Saturday, June 6, 2020

On The Road In The 1970's--Part 44

The other guest from the UM&M Homestead branch office where my father worked in Indianapolis, when my family lived there, who came over by himself for dinner, was the sales manager and executive who headed UM &M's branch office in Indianapolis; whose last name was Crater.

Crater was a white, well-dressed, crew-cutted guy, who appeared to be in his mid-to-late 40's; and who was an ex-Marine who seemed proud to be an ex-Marine. He seemed like someone who probably had voted for the Republican candidate Eisenhower in the 1952 and 1956 U.S. presidential elections, rather than for the liberal Democratic presidential candidate Stevenson, like both my parents had done in 1952 and 1956.

My recollection now is that Crater was married and had children. But I think the reason he didn't bring his wife along, during the weekday evening he came for dinner with my parents and me, was that his wife and kids still lived in another U.S. city; because he and his wife had apparently not yet found a buyer for the house in which his wife and kids were still living in. And only after that house was sold would Crater then be able to purchase a new house in Indianapolis at which he could move his wife and children to there live with him in Indianapolis. In the meantime, when Crater was not on the road making sales calls, he just housed himself, at company expense, in some motel in Indianapolis.

Although Goldberg and Crater each spent a lot of time selling drapes and textile material for clothes and piece goods to department stores and small merchants around the Midwest, Crater, unlike Goldberg, was not of Jewish religious background. And perhaps for that reason, Crater didn't seem to feel that the Midwest was as "strange" a "territory" to be a salesman in as Goldberg apparently did.

About the only other thing I now remember about Crater (who, when not on the road selling, was the person in the UM&M  Homestead office who supervised my father at work) is that my father once mentioned that Crater was the kind of guy who, in the early 1960's, would still wake up early to do push-ups each morning before heading off to work--despite apparently being in his mid-to-late 40's.

Other than Goldberg and Crater, the only other person I can remember meeting once who also worked at the office in Indianapolis where my father worked, was a white man named Kelly, who was the office manager that supervised the small number of typists who also worked in this office.

Kelly seemed to be in his early 30's. My father felt he was a friendlier person than was Crater and "a very decent chap." Kelly and his wife of about the same age, Kay, never visited the house my family rented in Indianapolis, for dinner. But one Saturday or Sunday evening, my parents and I visited Kelly and Kay for dinner at the small house in another neighborhood in Indianapolis in which they lived, alone with their child, who was less than 4 years-old at that time.

Kay and my mother seemed to enjoy chatting with each other, despite being of different religious backgrounds. But probably because Kay (who, like her husband, was of Catholic religious background) was saddled with the heavy responsibility of having to spend all her time at home caring for her child alone during the day, she probably felt she lacked enough spare time during the week to spend chatting again with my mother; and her weekly evenings and weekends were the only time that she had for being with her husband.  And because my father and Kelly saw enough of each other five days of the week at work, they likely felt, especially given the likely 15 years or more age difference between them, no special desire to pal around together on weekends, rather than each just spend their weekend time with their nuclear family.

Aside from seeing Kelly and his wife at their small house that one time, I think the only time I likely saw them again was at some kind of late spring or early summer Sunday afternoon office picnic later in 1963. And the only thing I can remember now from that picnic is that I was surprised that one of the young white woman office secretaries, who appeared to be in her mid-twenties, seemed at the picnic to be more skillful at throwing a softball around than were most other U.S. women of her age in the 1960's then were.