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This What Work Is? Ronnie Dee
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Copyright 2026 by Ronnie Dee |
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I find it hard to believe that I actually earned a living for forty some-odd years and bought houses and cars and was married and in love for forty three years, until my wife passed away, seeing as how juvenile I have felt my whole life.
I have never really felt very "grown up" or "adult" at any point of my life. I guess I have been more assertive and combative than I realized at times, but it just doesn't feel like it. I still feel like life is kind of silly in that we are probably the only, or one of the very few planets with intelligent life and we don't have any idea why or what to do with it.
People are struggling so hard to accomplish all of this stuff and then we die and it means nothing. I have never understood why people take everything so seriously. I have taken very few things seriously and have survived so far, albeit with help from some very kind people and a lot of luck.
My wife, Donna Sue, used to love the fact that I didn't fear or worry about anything. Which was pretty much true until I met her. Then things changed considerably. I had someone else to be concerned about and pleasing her and enjoying my life with her became my top priority.
I loved my life with her for fifty years and now I am back to just me again. I am much the better person than I was when I first met her, but I don't know how I did it.
My first paying job was a temporary thing for a few days. My uncle and my grandfather were architects who were working on the new Kentucky State Fairgrounds in1956.
I didn't want to ask either one of them to find me a job, I just decided to go on my own and see what was there. It was almost finished, but I went anyway and walked up to some guy who looked like he was a boss of some kind and asked him if any jobs were available.
He told me, "Go see that guy over there," and pointed to a man talking to a bunch of guys standing around.
So I asked him about a job and he put me to work with these other guys in the stadium. We were to dust the seats. They had just finished construction and the 20,000 seat stadium was covered in a thick layer of dust. We were given a handful of rags and told to dust off the seats. We were to knock the dust off of the seats and somebody else would follow later and vacuum the dust from the floor. Then another crew would come along and "fine dust" the seats. So I put a kerchief around my face and began whacking dust from the seats.
The next day I went back and we hit the 19,000 seat indoor arena, Freedom Hall, and did the same thing. Needless to say, I was covered in dust when the workday was done. That was the first and one of few actual "work" days in my life.
After that I got a job at Joe's Pharmacy for a few months and then the Courier-Journal.
I somehow avoided the daily rat race by working "off" hours most of my life and never experienced the "daily grind" that goes with a lot of jobs. I never had to punch a clock or meet a quota or any of that kind of stuff and I am thankful for that.
I can't believe that I wasn't fired for some of the stunts I pulled at the Courier-Journal, (known to some as The Curious-Journal) or Joe's for that matter, but I almost was one time. My boss called me to his office and told me he wanted me to look for another job.
He said, "I'll give you plenty of time to find another job, and I hope you find one where you can play more than you have to work."
Well, naturally I didn't look for another job. I buckled down and got serious for a couple of weeks until it all blew over and everything was fine. I knew he didn't really want to fire me. He would often threaten us, but he was an okay boss. Don rewarded him for quite a spell by placing a fresh piece of fruit on his desk every day, culminating with a pineapple. It was tough trying to ride herd on an office full of teenagers. On occasion he would call us to his desk in a group and give us Hell about something and we would stand around his desk looking at our feet. We knew that if we looked at one another, someone was bound to start giggling, thus starting a chain reaction. But the Courier-Journal was a good place to work under the Binghams and we always defended it against the naysayers.
In school I had to do everything they wanted me to do and not much that I wanted to do. I found school boring and dull. I could get A's any time I wanted, which wasn't often, except for one mistake. I was never big on math, but I got by in algebra. Other kids warned me, "Don't take geometry."
So, of course I took geometry. I paid no attention in the first week and as a result, I was lost. I dropped out at the half term with four other guys and took some sort of English class.
I didn't even like shop classes. I wanted to make golf clubs and swords and baseball bats and the teacher wanted me to make flower vases and lamps. My metal class instructor in the seventh grade finally had enough. He came over to me one day and said, "Ronald I've had enough of your foolishness. I will make you a deal."
He took a piece of string about three feet long and tied it to my belt. He took the other end and tied it to an anvil sitting on my work table and said, " If you can go to the end of the term without breaking this string I will pass you. You don't have to do anything more. Do you accept that?" The class laughed, and I told him that I would take up his offer. I did and he passed me. I considered that a pretty sweet deal.
Work was different. I had a lot more freedom than I had at school and more importantly, I got paid. It wasn't a lot, but it was more than I ever had before.
I first worked as the office boy in the Advertising Department on the second floor. That kept me pretty busy and I liked it. But I began to work more for the sales reps than I did the bosses and they didn't appreciate that.
One of my jobs was to go to the mailroom daily at about 4:00 and get a stack of the daily newspapers for the staff. At that time the paper put out The Courier-Journal in the morning and The Louisville Times in the afternoon. A few of the reps were hot on getting The Red Flash, which was the very latest edition of the paper and came with a red stripe down the edge. It was sold only on the street, but the guys would implore me to, "get me a Red Flash today".
I got fed up with this because The Red Flash was hard to come by inside the building. So one day I took a red marker and drew my own red line down the side of several papers and handed them out, much to the delight of my customers.
Their delight turned to anger shortly after, as the rest of the guys roared with laughter at their cohorts' distress when they discovered the ruse.
