One day when I was maybe 10 years old...
I came home from school, and saw that my father's dump truck was backed up to the opened garage door, at the rear of the driveway. I heard my dad unloading something off the truck and into the garage. Repetitively. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
I didn't know what he was unloading, but he was out there for a few hours. I eventually went out back there to check out what he was doing. The entire garage, front to back, floor to ceiling, was filled with identical parts. They were packed into the garage like sardines in a can, so tightly that you probably could not fit a piece of paper in there, let alone a vehicle.
I asked "What are those"?
"Old telephone parts".
"What are you going to do with them"?
"I'M not going to do anything with them. But WE are going to do something with them".
Now, to this day, I'm not sure exactly what those parts were, or where the hell he got them, but I'll try to explain.
These parts had many sub-components. One of these sub-components contained clustered strips of a soft metal, silver in color. I'm thinking as I type this that those strips were probably made of aluminum.
Attached to the front of our house, my dad had built a big addition, that was used as a sole-proprietor delicatessen that was mainly run by my mother. It was a pretty popular place, and the business did well. My mother would run the place during the day, and it would close relatively early, maybe 5:00 or 6:00 PM. My dad had rigged up so many florescent ceiling lights in there that to my young eyes, it looked as bright as the sun inside that little business. That place made me feel safe.
My dad typically worked from sunrise to dawn. He demolished buildings by hand. That was a thing back then. He would bid maybe $800 to demolish a home or business, get paid the $800, and then keep all of the lumber to either sell or use. But that's a whole 'nother story in itself.
He would come home filthy and dead-tired every day, eat dinner, and then start on some other money making venture until about midnight. Rinse and repeat. Every day, 6 or 7 days a week.
Back to the telephone parts...
He grabbed one of the parts, took my hand, and said "come with me".
We went into the delicatessen. It was night time, so it was closed, but those bright fluorescent lights were still on. There was an area in there, behind a counter, where he had set up a little, narrow workshop. In that area was a manual guillotine metal shear. Think of one of those paper cutters that has a long-handled blade on it where you place one or more pieces of paper down on the attached flat surface, and then use your hand to lower the blade to cut the paper. Only this thing was made to cut metal.
We went into the work area, and he carefully explained: See these clusters of little metal strips? Yes, I see them. See that little dot at the end of each strip? Yeah, I see it. That little dot is gold. I need you to take apart each cluster of of these strips. Then, I need you to lay each individual strip down on this cutter here, side-by-side, until you can't fit anymore on there. After you do that, take your hand out of the way, and say "ready". Then, I will lower the blade on the cutter to cut the very tip of the strips off. Then, I'll brush the cut tips of the strips into a bucket, and you do the same thing again, over and over. Do you think you can do that? Yes, I can do that.
So that's what we did. For months and months. Every night. He'd be so dirty and dusty from working all day that his face was black.
The strips were about two inches long. After they were cut, there was still some of the aluminum left, but the strip was now only about 1/8 of an inch long, with a miniscule drop of gold on it. That little drop of gold was maybe the size of a pinhead.
The clusters were hard to take apart. My dad helped me take them apart as well, and we both got blisters from doing it repetitively. You almost had to do it gloveless, because it was intricate work, and all we had were those bulky work gloves.
We'd get a bucketful of the cut strips after about a week of working every night. On Saturday, we'd get in the dump truck and drive them to the scrap yard about 7 miles away. Harvey was the owner of the yard. My dad would give him the bucket. Harvey only had to weigh the bucket the first time to get just the tare weight of the bucket. Harvey would weigh the bucket full of these little nubby cut off strips, subtract the tare weight of the bucket, and then use some factor to subtract the weight of the remaining aluminum on the strip to approximate the weight of the actual gold. If memory serves, we got about $100 a week from each bucket, which was good money back then in the late 60s for a supplemental job.
I did my homework before my dad got home. Then, every night, under those fluorescent lights in the deli, with my dad whistling the same tune. Every night, the same tune. All night until bedtime. I don't know what song it was, but it was pretty, and I remember it to this day, and I'm humming it as I type this out.
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