Read Ghosts of Tom Joad for Free Online Page A

talk about this football scholarship business. I don’t know really what to say. Chances of you getting it coming out of Reeve are pretty slim, so don’t get your hopes up. Look what happened to Rob, ending up at the factory and all after failing tryouts at Ohio State. You should get something to fall back on. Your mother’s gonna quit her job soon and it wouldn’t hurt you to start contributing to this house.”
    â€œYeah, I know.”
    â€œYeah, I know you know. You heard all this a thousand times from me.”
    That all counted as a typical kind of conversation, and his last words as almost an apology, for, I don’t know, him being him.He was always short with me, a lot of times cutting off just about anything, saying, “Well, I’m tired, just got back from work” or “Got to go to work now.” I don’t know he’d have had anything to say at all without that job.
    T HE FACTORY WAS a hard breathing place. It was where almost every man worked, it was Reeve’s biography and we all knew it, even the men who could not talk about much of what they thought. Sometimes people forget that even though you speak with an accent you don’t think with one, and most of Reeve’s men did their share of thinking about that factory. It was that factory that made Reeve until the late 20th century, and then unmade it throughout the rest. It sat near the river, but the two no longer mattered to one another, grown apart people said like in a divorce. Reeve in fact was built near—because of—a river, like Detroit, like Pittsburgh, like Louisville, even Chicago, which was in the right place but needed a different river so they just dug one. Things were different in those days, people more willing to do things like make the Chicago River flow the other way because they needed that. The rivers then were needed for transportation of raw materials like iron from the Northeast and for shipping finished goods down the Mississippi. The rivers provided power, and water to cool the factory machines. Now, a town existing because of a river seemed as out of place as a typewriter, a phone with a cord, a two-parent family.
    Today’s Reeve came about because of the factory like I said, originally the R.H. Reeve Company, owned and begun by the Reeve family to make glass insulators for the power lines thatwere poking fingers west behind the railroads. Early on there was also some coal, long since mined out. A few of the hills in town actually started life as slag heaps, slate pulled away from the coal and discarded before anyone knew about fracking. Anyway, things soon turned discarded for the factory, too. The world stopped needing glass insulators as Bakelite and then plastic became available, and the factory changed to making glass things in molds, all kinds of things people needed like drinking glasses and cooking stuff. Those were good times for Reeve, really starting to accelerate after World War II was won and Grandpa came home to a factory job, and then as my father was working at the factory from as soon as he returned from the Korean War right up until the factory first went out of business in the late 1970s. Luckily, some Japanese investors bought it and converted half the men to unemployed and the other half to making new glass things people needed more than cookware, television picture tubes, though at lower wages than before to “save jobs.”
    This seemed at first to be Reeve’s lucky break, TV picture tubes. Most of the manufacturing process was automated, technology over craft in a vital signal we all missed. A decent number of jobs to work the furnaces and handle the raw materials. Glass was good for this kind of item, and we all looked around and knew that people would always want TVs and so they’d need what we were making. The factory sold to American television makers, stable companies like RCA, Motorola and Magnavox. We did not adjust well to the