The Night They Closed The Flamingo

 After the conclusion of my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, I concluded it was time for me to leave Green Bay and see what else was out there. I got myself accepted at Wisconsin, down in Madison, and began the process of figuring out how I was going to pay for the next phase of my education.  Thanks to a more enlightened political era, education costs had not exploded and through low cost loans and Pell grants, I only needed to come up with about one third of the cost.

I was bound and determined that I would not return to the pickle factory that summer.  As the summer moved along, and I was having trouble finding work, I was finally hired at a canning factory.  Fate seemed to be pushing me in the direction of a career in food processing.  The summer before I had gained valuable experience in pickles and this summer promised the adding of peas, corn, beans and carrots to my resumé.

In mid July, I went to work forking beans, with a minor in corn shoveling, on the 3:00 to 11:00 shift six nights a week.  The pay was $1.90 an hour.  I liked this shift more than the 4:30pm to 4:00am shift I’d worked at the pickle factory because it left me time at the end of my shift to pursue my social life which consisted of patronizing the myriad of Green Bay bars every night till closing.

My first assignment at the canning factory was to fork green beans from a truck onto a conveyor belt that lead upstairs to a couple of tables where about twelve middle aged, hair netted ladies, sat picking out stones, twigs, and horribly misshapen beans.  The acceptable beans would then proceed to the next step in the canning process.

About forty minutes into my first shift, I forked a bunch of beans toward the conveyor belt and nearly jumped out of my skin when one of the beans slithered away from my fork.  My coworker reacted quickly, and pinned down the slithering bean with his fork.  The bean in question was actually a little ten-inch snake the exact color of the beans. My coworker pinched the snake behind its head and walked over and deposited it in a pail near where we were working.

About an hour later, my forking friend asked me if I would like to take a break.  Never being one to resist a break, I said sure, and he walked over and picked up the snake from the bucket.  He motioned me to follow him and he walked over and placed the snake high enough up the conveyor belt that the snake would have no escape until it reached the picking tables on the floor above us.  About a half minute later, we heard the screaming from above and the conveyor came to a screeching halt.  We went and sat down.  By the time a foreman could be located, the snake dispatched and the picking ladies rounded up and made ready to go back to work, we had ourselves a nice little unscheduled ten to fifteen minute break.  Talk about useful on-the-job training.  I ended up only forking beans for two weeks but we did use the snake break one more time before my responsibilities were changed.

After about two weeks of bean forking and corn shoveling, a boss approached a group of us in the locker room at the beginning of our shift.  He explained that we were going to be shifted to the cleaning crew and our new hours would be 11:00pm to 7:00am.  Our pay would go up a dime to $2.00 an hour.  I wasn’t too thrilled with the change because these new hours would destroy my social life, but that extra ten cents an hour was sweet, so I sucked it up, and went to work on the graveyard shift.

The work on the cleaning crew was actually kind of fun.  It consisted of spraying down the factory floor and all the machinery every night with high-powered steam hoses.  About twelve of us would climb into our yellow rain jackets and pants and rubber boots, turn on the steam and then the water and go about cleaning.

Our foreman was named Woody and he appeared, to us, to be an old man.  He probably was fifty.  He was missing the requisite digits from both hands and was missing a good percentage of his teeth.  A life in the factory had made him very hard of hearing, which given the din of the factory floor may have been a blessing.  Woody didn’t like us very much on principal.  He knew most of us were short timers and he didn’t pay much attention to what we were up to as long as the machinery was clean in the morning.  I think he was fond of taking naps during his shift.

Before too long, we discovered the joys of conducting the ultimate water fight.  Every night for about 40 minutes to an hour, the cleaning crew divided up into two teams and went about the business of drenching each other.  About four others and I would always take to the deck that covered about half of the factory floor.  The deck was a grate with many openings in it providing excellent opportunities to attack the unsuspecting below.  We were out manned but we held the high ground, which we defended fiercely.

The goal, every night, was to hit some poor slob below you with a torrent of water that would catch them at the base of their neck, just above the spot where the rain jacket clasped.  Properly executed, this shot would leave the victim wet from his shoulders to his knees for the rest of the night.  The water fights might as well have been scheduled along with our lunch breaks until an unfortunate incident brought them to an end.

