Singing Out In The Street

[ChicoHarris]

Graduated high school and the Marines turned me down so I signed up for a four-year hitch on a warehouse dock. Started working there 30 years ago today.

Five days a week and on the dock I used to sing whatever was in my head (and I can't sing). This one older black guy (he was at least 35...) named Charles Berry (I called him Chuck Berry) used to shake his head and say, "You one crazy white boy..."

Five weeks after I started on the dock, The River was released and over the next almost-four years, I probably sang these lines over a thousand times:

"I work five days a week girl
Loading crates down on the dock"

I stopped working there July 28, 1984. This performance of "Out In The Street" is July 28th, 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmDlcKXJa4Q




A wrong.
The Daily Mississippian June 18, 1989

IT WAS THE NEWS that Malone and Hyde Wholesale Grocery Company is closing that prompted me to go over to Tupelo last week and pay a visit. I spent four years on the dock of the cavernous warehouse before the four I invested in Ole Miss. I learned more about what it takes to live in this world in that old red brick building than I ever could in all the journalism, political science, history and other assorted classes the Lyceum deemed necessary. I learned how important our physical laborers are, not only to America but also to the rest of the world. I learned to respect the men who sweated through searing summers and shivered through arctic winters in order to draw a paycheck and support their families. I learned about the infectious camaraderie that grows between men working a sixty-hour week of muscle-numbing honest labor.

Everything was pretty much the same except for one glaring difference.

Lawrence Edwards, a supervisor, was no longer part of the crew. We all called him Mister Ed. Everyone wanted to work for him because he was a genuinely good person and it showed in the way he ran his end of the dock. You still worked when Mister Ed was your boss, but somehow the nights were not as long and the hundred-pound sacks of potatoes felt like only eighty, at the most.

Mister Ed was the type of person who would smile and speak to you after a 15-hour night of physical and mental strain. He would praise you behind your back and would never ever speak badly of anyone. If he possibly could, he would make your job easier.

If he had a truck trailer that was a 110 degrees inside and needed me to pack it with 60-pound bales of flour, I would try to talk him into finding me something to do along the lines of riding around deep in the warehouse on a fork lift. This dock labor was a man's job, and he tried to make it easier on 19-year-old punks. You didn't mind sweating for him because you knew he would go to bat for you when the time came.

The day after John Lennon was murdered, Mr. Ed asked me, “Reckon what makes somebody want to do something like that? Sometimes I don’t understand this world. That fella was just going home and got shot and killed. I been staying up to watch it on TV.” I’ve never forgotten that, because I knew Mister Ed had no special affinity for the Beatle, but did know the difference between right and wrong.

On that dock in an industrial section of Tupelo, Mississippi in the early 1980s, Mister Ed was not judged by the color of the skin that stretched across his bulging muscles. He was seen only as a good, honest man. He was the type of supervisor who would ask about your family while he helped you do your work.

Just before I quit Malone & Hyde, Mister Ed was hospitalized for exhaustion. The general consensus was that after 20 years of working all night and part of the day, he was overdue a long rest.

The doctors said it was cancer. Mister Ed went under the knife and returned to the dock. The strenuous nights took their toll and in 1987 the doctors said they couldn't get it all. It was time to go home for good.

I went to visit Mister Ed at his home. The muscles, once tight, were relaxed. His gait had slowed; he bore the scars of operations undergone in the will to live. The smile, wide and sincere, was still there. He told me about his dizzy spells, his ever-present fatigue, and how rough the chemotherapy treatments were. He told me how much he missed Malone & Hyde, being with the men, working for a living. He told me of the loneliness of each day, with family working and children in college, with no choice but to leave him at home with one of God's greatest tests.

"Chico, my chances are slim," he said. We were watching the Lakers and Pistons play basketball, but I had no idea who was winning. All of my thoughts went out to Mister Ed and his family. It’s useless to try and figure these things out, because it isn’t possible. It defies everything that should be.

[The Black Canary]

Beautiful, the world needs more Mr. Eds in it, on it!!!!