Sheehy at the Universal Cast Iron Manufacturing Company

 Sheehy at the Universal Cast Iron Manufacturing Company

    Looking back at growing up in the Gate there were rites of manhood that had to be accomplished by boys and often they were very unpleasant. I am not talking about smoking cigarettes, drinking or looking at cheesecake photos. These were jobs arranged by our fathers with the intent to "make a man  out of him." I was always a little allergic to hard, physical labor and sometimes felt guilty about my cakey paid gigs. The Knowltons worked at a factory called Preco, my brother endured a construction job as a young teen and Greg took on a challenging Summer job at Universal Cast Iron Manufacturing at 9430 Rayo not far from Tweedy school.  Greg toiled in the part of the business called Univco where cast iron fittings were stored and shipped. The place was founded by Zalick Familian back in 1946 and handed over to the nose to the grindstone Al Familian during the time Greg worked in the yard. Greg had no choice in the matter and showed up early and began the exhausting tasks of placing heavy crates of iron parts onto a dolly and moving them into place for truck drivers to drive them off to customers. Being new, the kid was not adept at navigating and in his first week he tilted a heavy load and it fell back, pinning him to more crates, compressing his ribs and knocking the wind out of him forcefully. In telling the story he would supply the painful grunt he had to keep to himself on that day. The rest of the week he had to bear the tender bruised ribs that made breathing a rough process. As the hard weeks went by he progressed to driving a fork-lift which made the job more rewarding despite the humorless atttitude of Al Familian, a bachelor who cared only  about his balance sheet and hired only poor Mexicans and youngsters like our man Sheehy. Greg eventually made friends and picked up some Spanish, enough to be able to curse and tell dirty jokes to his co-workers like Luis Ramos..."un chico que tiene un gran verga." Greg finished the Summer and returned to school, then managed to get employment the next year with the Parks and Recreation department as a landscaper that also gave work to Bobcat and Timo at other times. Being that local boys were literatlly surrounded by huge factories and very close to Vernon the natural place to get teenage work would have been in factories. However, in most of these businesses they wanted full-time men and not flighty teenagers who would rather be cruising Tweedy than hauling cast iron parts. I lasted one day in my factory job and almost left at lunch.