As a teenager & into my undergraduate years I worked summers & part time in machine shops & a brewery. Stories of what I experienced & learned along the way have been related by me on the Antique Board. Since the subject of German immigrant toolmakers is raised here, I'll relate a few tales of my own.
At the age of 14 I was attending Brooklyn Technical High School. I had always had an interest in machinery, wanting to be a machinist as well as a mechanical engineer. After my first machine shop courses, I thought I knew somethng & wanted to work in a machine shop that summer. You had to be 18 years old. It was before phot ID, so I used India ink & the photcopier at the public library to fix my birth certificate. I went to Long Island City, Queens. There were plenty of shops. No one wanted a skinny kid. I walked miles, finally found this one machine shop in an odd location. I looked in the door & saw this oldtimer with wild white hair, beard stubble & a toolmakers apron on. He was using a Rockwell hardness tester & caught my eye. "Was willst du hier haben, junge ?" (what do you want here, young fellow ?) he hollerd. Knowing Yiddish from home (a kind of German based dialect), I understood, so hollered back: "Arbeit" (work). "Kommen Sie herein, Junge". I came in, the man looked me up & down & said "Morgen, sieben uhr". That was it- be there the next morning at 7. No idea of each other's names or anything else.
I started in that machine shop & was put to jobs like deburring thousands of bushings with a little 3-corner scraper. I learned to use the 3-corner scraper, so they put me on a gang drill with a jig, a box of parts & some small diameter bits. Then, they put me on a B & S Hand screw machine. I leanred to do simple setups. Jobs that were repetitive, boring yet took some skill seemed the norm. The foreman rang a bell in the morning to turn on the power to the lineshafting, blew an air whistle to end work & rang a gong to resume work. Morning had a coffee break & afternoon we each got a quart of beer.
After some time, I had picked up a fair amount of German, building off Yiddish I knew. The shop steward came over to me and asked me what part of Germany my people were from. No one could figure my accent. The steward was a kindly man, so told him the truth. No German ancestry, as a Jewish kid I knew some Yiddish. The steward laughed & hugged me, saying: "Du hast gut gemacht, Junge". I never heard another word about how I came to speaking German, kept learning & drinking beer with the older machinists.
One day, the following summer, I got sick of the BS jobs, wanting to work on an engine lathe. I asked the foreman. He glared with eyes like an oxyacetylene cutting torch. I may as well have asked to sleep with his daughter. He made remarks about Brooklyn tech boys thinkng they knew machne shop work, hollered to get back to work. Next morning, the foreman took me to the stock rack, telling me to cut off a piece of round cast iron bar with a hand hacksaw. I cut partway thru & when he was not looking, popped it off with a chisel.
The foreman took me to a bench. There were a few files, a hammer, cape chisel, combination square & vernier caliper. He told me he wanted me to make a cube, "zwo bis zwo bis zwo, ganz genau, ganz glatt und treu" ( 2 x 2 x 2, totally accurate, flat and true).
I chipped one face off roughly flat & filed it in. I worked at my cube, chipping & filing. The foreman kept popping up , calling me "Herr Meister" (master machinist) in a scornful way, wanting to know why I wasn;t done. Some few days later, I had my cube. I am guessing it was with about 0.005" , good for square , as flat as I could tell with the square blade. The foreman checked it on a surface plate with bluing, then put the mike to it. He made faces & muttered "Dass ist aber schlimm" (that is bad). He put the cube into his wood chest & found work for me to finish the day with.
Next morning, he took me to an old lineshaft driven engine lathe. A casting sat on a warehouse truck. He handed me the drawing & told me if I messed up that casting, he would break my a--, kick it up and down the street & see to it I never worked in a machine shop again. It was a faceplace setup job. The foreman made remarks about Brooklyn Tech boys using 3 jaw chucks & round stock. I got to work, using a chainfall & blocking to get the casting onto the lathe bed.
The shop steward & some of the other machinists did come round to help me get started. I machined the casting, having to break the setup and re-dog it in the process. It had ID's, OD's, depth & shoulder dimensions to machine. The foreman kept hollering at me , wanting to know why a "meister" like me was not done.
The casting was machned & the foreman & outside inspector came round to check it. They passed the job. The foreman & steward saw me the next day, shook my hand & told me I was moved up to starting journeyman's pay.
