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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

always rushing, with a piece of food or something so that you never stopped to eat.

Q:

What was your job at Gimbel's, exactly?

Foner:

Stock, hanging up things, I don't know, putting price tags on. I then got another job later on. That was my first job.

Q:

How long did that last?

Foner:

About two years. About two years. It was a very good job. Ten bucks a week was fantastic. Then I inherited the job with the lights.

Q:

I meant to ask you, what neighborhood was it that was the last one that had the lamps?

Foner:

The area that includes Park Avenue, Flushing Avenue, outside Williamsburg, it's toward Kent Avenue. You don't know the neighborhood.

Q:

I don't know it that well.

Foner:

We started on Broadway about, I'd say, twenty blocks from where I lived, on Broadway right up towards P.S. 147. There were three lights with four lamps on each, and it was near a bank. That was the signal. You started there and you turned off the light. The person in charge, the supervisor, knew that you had started. Or if you turned them on, they knew you had started. We had this problem. My brothers had gotten post office jobs, so they couldn't do it anymore, so they wanted to turn it over to me. I was too young and they were sure that the guy in charge was a jerk and they hated him. He was sort of a mean guy. Why, I don't know. They said he was mean. But they knew that if they said that they couldn't do it and they were going to give it to me, that he would object and give it to somebody else, so they never told him. So I was taught the route, and I was to get there before he got there, see, because he would be there at a certain time, to start before him at both times, so that he wouldn't know who was doing it. You had a key, and you stuck it into the lamp post, and you would turn it on.

Q:

Gas or electricity?

Foner:

Electricity. It was the last section of Brooklyn that wasn't on the central switch.

Q:

This was when?





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