I was 13 years old in 1958. I had a job working for Rene Comeau Trucking. In Adams we pronounced the French name "Rainey," but thinking back 60 years, properly he should have been called Renee as in “Don’t walk away Renee.” But his nickname was Smokey.
There were Comeaus forced out of Acadia by an English general whose house still stands in Marshfield from 1699. Adams was a manly town and you would not call a man a girl's name. You also would never wear a tie into Chick's Café. Unless you wanted trouble. Mr. Comeau would have been appropriate. Mr. Comeau owned the trucking company that hauled the limestone products from New England Lime Company on Route 8, Howland Avenue. Rene always drove a beautiful Cadillac. That's when Cadillacs were Cadillacs. He had pure white hair and a permanent smile. Nice fella. Mom waited on him at Eileen’s Dairy Bar in the Italian Zylonite section of Adams. Eileen's lunches were wholesome and awesome and there was a lot of limestone covered parking lot in which to park your big tractor trailer rig. Mom got me the job to keep me out of trouble. The $15 a trip, 15-hour round trip to NYC wasn’t bad either.
So Rolland the tractor trailer driver and I are at a dock at 7am in Brooklyn -- it is in New York City kind of -- unloading 100 pound bags of limestone dust. At the end of that particular dock stood the Statue of Liberty. Quite a sight for someone who had never been out of the Hoosac Valley. We would handcart it to the end of the trailer box and unload it onto a wooden pallet. The handcart took seven 100-lb. bags. Then a forklift operator would pick it up and bring it to a ship. Not all of it left the country. A lot of it went to line the ball fields of the old Yankee Stadium. No wonder that almost everyone in Adams was a Yankees fan. Some went into toothpaste, and the rest to animal feed.
So around the corner comes the fork lift operator. To my total surprise, he is a black man. Possibly the very first one I ever saw. He is well dressed, and his handsome smile shows some silver or gold teeth. He hollers out to us, “What you boys got in dem bags -- sea-ment?"
Why do I remember this so well? It probably is the reason why today I am in the sea-ment business. And that's the truth. I am sure of it. Besides I would never lie to you, mi amore. Never.
- Bobby Bacon
