There were a couple guys that could do a screen job at Lenny’s shop and keep it clean and simple. It helps to be an anal retentive clean freak, but at the least you’ve got to be organized. I’m fairly organized, but I can’t do it without wearing the stuff, and clean-up, forget about it, I take a bath in it. Lenny made ordinary vandalism look like a benefit show. For one thing he would not buy screen ink. He had One Shot around and that would have to do. You can use it IF you cool it off for a few hours in the refrigerator ‘til it thickens up some AND if you strain it. But lack of method was called “Quality Control” here. So was bidding on a job lower than anybody else in the western hemisphere and then trying to bang it out cheaply enough so that you could still make money on it.
Captain Pete worked there for 23 years and could only handle a one color simple straight run. Whenever I would make a lay out for him and say the phone number should be a “reverse” (having a panel where the letters are showing through - makes a one-color run sort of imitate a 2 color one) I would have to retrain him. It sometimes happened twice in a day. To illustrate the brain power in this department; when we went to lunch Pete always stayed behind and Lenny would tell him “Watch the phone.” That meant to him “WATCH” the phone and when we came back he would be standing there in the same spot, at parade rest, doing just that and nothing else. A good soldier. Go Army!
Captain Pete was obsessed with his private projects. For awhile it was the NRA and he had all the gun stickers plastered all over his truck. He was THE loudest proponent of the 2nd Amendment, even though he didn’t actually own a firearm. He made moonshine with the redneck across the street and for awhile that was “the Elixir of the Gods” and EVERYBODY should have some. He was a fanatic about everything that interested him. Then it was bowling. He went almost every night and was sneaking out to a bowling tutor on Lenny’s clock and once he started on the topic you couldn’t get away from him. He’d been in the Army once upon a time and every day Wally would get him all majorly rattled about whatever conflict there was in the world because Pete wanted to go volunteer to kill ‘em all, as we ALL should. We never went, though. He became an Amway Rep. I will assume you know what THEY are like. And then one day Captain Pete discovered Jesus. There’s no convert like a new one. I’m an atheist. Pete had a three year old daughter that he doted on. One day one of the guys was ragging on him just to get his goat and brought up Pete’s sex life. He said “My wife and I have not had sexual relations in nine years!” I’m proud to say I brought a little corner of Hell to Pete’s world.
Pete had a FINE ‘57 Cadillac parked in his driveway with some minor ailment, like a dead battery, but he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. He seemed to know that it was worth a bundle, though, to hear him talk. It wasn’t for sale to the likes of me, with a big red 666 branded on my forehead. He drove a thrashed-to-the-max ‘63 Chevy truck. One day he received one of those teaser ads in the mail where they tell you you’re going to win some big item if you just go listen to their spiel and he told Lenny to basically “take this job & shove it” because his boat had come in - and he GAVE AWAY the Caddy. He “won” a set of Pic-n-Save steak knives, and didn’t buy the condo. And just his bad luck; Lenny took him back.
They used newspaper in the screen room for cleaning up and were always out of it. Lenny took the Times at home but never brought any of it in. One day before recycling really got popular I saw a big bunch of newspaper stacked at the curb so I stopped and picked it up on my way in to Lenny’s and gave it to Captain Pete. An hour or so later I heard Pete telling Lenny he needed newspaper. (???) They were standing right by the dumpster. I reminded them that I had just brought in about 100 lbs of the stuff and put it in the silk screen room. Lenny handed Pete a 20 and said go buy some. It was GONE! My newspaper was all in the dumpster! You couldn’t help these guys.
One day as I was coming in to work I saw Pete outside the screen room holding conference with a group of his bible buddies and made a joke to Lenny about it, me, the very atheist and a bachelor besides! That ended the sermon-on-the-sidewalk but it brought the mighty and awful wrath of Captain Pete down upon us ALL! For 45 minutes he strutted and fretted his stuff upon the stage in Lenny’s face about the evils of (me) and others that would stifle His Voice, until he finally asked Lenny if he was being “fired” for his activities. Lenny then said “Yeah O.K., if you won’t shut up about it - be fired.” So Pete put in to the EDD that he was “fired for religious persecution” but he was a subcontractor, like all of us, so he was just out. During the harangue he got on the subject of how “immature” we all were and that was the part Lenny remembered later when he got in a fight with Dynamic Duane, who was 21 years old at the time (Lenny was in his 50s). Duane told him he was the biggest 50 year old baby he’d ever seen and Lenny came back with “You’re the BABY!” So they stood there for a while calling each other a bigger baby ‘til Lenny said “And you’re im, im, immature, too.” So that became THE THING we would call each other forever after. “Im, im, immature”. “Yeah, Steve, you know you spelled that wrong - and it’s because, you know, ya know, you’re just too im-im-immature! You baby. You . . .big . . .baby! BabybabyBABY!”
To Lenny it was “The Time I fired Captain Pete” but to me it’s “The Time Captain Pete Fired Himself”.
Pete was gone. History. Then Lenny became the silk screen man. He told about “the time” he ruined a job because all the signs stuck together and he tried to pass it off and collect anyway, but wound up having to do the job over. Picky customer. Well, it wasn’t just “One Time”, it was policy! Our motto at this shop was “We do every job TWICE!”
His method of registration was to place a blank under the screen and pounce charcoal through it to see the image. It transfers the image, but clogs the screen horribly. It can be blown out, but....that didn’t matter to Lenny any more than “within an inch or so” meant “registered”. It produced an early version of 50% black, and the boogers that weren’t strained out of the paint made interesting negative space, or implied texture in the image. He had an order for 50 two-sided real estate riders once and I saw him out in the back coating them out on the floor with a hairy old sheep skin roller, sawdust all over the floor. Some were Masonite, and some were that waffle backed cheap stuff. Some were plywood and none ever got the edges sanded, so they had the hair sticking up from being cut with a dull blade. Most were old signs cut up. They would pick up onto the roller and he would knock them off into the dirt and paint the other side - “both sides at once”. When the customer came in and saw them all glued together in a solid block and rejected the order Lenny couldn’t figure why. Some customers are just “Too damn penickity!”
