The Bakery

The Bakery Richard Nichols 4.26.11
Helms Bakery was a Southern California institution, recognized by many because of the bright distinctive yellow trucks that drove the neighborhoods every weekday, loaded with fresh pies, donuts and bread. On an elementary school field trip I visited the bakery, and along with thousands of other children over the years, we were fascinated to see where all the goodies came from.
Paul Helms founded the company in 1931, and it remained a family-run business until it closed in 1969, finally failing because of shopping malls, supermarkets and cheap bread. It had a loyal employee base who were paid union scale because the company wanted to keep the employees happy and union free. Many employees spent their entire working lives at the bakery.
My father, in his later working life, got a job at Helms as a janitor. He'd been an expert in the tire recapping business, but both age and a shrinking demand for recaps ended that.
In 1960 I graduated from high school and attended Cerritos Junior College that fall. Helms had a policy of hiring college students with a relative working at the bakery, to fill in for vacationing employees. In the summer of 1961 I had my first job.
I was hired for the shipping department night shift. We spent the evening filling orders down long rows of racks for the delivery truck drivers, or Helmsmen, as they were called. Bread, donuts, pies, cakes and other items went into metal stacking trays on rollers. During holidays such as Thanksgiving, it was not uncommon to fill one order for a hundred pumpkin pies. When the orders were filled late into the night, we rolled the racks through swing doors to the dock to load freight trucks, which then delivered to the drivers in outlying areas all over Southern California. By the end of the shift, the huge hardwood shipping floor the size of a football field, which had bustled with the activity of two shifts filling orders for hundreds of drivers, was now empty and swept, ready for the morning shift, consisting entirely of women.
I worked at the bakery off and on for the next 7 years, full time and part time. I was in and out of college, taking breaks, then returning, going to four colleges. During one semester I took a full load and worked full time, keeping myself going with the help of "bennies" or benzedrine.

Much of my real life education, and fun, happened from working at the bakery.
The men who worked the night shift had families. In those days a factory wage was enough to buy a house. I brought home about $120 a week, and had more than enough. This easygoing bunch could have some fun. One pastime, when the foreman Happy, and the supervisor, Bill McGee. weren't looking, was to wad up an entire loaf of white balloon bread into hard golfball size balls and have a doughball fight. With all the pies and cakes around, it was easy to gain weight, especially when fresh cream was brought in from the back. Cream and cherry pie was a favorite. One of the women said, "Richard, you are getting fat," and when I looked down at my stomach, much to my surprise, I found that she was right, I'd developed my first paunch.  After the shift ended at around midnight, some of use would go to the local bar for beer. One guy, Gary, got off earlier, and we often found him at the bar working on his twentieth (or more) beer. Somehow he always got home and was up the next morning for work, a working alcoholic. One guy worked all day doing yard maintenance, and then worked the night shift. I never understood when he slept. Another worker, fresh from Italy, was given a bad time because he ate so much garlic that he reeked of it. I liked him and tried to give him some cover, defending him against slurs. When I worked the late, late shift, getting off at three a.m., a group of us would have breakfast and hit the golf course at sunup. Nicknames were common. Larry was fine haired and balding, so he was labeled "onionhead."
I made friends with Ron Crozier, who ended up influencing my life more than anyone at that time. He was a graduate of LA State but was working full time at the bakery because he was supporting and taking care of his parents, who were both ill. Ron was four years older than my tender age of 20. Ron and I dated two women on the Day shift, Darlene and Virginia. Our dates consisted mostly of going to a bar to drink. A friend of mine David, met Virginia, and soon he asked me if he could date her because they had fallen in love. I gave my blessings.
  Ron introduced  me to marijuana and LSD (acid), jazz, and some kind of bohemian life. We spent many an evening passing around a joint of weak Mexican leaf, drinking beer and listening to Jazz. We also talked about what it was all about, about our angst, and about Buddhist philosophy. Sense of self and the ego seemed to be the main topics. Ron, more than anyone I ever met, could get under your skin and challenge your notions and ideas about life's meaning. The LSD sessions shattered our world view such as it was. The "doors of perception" were changed forever. Nothing is solid, and that is what we discovered as we melted into the rug or the chair. "E=mc squared" seemed real to us. Light became waves and patterns. In retrospect, the experiences were real, even if the conclusions were wrong or misguided.
I also met a young woman working the summer day shift in shipping. Carol was a very attractive woman with fine Italian features. I'd always been a little awkward and shy around women, but soon we were dating, and finally, at long last, I had sex for the first time. That first affair lasted for four months, but soon after her mother found out we were intimate, she kicked her out of the house, and then Carol kicked me out of her life. I never saw her again.