Got to get to my machine - it's waiting in Racine

Jeff DeMark and I were talking one time way back. About the assembly line. I remember him remembering. Saying "When you’re in the factory and start imagining what time it is - that it might be almost noon or it might be near 5, when you get off - and you wonder, but you are afraid to look at the clock, it was always up there on the wall. Afraid to look because it could be so disheartening if you looked up and would see you had another hour or worse - more - to work. Before the shift shut down. In Racine when we were growing up its was still very much a factory town. Modines, Twin Disc In-sink-erator, Johnsons, Case, Jacobsen's, many more.  The most ominous of all was the Bell City Foundry - which is sadly more or less the site of a barbed and onerours youth detention facility today. The factories varied but to different degrees they were dirty, hot, boring, dangerous. But if you needed money you could probably find work there. And money - especially money for a ticket out of town. Like Jeff DeMark says here “The paycheck was my only friend.” The machines were the punch press, the drop forge, the drill press, the assembly line, the oven, and on. Whatever it was it was your machine, dammit. There was the weekend yes. And You maybe go up to Milwaukee or Madison and have a great weekend - but it would come to an end. You put your long hair up underneath your Beatles wig to pass the muster - you have to get back to your machine, waiting in Racine. - Jack Vaughan

The following was recorded circa the mid to late 1970s. At the Creperie (?) on State St in Madison Wisconsin. Let by Jeff DeMark, it was a night of poetry and music billed as "The 39-cent Poetry Reading" (?) Muscians on the stage included Jeff, Dana Poissin, Charlie Deming, Jim Haas, Natawa and myself.