The Forgotten Glasses




Gene Treanor

 
© Copyright 2025 by Gene Treanor



 Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

My apprenticeship in cabinet making had included a fair few hours of learning the finishing side of the trade. Using and learning about stains, grain filler, linseed oil, shellac, and spraying lacquer were all part of my work week.

After working in a small country workshop for several years, I landed a position in a larger shop in Cambridge, not as a cabinetmaker as I had hoped, but as a finisher of the work of the other, more experienced, men in the shop.

The finishing room was a large area set aside for holding the furniture as the pieces went through the various processes to completion. The room had all the requisite equipment for the job including a large pair of swinging doors which allowed the easy entry of pieces to be finished but closed quickly to keep out the dust generated from the cutting and sanding of the timber which was being turned from planks into cabinets, tables, chairs, and wall panelling in the wood shop part of the building.

One of the company's main products was architectural panelling, and fittings for doctors, lawyers and corporate offices and those who wanted to show their clients that a consultation in an office with mahogany raised panels surrounded with deep rich mouldings, and fitted with glass fronted solid timber book cases was worth every cent of their fees.

One morning John Paulaskas, one of the cabinetmakers, came into the finishing room to ask for my help. He came through the swinging doors, carrying a drawing and walked over to the bench where I was preparing materials for the day’s work, which happened to be finishing one of John’s beautifully-made bureaus. .

“Gene, can ye give me a bit of help with this drawing? I’ve forgotten my reading glasses and canna make oot some of the notes the boss has put on it.” John had a very pronounced Scots burr to his speech, despite having an obviously unScottish last name. I later learned it was Lithuanian.

Over the next few days on this job, and later when John started a new project, he regularly “forgot” his reading glasses and asked my assistance. The reason behind his forgetfulness has quite a story behind it

(A bit of background: one in four Lithuanians emigrated from their homeland between 1870 and the First World War. Most went to the United States, but by 1914 there were about 7,000 of them in Scotland. Poverty and brutal repression by Russia after the failed Polish-Lithuanian uprising of 1863 drove many to immigrate. Aggressive ‘Russification’; meant that public use of the Lithuanian language was forbidden; there was anti-Catholic discrimination by the Orthodox Church, and in some areas of Lithuania, repopulation by ethnic Russians. . If this sounds familiar, you have only to look at what’s happening in parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine today.) .

I began to wonder about the forgotten glasses. I didn’t want to pry—this man was, after all, my father’s age, and I hesitated to offend him. After the third or fourth episode of the forgotten reading glasses I said, “er, John…seems like those glasses are lost most of the time.”

He made a sort of growly noise, lowered his eyebrows, and then said, “Gene, ta tell ye the truth, I dinna have any reading glasses. I canna read.”

Over the next few weeks I learned the story of John’s life and why he never learned to read.

“There was a lot of us in the hoose, and not much to go around, so I went doon the mains like my father before me. I must have been 11 or 12—in those days if ye were big, ye could pass for older.”

“The ‘mains’, John? What was that?”

“Ye know, them holes in the ground where the coal comes out of. The mains.”

Ah, the mines! John went down underground as a boy to dig coal—at age 11 or 12! Even in the 1960s this was hard to believe, but it had been common when John was a lad in the early 1900s.

“I hadn’t had much schooling before then, and for sure I got none after,” John said. “But ye didn’t need to read doon there—know your numbers, 1 to 9, that was easy enough, sign your name, that was a aboot all ye needed.”

“It must have been hard work for a half-grown boy,” I said.

“It wasna the wurrrk, it was the thievin’ that was hard to take,” John said. “We were issued ten brass tokens every morning before goin’ doon. The tokens had our personal numbers. We’d dig oot a bucket of coal and hang a token on it. The buckets were tallied at day’s end and that’s what your pay was based on.”

John’s face clouded over. It was about morning break time, so we stepped out on the loading dock and he brought out a package of Camels. After a couple of deep drags, he said, “The first day my count was short, but I figured, mistakes happen, I’m the new boy, keep my mouth shut. Then a few days later, short again. I know I dug ten buckets and sent up ten tokens—but I only got credit for seven. When I mentioned it to the tallyman he told me I must have miscounted. Or mebbe lost a token or two.” Puff, puff.

I could see his mind travel back to that grim place forty or more years ago. “Next week I sent up ten and got credit for eight, and when I questioned it, he said, ‘Ye didna take all yer tokens, ye daftie—look there!’ And on my hook were two tokens. Tokens I know I took doon with me.”

“But you were the new kid, so…? “

“So I asked my Da about it. And he explained the facts o’life to me. New boys, young miners, they often came up short. Just how things went. A day I was short, one of the older men would be over. Amazin’ how an auld bugger, a friend of the tallyman, could dig 12 buckets to my eight, eh?” He ground out his cigarette and carefully put it in the bin and scuffed the ash off the concrete floor.

“So what did you do?”

“I fell into some luck. A few months after I went doon the mains a friend of my father told me about an apprenticeship. I went there, got the work, learned to be a cabinetmaker, went to England, then came here to America. All these years, the reading didn’t matter—until this new boss. He’s aye fond of writing stuff on the drawings isn’t he?”

The bell rang for the end of morning break. We went back to the workshop and I carried on with my finishing of John’s beautiful bureau. A few weeks later, I, too, ‘fell into some luck’ and found a new position as a full-fledged cabinetmaker.

I never saw John again—but I hope the new lad in the finishing room continued to stand in for the lost reading glasses. 


Gene Treanor learned all the old skills of woodworking in the 1960s, but then stepped back a century or two to build harpsichords until returning to the 20th century to do model-making in the days before AutoCad.   He spent many years as the resident wizard at a science discovery centre, turning science theory into interesting and interactive exhibitions. He is now working for himself, using the beautiful and exotic timbers of Tasmania, his adopted homeland.   While waiting for glue to set, he has been known to write an essay, or the occasional satirical poem.


Gene is strangely modest about his writing skills, he tells his wife Karen“You’re the writer in the family.” As if there’s only room for one.  He’s written some excellent thought pieces and several amusing and close-to-the-bone satirical verses.  This story is as he wrote it.  Karen's part was typing the dialogue as he recounted it, inserting punctuation and asking for clarification in a couple of spots. 


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