One of my coworkers was an old friend whom I had known from early childhood.  It probably should be pointed out that this friend had a problem with impulse control.  One night Woody unexpectedly showed up on the floor, and flew into a rage when he figured out his whole crew was engaged in a massive water fight.  Everyone immediately went back to work with the exception of my friend who had a particularly rancorous relationship with Woody.   He just couldn’t resist the impulse to attempt to drown Woody, drenching him and running him off the floor with well-aimed blasts to the seat of his pants as he high tailed it off the floor. While this did provide the rank and file with a great deal of amusement, it probably wasn’t a very good career move.  My friend, not unexpectedly, was fired at the end of the shift and the rest of us cooled it with the water fights.

One night Woody came and got me and brought me to a tunnel about 35 yards long and 20 yards wide.  Two troughs ran the length of the tunnel to a set of vibrating machines at the far end.  Vegetables would be swept toward the vibrators through the troughs in a torrent of water.  The vibrators would then shake all the too small or odd shaped reject vegetables through a grate and onto the floor.  My job was to clean the tunnel floors and the vibrators of the millions of peas, carrots or beans that hadn’t made the grade.  Those that were the right size passed over the vibrators and went through a gate to a room where they were frozen and packaged.

On my first night in the tunnel, I decided I would not be satisfied until every last pea was dispatched.  I was alone in the tunnel and there wasn’t a lot of thinking involved so I made a game out of getting every last vegetable swooshed down the drain.  In the morning Woody was so impressed he went and got another foreman to show him the job I had done.  Apparently, this was some sort of record performance and as a result I was given tunnel duty every night from then on.  I didn’t care because my one friend had been fired and working in the tunnel entailed even less contact with any authority figure.  It was a one-man job and I quickly figured out how long it would take me to do the job, which told me how much time I had to goof around each night.

 My career in food processing was going well.  I had a job that was easy, I didn’t completely hate and I was making 30 cents an hour more than I had made at the pickle factory.  The one thing that did bother me was the crimp the graveyard shift was putting in my social life.  I have always been good at a certain type of problem solving and it wasn’t long before I had the solution.

Every night we would begin work by punching a time clock.  Our time cards were kept in a rack next to the clock.  It dawned on me, that I didn’t necessarily have to physically be there in order for the clock to be punched at the beginning of the shift.  I spoke with a trusted colleague, who thought the idea brilliant, and he quickly agreed he would punch me in at the regular time even when I choose to actually start work after the bars closed.  The idea was I would have my friends drop me at the factory after an evening on the town and I would quietly go to the locker room, get dressed and go to the tunnel and work hard till the end of the shift.  No one ever checked on me in the tunnel and I thought the only way I would get caught would be if someone actually ran into me as I was entering the factory.  It seemed to me that the risk was worth the reward, especially if I didn’t abuse the ploy and only used it once in a while.  I tried it out a couple of times and it worked without a hitch.

Which brings us to the Flamingo.  The Flamingo was a bar that had opened about eight months to a year before I started at the canning factory.  It was an old house in which the bottom floor had been gutted and turned into a bar.  The whole place consisted of a medium size bar, a pool table, a couple of pinball machines, and a jukebox.  In other words, it was pretty much the same as hundreds of other Green Bay bars.  The one thing that made the Flamingo different was its clientele.  The Flamingo had become the unofficial home base of the freaks, long hairs, hippies and the unaffiliated weirdos of Green Bay.

I had been going to the Flamingo every once in a while since pretty near when it opened.  Other than the patrons, it was a pretty ordinary place.  I never saw anything approaching a fight there or any drug deals or any other illegal activities, which is a lot more than I can say for several Green Bay bars that were in operation in those years.  The jukebox was rock and roll, played at ear splitting levels that didn’t disturb anyone because the bar was in the middle of a commercial area populated with several other bars, most of which were much larger than the Flamingo.  The bar did offer a water glass, full to the brim, of tequila for $1.00.  The tradition, all of a few months old, was to drink the entire glass in one pull and then get up on your bar stool and scream.  I tried it once but was unable to finish the whole glass and very nearly puked all over myself.  So I stuck with my usual beer.

