Timex summer

LITTLE ROCK — Like many e-mails, the one below arrived from out of the blue.

The question asked in it by Mack Hicks of Cabot sent me digging through memories buried beneath layers of living over more than four decades. I suspect many of you can relate.

“Mike,” the e-mail said, “about 40 years ago I used to work with a Mike Masterson at Timex in Little Rock. We were inspectors working for Harold Wolverton. You look a lot like him. Are you the same person? This guy was one of the funnest people I’ve ever known. You would have known me as Junior Hicks.”

Hmm. Me, fun? Junior Hicks? Timex?

Suddenly, my mind was dredging up fuzzy memories stretching back to the summer of 1968. I was 20, full of energy and hope, and about 80 pounds lighter. A journalism career wasn’t even on my radar.

I could vaguely recall Junior Hicks as a name from my past, but no face came to mind, even though I strained to see one. I remembered working in an incredibly loud, hot and sweaty factory room that summer. Not even massive fans could cool the space to 90 degrees in what was known as the “press room.”

I recalled making constant rounds among the clattering machines that were continually stamping out watch casings, and seeing all the women with their sack lunches who sat for hours on end, concentrating with intent faces on the parts they were rapidly moving through shrieking metal beasts that reeked of oil.

It was the kind of place where a single serving of gruel might have been offered for lunch.

Some ladies were missing parts of fingers, a permanent reminder of a momentary distraction. There was no mercy for even one split-second of carelessness. The mean machines were relentlessly objective and cared less what or who they separated.

I clearly remembered the screams of a poor worker who got her hand caught in a machine one afternoon. They quickly bundled her mangled hand in a white towel quickly turning crimson and rushed her to the hospital.

Work in the press room never missed a beat that day because these ladies were valued by how many pieces they punched out. I gathered up the parts they cut to measure the tolerances. They had to be exquisitely precise.

The job was good for me in many ways. I witnessed, and could feel up close, what all those people knew as their daily lives as well as their futures, which seemed so sadly repetitive and mundane. The perspectives I gained just out of my teen years at that almost medieval factory laid a groundwork for future understanding in my life.

I recollect being mighty pleased to leave that job at summer’s end and return to class at State College of Arkansas, now the University of Central Arkansas, where I could carve out a more promising future far from the ear-piercing sounds, the unbearable heat and those oily machines.

My clearest remembrances are of those Arkansas mothers and women who knew little else but mastering those jobs they had to have.

I asked Hicks, now 65 and a private investigator who owns Southern Investigations Unlimited, what he could recall.

“I started to work there in 1966 and worked into 1969,” he replied. “I married one of those [Timex] women, Jan.We are still together after 43 years and have had three children, five grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

“You asked what I remember. It was hot and nasty back there where we worked. Were you there when the explosion occurred just down the hallway from our work station?

“I was standing at the work station checking case backs and had several in my hand. When the explosion occurred I jumped about a foot off the floor. The

case backs flew every where.”

I hadn’t been there for the explosion, but wasn’t surprised.

“Do you remember John Scarborough?” he continued. “He worked with us and left to become a state trooper. You probably remember he was killed while on duty a few years ago just south of Little Rock on I-30 when a guy driving a tractor-trailer hit him when he had someone pulled over.”

I couldn’t put a face with Scarborough’s name, either, but I did his recall his name.

Most of us have a lot of Mack Hickses in our lives. I believe it often takes people like them to go out of their way in the crush of their own daily lives to help us reconnect our current realties with our mutual pasts.

Hicks’ e-mail reminds me that the experiences in all of my life’s long published chapters have led to where I find myself sitting in reverie today. The Timex summer wasn’t a hallucination or a dream. We actually shared that reality almost 43 years ago.

Thanks, Junior, for taking your time and effort, which triggered those reflections. They came at a good time in my life.

Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.