Around my sophomore year in high school (1977), I got a part-time job working at the Carson Candy warehouse in Luck, Wisconsin. The business had a couple of trucks that delivered candy and cigarettes to local businesses. The warehouse was just a block off of main street. It had shelves of candy and cigarettes and a garage where the trucks were kept. I worked after school to stock shelves and ‘stamp cigarettes’.
I reported to Alan Gursky. He was a grade ahead of me in high school. I categorize him as a ‘bully nerd’. He was a nerd who loved to pick on other nerds to compensate for … whatever. Anyway, I tolerated his poor behavior for the sake of the job.
Boxes of candy would be delivered and we would stock them on warehouse shelves. Drivers would come by later and stock their trucks with whatever they needed.
The other main task was to ‘stamp cigarettes’. All cigarette sales in the United States were subject to a special tobacco tax. The cigarettes were already wrapped in packs and further into cartons. The cartons were already sealed with glue. What Alan and I did was to take each carton and feed it through a special machine that would break the carton’s glue seal, stamp each pack with an ink marking, then re-glue the carton. Alan did the work of feeding the machine and I was on the other end to package the cartons back up. He loved to shove them through so fast that I was unable to adequately handle them at the other end!
