{"id":2360,"date":"2009-01-21T19:54:51","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T00:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2009-01-21T19:54:51","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T00:54:51","slug":"service-section-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=2360","title":{"rendered":"Service Section memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

I still haven\u2019t finished<\/strong> the Schulz biography, so what to write about tonight?<\/p>\n

Further memories of the AFLC Service Section, I suppose (see yesterday\u2019s post). It was one of the more colorful places I\u2019ve worked.<\/p>\n

The Service Section (shipping and mailing) was to the America Lutheran Church Headquarters what The Weird Brother We Keep Locked in the Basement and Never Talk About is to some family living next door to a Flannery O\u2019Conner story. The suits (and clerical collars) worked in a tall, pale building on the south side of the block, above Augsburg Publishing House. We SS guys* toiled like orcs in an ancient, creosote-stained, low building on the north side of the block. In order to physically pass from the Shambles to the Tower, you had to either go around outside, or take a freight elevator down to the basement, then follow a tunnel through the rumbling presses of Augsburg\u2019s printing department, to another elevator back in a corner. <\/p>\n

But it was possible to go lower still. We had a sub-basement too, for storage. In order to reach that, you had to use a remarkable device, a hydraulic elevator that looked to be as old as the building, and the building appeared to have been built about the time Father Hennepin was saying, \u201cIf I build a city way out here, the Norwegians will never find me!\u201d There was a steel cable on a pulley at one corner of the elevator\u2019s open platform. You pulled on one side to go down, the other to go up. The trip transported you down about three feet while the mechanism gushed and gurgled, and took about five minutes to complete. One reason I liked being sent down there was that it was kind of like a break. During the ride down (and up again), there was nothing to do but relax. Lessons for life.<\/p>\n

I hope that, when they tore the building down, that elevator went to the Smithsonian.<\/p>\n

My supervisor was a round-headed, wide-bottomed guy who liked to reminisce about his World War II experiences. He actually served on a hospital ship, so it wasn\u2019t much blood and thunder, but he often spoke wistfully of marching into Paris on the day of liberation (how a guy from a hospital ship got to do that, I have no idea. Perhaps he lied. Or perhaps my memory has deceived me yet again), and a French woman took one look at him and said, \u201cMagnifique!\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

One day I caught him taking a pull from a bottle he\u2019d squirreled away in a storage locker. I said nothing about it, and he said nothing about it, but after that he was my best friend in the whole world.<\/p>\n

A year or two after I left that job, I ran into him on a Minneapolis street, and he told me he\u2019d joined AA. I congratulated him, and I meant it. I\u2019ve had worse bosses.<\/p>\n

*For some reason, that doesn’t look right.<\/i>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I still haven\u2019t finished the Schulz biography, so what to write about tonight? Further memories of the AFLC Service Section, I suppose (see yesterday\u2019s post). It was one of the more colorful places I\u2019ve worked. The Service Section (shipping and mailing) was to the America Lutheran Church Headquarters what The Weird Brother We Keep Locked … Continue reading Service Section memories<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}