I worked on different jobs after that, often with old immigrant machinists. The foreman used to hand me his "Tabellenbuch fur das Metallgewerbe" (a machine shop handbook) he used as an apprentice in Germany in the 20's. Another guy would loan me his "Machinery's handbook". They'd hand me a drawing and a pad of paper. I'd sit at the bench figuring out coordinate dimensions from angular dimensions, figuring thread depths , gear data & fits. No calculators in those days, a slide rule, logarithms or longhand figuring depending on how close the numbers had to be.
I learned from those oldtimers. I went on to work in other shops & as an undergraduate, worked in the old Rehingold Brewery in Brooklyn, in the engineering department. The brewery may as well have been the Kaiser's Navy, afloat in Brooklyn in 1970. I got a good grounding in a lot of shop skills & much more.
I had been born with a disability (likely in the autistic spectrum) plus motor skill delays. The system didn;t do anything for kids with disabilities like mine back then. Bench work, filing & applying the mathematics to shopwork were some of the best therapy. I saw my hands begin to do what I wanted in a precise way, and then it became automatic. An acid test came as a machinist at a cancer research hospital in my junior year or college. I had to drill a small hole down the center of a piece of 1/16" diameter bronze rod, hiolding the drill in a "pin vise" in my fingers with the work in the collet of a small bench lathe. I then had to fit & solder a loop of 0.003" diameter music wire into the hole in the end of the rod to make surgical snares. I ruined alot of material & was going to be fired. Toolmakers tried to teach me how to feel & feed the small drill bit, how to fit & solder the music wire. After 3 days of frustration, my fine motor skills kicked in & my hands seemed to take on a life of their own. The toolmakers and foreman took me uop the street for beer after work & were genuinely happy for me.
OTOH, Mike Korol, the senior erector for Skinner Engine had a different story. Mike was born in New York City of Polish immigrant parents in 1917. His dad paid a German immigrant shop owner to get Mike started as an apprentice machinist in 1935 in NY City. The Germans int hat shop were quite sympatehtic to the Nazi government's policies in Germany. They rode Mike all over the shop about his being Polish, starting him at cleanign the toilets & sweeping the shop. Mike worked up, knowing he had to be the best and not give anyone cause to find fault with him. He said one of the worst days of his life in that shop was the day Hitler's armies invaded Poland. Mike bit his tongue & became a journeyman machinist & moved on, working at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard as a heavy machinist. He was there on 7th of December, 1941. Mike worked many years as a marine engineer, machinist & steam engine erector. He told me he learned the machinist trade, got a great education & learned the work ethic from those Germans. Beyond that, he said they were thrifty to a fault, hardnosed, bigotted & took little else from the experience.
I've got the first good micrometer I ever owned yet in my chest. The name of a toolmaker from the old Schrader plant in Brooklyn is engraved on the frame. I got the mike from a toolmaker named Heinz. Heinz took me under his wing one summer. Heinz was an immigrant German toolmaker trained at Deutsche Waffen und Munition Fabrik in the 1930's. Heinz took time to teach me & never came down on me like some of the other oldtimers. Heinz laughed at my making a cube , saying as apprentice, he had to file what amounted to a punch & die set with hex, triangle & square male/female parts. The test was how they fit together.
Knowing I needed a good mike, Heinz took a 1" mike out of his chest & sold it to me for a very few dollars. It was his first good mike when he started in the USA in Schrader's toolroom. He bought it from a guy who was retiring. We'd sit outside, eat our lunch & drink our beer. Heinz had lived through the 20's, 30's & WWII & it had quite an effect on him. He looked out for me & used to tell me all kinds of stuff, but mainly encouraged me, telling me to be an engineer, telling me I did not realize the great life I had & not to waste it. I have that mike some 40 years later & while Heinz's name is not on it, it his name & his hand on my shoulder that I recall when I hold that mike.
Maybe a different crowd of German immigrants and the passage of a decade mellowed things out for me when I came into the shops. They were tough on a kid, but I suppose within reasonable bounds. It made something of a machinist out of me & I took that with me as I became a mechanical engineer, combining the two in my career. I even took the "Bauerndeutsch" (farmer's German) I learned as a kid in the shops & used that on erecting jobs overseas. It's been a good run of 37 years so far & a great life. I think the oldtimers would be proud of me, but they are long gone.