Every night the police would park across the street and watch the proceedings through binoculars.  It drew this unusual amount of official attention solely because the patrons were perceived as different and some kind of threat.  As a denizen of Green Bay’s nightlife, I could have pointed them in the direction of at least a dozen bars that had bigger problems than the Flamingo.  As the summer ran its course, the surveillance increased and right around the end of July it was announced that the bar’s liquor license would not be renewed and it would close in 30 days.

As the date of closure approached, I knew it was a night I was going to need to play time clock bingo, so I quit doing it for fear I might get caught and either lose my job or come under increased scrutiny that would prevent my attending the last night of the Flamingo.  When the night arrived, my buddy punched me in at the usual starting time, and I headed to the bar.

I don’t know what I expected to see but it certainly wasn’t what eventually unfolded.  Around 10:00pm, as I was walking through a parking lot near the bar, I saw a group of people carrying the pool table out the front door of the bar.  In the street there was a bonfire going and the pool table was quickly dumped into the fire.  The flames shot up about 15 feet in the air and cast a weird glow on the scene.  The police had not anticipated, either the size or the mood, of the crowd that had shown up.  They were scrambling and within a couple of minutes the sirens of the fire trucks could be heard.

I walked through the crowd and didn’t recognize most of the people who were leading this parade.  I was standing near the bonfire, watching a group of people pull the wooden front porch off of the bar and proceed to add it to the fire along with a few random bar stools.  I was as astonished as the cops at what was going on and decided I was not going to get involved.  I walked away from the fire and moved over where a group of spectators had gathered to watch.  About two minutes later, the fire trucks arrived and were greeted with a hail of bottles and rocks.  The trucks backed off and the police reinforcements started to arrive and suit up in their spanking new, never before used riot gear.  When they were ready, the police lined up in formation dressed in riot helmets and flack jackets, carrying four-foot long clubs and shields.  Their initial push was met with more bottles and rocks and they made a strategic retreat.

The cops’ next move was to launch, what I suspect, was the entire departments supply of tear gas into the rioters and the spectators.  I had long before planned my escape route and took off to another bar that quickly filled up with people fleeing the tear gas.  I didn’t witness the conclusion but the riot was over soon and when I left the bar I had taken refuge in, all that was left was broken glass and the remnants of the now drenched bonfire.

I went back to work around 2:00am and just as I was leaving the locker room to head to the tunnel, I ran into Woody.  He asked me where the hell I had been and I told him that a certain foreman who was in charge of the corn barn had asked me to help out there.  Woody probably didn’t know or remember that I had worked for a couple of weeks in the corn barn, so my knowing the name of the foreman in charge there, lent some credence to my story.  He probably didn’t want to lose his star tunnel rat either so he glared at me and told me to get to work.

For years after, I believed that only in Green Bay could a full-scale riot break out over the closing of a bar.  It wasn’t as if there weren’t a couple hundred alternatives.  I changed my mind about the uniqueness of the Green Bay reaction over the years after reading about riots breaking out after sporting events in various U. S. cities.  It didn’t even matter whether their team had won or lost, those that have a propensity to lose control in a mob will do so regardless of the “reason.”   I want to be perfectly clear that I am not lumping the riots that are caused by years of discrimination, brutality, and repression with those that are touched off by sporting events or the closing of a bar.  Context is everything; although I believe once the festivities start some of the same dynamics apply.

A couple of days later, three friends, who had been arrested, asked me to come downtown and talk with their lawyer. I had seen all three of them in the crowd of spectators and had not seen them throw anything or do anything but watch the unfolding scene.  In fact the only person I recognized throwing rocks was a crew cut kid I had played basketball with a couple of years back.  I told the lawyer what I had seen and felt compelled to tell him how I happened to be there in the first place.  He laughed and undoubtedly knew my credibility as a witness just might be just a bit compromised. He handed me a beer from a little refrigerator full of Budweiser he had in his office and we sat back and enjoyed a cold one.  After all, this was Green Bay.

A couple of weeks later I left for Madison and my Green Bay days were behind me.