“Terminal A” was originally a one-shot story based on my time at the Post Office. But friends asked for more, so I will continue to add chapters from time to time
Chapter 1
At the age of 16 I got my first real job. I became a part-time mail handler at the Post Office Department, which in 1969 was not yet called Canada Post. I worked at Terminal A, a huge place attached to Union Station in downtown Toronto. My shift was 5 to 11 p.m., five days a week. My schooling suffered, but I’d lost interest in high school anyway. My mother agreed I’d might as well pick up some job skills so as not to end up as a hobo. I’d mowed lawns for the neighbours and clerked in a Mac’s Milk store, but this was the big time. A union job. Two dollars and five cents an hour.
I started work in May 1969. Two weeks later we went on strike. The strikes were rotating, announced only the day before, and designed to spread in waves starting from Toronto or Montreal so as to cause maximum inconvenience. We employees were told to phone in on Sunday to determine whether or not we’d be on strike on Monday. In the summer of 1969 I was spending my weekends in Jackson’s Point up on Lake Simcoe, so for several weeks I managed to grab an additional day to hang out on the sand chatting up the girls, cruise around in my ’56 Dodge, and scheme ways to buy a six-pack of Molson Canadian on Saturday night.
Union and management eventually settled late in the summer and my hourly pay went from $2.05 to $3.15, an unbelievable wage. I received $400 in back pay. Long weekends at Lake Simcoe were over, but by then it was nearly time to report back to Northern Secondary School to start Grade 11. I settled into a new routine. Each weeknight I’d grab a quick bite after school, then take the subway downtown to start work at five. I don’t remember when or if I did any homework.
Low-seniority mail handlers were sent nightly to various areas in Terminal A on an as-needed basis. But every night we started our shift down in the basement in Third Class Primary Sort, the Circulars Room. In the Circs Room bags of circulars, magazines and junk mail were dumped out onto a huge table, around which we stood and sorted.
The idea was to shuffle the circulars into trays two feet long, with all the addresses right side up and facing in the same direction. When your tray was full you put it into an eight-foot long plywood cart known as a coffin. You then took an empty tray and went back to the big table. When the coffin was full one of us took it upstairs. That man (and we were all men; there were no women handlers) was usually able to duck out for a quick smoke on the way back down to Circs.
There was no urgency in the handling of third class mail. Some nights there were half a dozen handlers working in Circs, other times there were thirty or more of us. Handlers, singly or in small groups, came and went all evening as directed by supervisors from various areas in the huge building that was Terminal A. We were the Post Office Department’s reserve army of labour.
If you were lucky you were pulled away to spend a few hours working upstairs in First Class, or maybe even Air Mail. Otherwise you stayed in Circs, filling up your tray, chatting about school, girls, horse-racing, whatever. Anything to pass the time.
One night my friend Garth left the Circs Room for good and was assigned to work in the Bag Room on the second floor. In Bags a conveyor belt dumped out empty mail bags from all over Terminal A. These were inspected, sorted and stacked by Garth and his two colleagues onto large four-wheeled vehicles known as wagons. Full wagons were hauled away by a tractor, hitched together in a train. Bags was much better work than Circs, mainly because there was a beginning and an end to the process. Circs was an awful, endless assembly line. In Bags Garth’s group started their shift with five empty wagons and a pile of unsorted canvas, and finished up at 11 p.m. with five neat loads of bags, ready to go back into the system. Garth was now doing interesting, meaningful work.
A few months later my turn came and I was assigned to Air Mail, the top of the heap for a mail handler. The only rung above Air Mail was the closed door mystery of Registered Mail. Registered was the Area 51 of Terminal A. We knew that handlers worked in there but we never saw them. Cash and negotiable instruments were sent by registered mail, so security was tight. Maybe they all carried guns in there, who knows? No one I spoke to had ever been inside Registered.
Air Mail was a good gig. Two handlers worked with five clerks to place pre-sorted bundles of mail into bright blue, lightweight mail bags destined for specific airports. Our work was tied to outgoing flights at Pearson Airport so there was a strict timeline and we all worked together to be done by 10 p.m. The clerks stood around coffins full of air mail in the centre of a circle of racked mail bags. They threw the mail at the blue bags like basketball players. The two handlers, Rick and I, picked up the odd missed throw but there were few of those. The clerks were good. When a bag was full we removed it from the rack and towed it over to a scale where a clerk weighed it and filled out a card on a length of twine. The handler was then entrusted the job of wrapping the twine around the neck of the bag, slipping a lead seal onto the two loose ends, and crushing the lead tight with a special tool.
In Air Mail I absorbed my first real work lessons. I learned about the comforts of work comradeship, about the satisfaction of seeing a job through from beginning to end, about teamwork and joint endeavour. The evenings flew by.
The experience was only to last about six months, however. Back in Circs one evening, a copy of Life magazine came my way. There was a suntanned girl on the cover and I still remember the words: “California Girls Spangle the Beaches.” So, in the summer of 1970 Garth and I quit the Post Office to go out to California. In 1970 it seemed everyone under twenty-five was on the road. We were all young, carefree and ready for new adventures.
On The Beach 