We had a lot of screen work backlogged one October when deer season came up and Lenny took off for parts unknown. Well, we couldn’t tell if he would only get to Vegas or “All The Way” (to Mesquite). He left me with a blank check and I went and BLEW IT on 4 quarts of screen ink. We got a couple of hot jobs done within the deadline for once and they looked good but when Lenny came back from Las Vegas he was so mad at me he threw all the ink in the dumpster!! I never saw another emergency check.
We got a big job to do for a major car rental outfit out at the airport. It was for a couple hundred 12x18 letter-number-combo signs on aluminum to hang on the fence to mark where each car should be parked. I came up with a method of screen and hand lettering that would work if I did most of it myself, it was complicated, but Lenny had bid real low and it was the best I could come up with to save time and effort. I came in one morning to see, much to my chagrin, that the job had been done without my help. To my amazement Lenny had gotten every one of them right with the screen part, with the exception that they were all about an inch off square and 2 inches from center and pretty fuzzy looking and he was in the process of poking a big hole in the top and bottom of each one on the drill press. We only ever had about 5 drill bits and they were almost as sharp as a stick. He had a half inch masonry bit going and was wallering out big gopher holes in these aluminum signs and I lost it. I asked him “How could even YOU f**k these all up this bad?” His answer was “Well, football football is my favorite sport.”
Lenny had grown up in a big family of about 16 brothers with Dad the town drunk so Mom had to operate the brats all by herself and he learned a system of survival (ducking blame) that accepted ANY ANSWER that got people to leave him alone. He called these gems “Truth”. This next tidbit is a real hard thing to accept, I know, but I swear by it; he actually DID tell the truth once. It was April 17th, 1991, at 10:03 in the morning, I have it documented, and he asked me if I needed any supplies. Like I might get ‘em. If Lenny said the sun had come up this morning you’d want to walk outside and see for yourself. He lied about what he had for breakfast, lied when the truth would serve him better. I said “Yeah, I need some purple for [a certain job]”. Purple was the most expensive color One Shot had at the time and once we ran out of the can I’d brought from my shop in ‘83 it was over. He said he had a quart (A $27.00 QUART!!) on his truck and he went out and got it for me. I was in such a state of shock I couldn’t believe it had happened - it took a whole day for it to sink in. I don’t tell this to many people that knew Lenny because they flat out don’t accept it, they sometimes accuse me of embellishing the facts as it is, imagine, that! But Lenny telling the truth? Forget about it.
I hope I never grow up, just wanna be like Peter Pan, ‘cause I’m - ya know - I’m im-im-immature. You know.
Posts: 1859 | From: / | Registered: Nov 1998
| IP: Logged |
posted
Ya know Mike, alot of people are waiting for the "Lenny book" to come out so they can have a source of laughs. Myself, I wanted it as an INSTRUCTION MANUAL! That is, 'till I found out it was written by such an evil person! When some peple want to make another's life uncomfortable, they "sick" the IRS on 'em. The other version is to call some religious organizations, and tell them so-and-so is "searching" and is a candidate for conversion. So when you hear the doorbell ring, watch out... I've got to get back yo my NRA magazine, so bye for now, Jim D.
-------------------- James Donahue Donahue Sign Arts 1851 E. Union Valley Rd. Seymour TN. (865) 577-3365 brushman@nxs.net
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for lunch, Benjamin Franklin Posts: 2057 | From: 1033 W. Union Valley Rd. | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
It gives me hope that some day I can run a real sign shop like Lenny. When I think I'm working too hard and things don't go well I have some comfort in knowing that real pro's do everything twice, and they don't need to grow up. I've been worried about that for 50 years.
ernie
-------------------- Ernie Balch Balch Signs 1045 Raymond Rd Malta, NY 518-885-9899 Posts: 405 | From: Malta, NY | Registered: Jan 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Well I've got to tell this one so it can live on...we also had a Lenny at a shop I worked at many years ago (for about 2 months) This Lenny was the salesman...big guy, beard, wore those pants that went swoosh...swoosh... with the big colar, now mind you I'm only 30, this was not in the 70's...
He drove this early 70's brown Chevy truck, you know the 2 toned ones, lite tan and brown, no fender wells, the rust had gotten them years earlier, he was a real thrifty kind of guy, so maybe that will explain his train of thought on this story...
Well one day he pulls up to the shop, the right front fender on his truck was creamed, so we all go out to see the damage, and what lays there in the back of the truck, you got it, a nice 8 point buck... ****ed off can't explain his mood as he goes about hitting the deer in the head and cussing about what happened, now this is not the good part, its what he did next that was too good!!
About a week later Lenny pulls up, and I'm outside having a smoke break, and what do I see, yup...the deer is is still back there, getting a little bit bigger...nice smell too.
I ask him when the hell is he going to get rid of that thing, and he goes on to tell me that because that damb deer had hurt his truck that he is going to get something back out of it, he plans to wait untill it gets real big and insert a tube into it and syphon off the methane gas to run his truck....silence....there was nothing I could say at this point because mind you, Lenny was a very intelligent person..to hear him tell it.
I left there about 3 weeks later and the deer was still riding with Lenny, it may still be to this day...
posted
I'm still tryin' to figger how Captain Pete acquired this three-year old child if he hadn't had sexual relations with his wife in nine years?!?!?!?
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic