#cadet draftsman

[testormblog]

Going Nowhere

Most children strive to grow up quickly to escape their boundaries.  I was no different.  Now sixteen years old, I was considered an adult.  Alas, the reverse happened to me; I became a prisoner not an escapee!  My life had become wretched and I was powerless to change it for the next five years of my indenture after my probation period finished.

Every day, I sweated at the Ipswich Workshops then lined up to required technical classes at the Ipswich Technical College, three nights a week and for a half day.  At least this meant I avoided the old codgers at the boarding house.  I only heard their loud snores as I flopped on to my lumpy bed, exhausted and utterly miserable.  Besides, I missed my beloved birds and had left them in Dad’s care.  I hated where I lived but couldn’t afford anywhere else.  My landlord demanded nearly all my wages.  He left me a few measly shillings for my train fares.

One shouldn’t give up hope.  I valiantly tried to keep it and searched for a chance to roll my dice of fortune again.  I read the available jobs listed in the Railway’s Workers Weekly when nobody was looking.  A couple months after I had started work, the Chief Engineer’s Office listed four cadet (apprentice) draftsman positions in Brisbane.  I thought one of these might be an escape route and quickly applied.  My Railway exam ranking secured me an interview and a position.  The top ranked guy scored another.  We virtually evaporated from the Workshops and reappeared in a huge drafting room of hundreds of desks in Brisbane City.  I never returned except once some sixty years later after the hell had met its own demise.

I felt like a jailbird released from prison, and its stepping stone the half way house, into better society.  I didn’t realise that life would be tough on the other side too.  I soon discovered that my electrical studies weren’t useful to a cadet draftsman.  The other cadets were enrolled in draftsman courses or engineering studies.  Thus, I needed to switch.  The Queensland Central Technical College had recently reviewed its engineering subjects, updated them for modern practices and rolled out its 1960 Engineering Diploma, a seven year course.  I decided to do it.  I started three months behind and had lots of catching up to do.  Alas, I was time poor.  I sat in the classroom from six to nine four nights a week and for a half day on Saturday.  On the nights, I waited a couple hours on a draughty train platform for the ‘Midnight Horror.  At 1 am, I staggered up the road to home for a woeful three hours sleep.  I was close to being a dead man walking.  One night, at 2 am, the Bethania Station Master on duty, fortunately one of Dad’s mates, found me asleep in a train carriage laid over for the night.  His daughter, who lived closer to the City, took pity on me and took me in.  I kept my head down at work and college.  I miraculously survived and passed every engineering subject that year.

At work, I went from a place where men swore in English to one where they swore in foreign languages, predominantly Russian.  Whilst the bosses were Australian, many workers were White Russians, post war escapees from Red Russia.  These men chain smoked foul smelling pipes and cigarettes.  A metre thick smoke cloud hovered over everybody, constrained above by the ceiling.  The room was a death cell whether one smoked or not.  Doubtlessly, a lad looking for acceptance by his colleagues, I smoked a few packets of Camel and Rothmans.  I had tasted nothing as disgusting as these cheap cigarettes.  Thus, I didn’t smoke much outside the office nor could I afford to, thus I evaded this addiction.

Everybody in the Chief Engineer’s Office worked silently and diligently unlike their brethren in the Workshops.  No pranks happened here!  I was eager to learn whatever I could.  However, nobody sought to teach me anything.  The men were immersed in whatever segment of infrastructure they had to design.  Being a cadet, they trusted me to do no more than trace their pencil designs on cartridge paper on to blue linen in Indian ink.  These tracings became the blue prints for the manufacture of componentry.  I traced various shaped steel components, scaled to dimensions, for the foundry at the Workshops.  The task was monotonous and tedious due to the careful penmanship required.  For two and a half years, I never drew up any of my own design work.  Nor did my pitiful wage of less than ten pound a week increase.  I earnt marginally less at the Workshops.  Heavens, I could have earnt more birding.

The office bell clanged eight times a day, four times to start work and four times to stop it.  It first rang at 9 am and last at 5.06 pm.  It ruled my day!  As required, I signed on in a book at these times irrespective of when I really began or finished.  The 5.06 pm finishing time clashed with the South Brisbane train timetable.  In those days, no rail bridge connected Brisbane City to the Southside.  On my college free nights, I had fourteen minutes to sprint through the street crowd, down Adelaide Street to George Street then across the old Victoria Bridge, a kilometre and a half.  Missing the train meant at least a half hour wait for the next.  I, being a runner, usually beat the train by a minute if I wasn’t queued to sign the book.  Most of the men in the same predicament signed the book the following morning.  So, I did too.

One night, the Chief Clerk, a power hungry snake, laid a trap for us.  He worded up his team beforehand though.  Somebody leaked his intention but didn’t tell me nor another guy about it.  The next morning, the snake frog marched us two into the Chief Engineer’s office, a suite so palatial it widened my eyes.  I cast my eyes to the floor and stood stone still whilst the Chief Engineer harshly berated us for disobeying the Railway rule.

As my mother unwittingly taught me, take the heat, retreat yet note the score as outstanding and wait for the day to complete.  The chance would come.

Years into the future, a colleague would eventually be promoted to the Railway’s Chief Engineer.  We’d meet again across a desk with me employed by another organisation.  Between us would be a tender for a new rail bridge.  He’d fail to check the document thoroughly.  My allegiance would be to my then employer not to him nor the Railway.  I’d remember the timebook incident and my misery working for the Railway.  That day, the Railway would pay dearly, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth.

That office bell began to sound like the dead knell to me.  Older cadets were resigning.  Then the guy, who began with me, snagged a role with an oil company.  I knew I had to ‘write on the wall’ too despite my indenture and my Railway blood.

[jobshub-pk]

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[chrisgaffey]

Alfred Hitchcock, May 1972, Cannes.

SIR ALFRED JOSEPH HITCHCOCK was born August 13 1899 in Leytonstone, London of English Irish ancestry and raised as a Roman Catholic. He was sent to Salesian College in Battersea and the Jesuit Grammar school St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill London. Around age five, to punish him for bad behaviour, Hitchcock’s greengrocer father sent him to the local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him away for five minutes, which he promptly did. The experience apparently left Hitchock with a life long fear of the police.  

His father died when he was 15 and in the same year, 1914, Hitchcock left school for college whereafter he became a draftsman and advertising designer with an electrical cable company called Henley’s.  During WW1 Hitchcock briefly served in a cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers. While working at Henley's, Hitchcock began to dabble in story writing for the company's in-house publication. 

In 1919 he began his film career at the age of twenty, working as a title card  designer for the London branch of the American firm Famous Players-Lasky  the production arm of Paramount Pictures at Islington Studios. In 1922, Hitchcock stayed on as part of the studio staff when Michael Balcon took over, this new company would become Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock's rise from title designer to film director took five years, during which he was a screenwriter, art director and assistant director. His first film in 1922, aptly titled Number 13, faced a string of bad luck and was cancelled. 

2 December 1926, Hitchcock married his assistant director, Alma Reville. In 1928 they bought a house named ‘Winters Grace’ in a village in Surrey and their daughter Patricia was born 7th July. Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, Blackmail, in 1929, often considered to be the first British ‘talkie’, in it he began the  tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences.  The 39 Steps (1935) was acclaimed in the UK, made Hitchcock a star in the US, and established the quintessential English "Hitchcock blonde" as the template for his succession of ice cold and elegant leading ladies. The 39 Steps was one of the first to exploit a “MacGuffin”.  In March 1939 David O Selznick signed 40 year old Hitchcock to a seven-year Hollywood contract. The first picture (his 29th) was to be Rebecca. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Hitchcock received his first nomination for Best Director. He was to receive 4 more nominations in his career without winning any.  

[inknscroll]

WASP pilot Margaret Phelan Taylor at the Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas on June 1944. *Article from: “WASP ON THE WEB,” published by “Wings Across America:”

“The daughter of Budd and Mary Phelan, Margaret was born in a pioneer log cabin on her parents’ farm outside Emmetsburg, Iowa on September 20, 1923. At a very early age, Margaret taught herself to read. When she had read all of the books on the children ’s shelf at the local public library, she talked her mother into surreptitiously checking out adult fiction for her.” —

“After graduating from St. Mary’s Academy in Emmetsburg in 1940, she attended Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, for two years, before going to Burbank, California to work as a draftsman for Vega Aircraft Corporation , a defense plant.” —

“Margaret learned to fly so that she could apply to join the women pilot training program. She applied after receiving her private pilot license and completing the required 35 hours. In 1943, following a personal interview and an Army physical, she was accepted into class 44-W-5, traveling to West Texas during one of the coldest winters on record, arriving at Avenger Field in mid December.” —

“After completing 7 months of AAF flight training, Margaret graduated and was sent to Stockton Air Force Base, California. She flew as an engineering text pilot, checking out overhauled twin-engine UC 78’s so that they passed inspections for the cadets to fly. She also ferried war weary planes to Texas and to the Arizona desert.” --- "The WASP were disbanded in December of 1944; and, in February of 1945, Margaret married Jim Taylor, an Army Air Corps pilot she had met at Stockton Field. Following the birth of their son, Clif, and daughter, Merridee, she returned to college, earning her B.A. degree in Education from San Francisco State College in 1954. She worked as an elementary school teacher following graduation." --- "In 1955 Margaret and Jim moved to Palo Alto, where she later worked at Stanford Bookstore. Margaret and Jim traveled extensively - visiting South America, Europe, Russia, Australia and the Far East. She and Jim celebrated fifty years of marriage in 1995. All the while Margaret continued to read voraciously, and was an accomplished cook, seamstress, & knitter as well. (Unfortunately,) Jim died in 2006. (Then, thankfully,) in 2010, Margaret, along with other members of the W.A.S.P., were invited to Washington, D.C. and (were) awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their service during WW2." --- "Margaret passed away on July 1, (2015)... She is survived by her children, Clif (& Jane) and Merridee Taylor, her ''darling '' grandsons Jamie (& Holley) and Daniel (& Lisa); her great granddaughter, Sophia Margaret; her sisters, Helen Augustine and Kay Pitcher; and various nieces and nephews." --- "Of all the passions Margaret displayed, none was more special than her gift for reading. She shared it with others all her life, and continues to inspire us all today. "My real specialty is reading. I have been a bookworm all my life, and I am still at it. Three of four books a week..." Her legacy of service lives on through her family and all of those lives (who) were touched by this special WASP." --- (Source's Info: Respectfully posted by Nancy Parrish from the official obituary - edited for the "Final Flight" pages with WASP information added for accuracy. *Quote from "Out of the Blue and Into History" in Margaret's own words (p. 392). Book edited by WASP Betty (Stagg) Turner.) (*My Source: From "WASP ON THE WEB," published by "Wings Across America." Via "WASP Final Flight" blog: http://waspfinalflight.blogspot.com/2015/07/margaret-phelan-taylor-44-w-5-july-1.html) --- (Photo Source: United States Army Air Force via ww2db.com) (My edits of paragraphs & words in parentheses) #books #memoirs #nonfiction #WomensHistoryMonth #ww2 #bookstagram #writersofinstagram #worldwar2 #American #history #1940s #writer #wwii #America #bookworm #vintage #WASP #veterans #supportourtroops #thankyouveterans #books📚