many of them would run to the other supervisors and complain on me. The other supervisors would take them out of the rotation causing the men to have to work the salt line twice as much and this wasn't fair to them.