Unusual Jobs: Making Spoons
Created | Updated Apr 15, 2023
Unusual Jobs: Making Spoons
In the Summer of 1968, I got a job working in a factory. The factory building was an old textile mill that was repurposed for making plastic silverware. The company that owned it was the Van Brode company of Clinton, Massachusetts. Van Brode was the North American producer and distributor of Weetabix cereal. In the late 1960s it also had a contract to supply soldiers in the Vietnam War. I don't know if they were shipping Weetabix to the GIs, but they definitely were making plastic utensils. A lot of them.
I was assigned to a line which consisted of a machine that poured melted plastic into molds, producing sticks with white plastic spoons attached to them. The machine deposited these sticks onto a short conveyor belt. There was one young woman who took the sticks off the conveyor belt and put them onto a rack to cool. There was another young woman who took the cooled sticks and broke off the spoons. The spoons went into a box which sat on a set of scales. The sticks were put into a bucket. When the box reached the desired weight, it was my job to take it off the scale and put an empty box in its place.
It was also my job to go to another room where flat unassembled boxes were stored. I would bring them to my line, fold them, put masking tape on the bottoms, and have the boxes ready to go on the scales. I would seal up the filled boxes and put them on a skid. When the skid was full, I would arrange to have someone take it to the next step in its journey.
Nothing was ever wasted. When the bucket of sticks was full, I would climb the steps and pour them into the hopper so they could be melted down and make more plastic spoons. I worked from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. There were two more shifts in the day; the effort ran around the clock.
Halfway through the summer, my family decided to take a crosscountry vacation trip, stopping in Detroit and Iowa to visit relatives, then to Utah, where a cousin was attending college, and finally to the West Coast where my sister was living with her husband in Oakland, California. I had to quit the job. I trained my replacement, who misunderstood which boxes he was supposed to use. I had to stay late to put the spoons in the right boxes.
I learned some useful stuff at this job. I know how to store my stuff in boxes. I know the different sizes of boxes, and I know what will fit where. I do not like to have white plastic spoons on hand. Can you blame me?