They could have fired me but instead, I was "moved" to the Dispatch Department on the fourth floor where I spent the majority of my career at the Courier. I went from Ad Dept. office boy to "the lowest form of human life," number seven boy in Dispatch. That was a favored expression, used often by the other guys in the office. I spent four months in that position before I was finally advanced to number six. At least I was now considered a member of the human race.
I was happier on the fourth floor because I was no longer the only teenager in the office.
Naturally, with a bunch of kids there, we had a lot of nicknames. There was: Turtle, Tiny, Palsy, Frenchy, Big Daddy, Junior and I'm sure some more I've forgotten. Big Daddy had a Maroon '47 Chevy coupe. One of those two seaters, so it was very short and thus appeared tall. He thought it was cool, so he was incensed when the stock room lady said to him one day, "Oh, you're the guy who owns that big, tall red car."
"Big tall red car, my ass," he fumed about that and he never forgave her for such a grievous insult.
But I literally couldn't help my high-jinx. It just was not in my nature to take many things in life seriously. I probably could have been much more "successful" in life if I had, but I am not complaining one bit about the way my life turned out.
On one occasion my foolishness earned my friend Eddie and me a mini vacation. It used to be that the ads were put together by pasting images on a background the size of a newspaper page. The type was also pasted down and then the whole thing was magically printed into an actual newspaper.
Eddie and I were goofing around, making up a fake grocery ad for some local store with yucky and ridiculous items for sale. We had things like; frozen toes, jars of muck, and candied liver, etc. We printed up the page and slipped it in with the actual proofs ready to be sent to the censor.
When he saw it, he knew it was a joke of course, but he brought it up to our boss. He thought it was funny too, but told us to cool it because it might reach somebody higher up without a sense of humor.
I don't know how, but the advertising man from Kroger got hold of a copy and our boss came to us one day and told us that we were relieved of all duties for several days in order to compose a fake ad for Kroger. We had a fun two days, giggling and fooling around while everybody else had to officially work.
There was one occasion where I really one-upped the big guys. My supervisor was on vacation and I had to make up the paper by myself. That meant I was the guy who said where the ads were to be placed in the paper. The Sunday Society section was printed early, on Thursday. There was a protocol to be followed and I did. Four of the big wigs didn't think I knew what I was doing, so they converged on my department and dismantled what I had done and tried to redo it themselves. The stores paid a premium for certain ad placements and the bosses obviously didn't know that and I wasn't going to volunteer any pertinent information.
They ignored my meager warnings and the following Monday, all Hell broke loose. Every department store in town was all over them and they were in a tizzy. I couldn't contain my glee. They didn't bother me any more about how to make up the paper.
Ad placement can be important sometimes. One edition had an ad for Arthur Murray Dance Studio right against an article about a dance floor collapsing with 2,000 people on it. The best one was when the Louisville Crematory ran an ad directly beside a Cunningham's Restaurant ad. That would usually be fine, but on this day, Cunningham's was featuring a "Hot Tom and Jerry." That got a lot of laughs. Barry Bingham, Jr. sent a note to the makeup guys (I was out of there by then) that read, "What are you guys, ghouls?" But that was just an unavoidable, one-in-a-million goof.
The worst was the day an article about Gov. Whitcomb of Indiana was referred to with an "S" where the "W" should have been down in the article. His camp did not believe it was an honest mistake. A busload of lawyers converged on the CJ that day. The culprit remains at large. (It was not me.)
The Composing Room had some real characters. That is where the Whitcomb incident occurred. A traditional job for deaf mutes used to be printing. I don't know why, but it just was. A lot of them worked in the Composing Room at the Courier-Journal, where the linotype machines were and where they physically put together the ads for the newspaper. They were pretty good guys and several of them had quite a sense of humor. One hefty fellow, Bob, would come into our adjoining office to get something for an ad he was "composing" and while waiting, he would sometimes pick up a telephone and yell out, "HELLO!" Anybody close to him would jump out of their chairs with alarm. I don't know if he knew how loud he was, but maybe he did because he would always get a big laugh out of it.
Some of the people up there called them "dummies" and that always offended me. My wife, Donna Sue, worked with several young women who were deaf mutes. She became especially close to one girl and took to learning sign language. She got to be very good at it and taught me some of it. I never felt confident enough to actually try it at work though. They have voices. They are mute because they have never heard speech, so they don't know how to use it. They are not stupid.
We used to send materials back to the composing room in these folders. They were about 10" tall and 14" long. The tops were open and each ad had an accompanying folder, So there were a lot of folders in use and they were reused many times. Any materials to be used in the ads were placed in the folder until they were put together. One of these guys, and I knew which one, seemed to get a kick out of the fact that I played the banjo and sang. He was always drawing "pictures" of me on the folders in some ridiculous fashion.
I say pictures of me. They were actually stick figures, with a banjo and long hair sticking out all over the place. it didn't take much of an imagination to figure who it was. Besides, he often wrote, "DEE," with an arrow pointed at the figure . He had me playing at the Super Bowl, for the Pope, on the Ed Sullivan Show, in Parades and many other venues. The folders were used over and over and some of them would end up a virtual ongoing comic strip.
This actually went on for years and my guys would often bring me a folder and ask, "Hey Ron, have you seen this one yet?" If I hadn't, I would draw something, or write some sort of a wisecrack on it and send it on. This went on for years.
When I saw him on the elevator or in the hall, he would gesticulate as if he were playing an instrument, and point excitedly at me. I would nod and he would grin from ear to ear. He was just having fun and I enjoyed it, too. I kind of missed it after I retired.