I was rummaging through a hodgepodge of personal items and came across a brass key. One of my first jobs before I went off to college was running a factory mill cutting the horizontal channels in prison cell keys. That comment may sound ridiculous but it’s true! Could cutting prison cell keys be any more symbolic starting my life as a musician, locked away in a practice room? The Folger Adams company made prison lock and security systems and Joliet of course was well known for its relationship to prisons. My routine involved clamping a key blank in the machine, making sure that the cutting fluid was squirting on the surface, pushing a button and watching the machine cut the key. Afterwards, I used an air sprayer and cleared off the brass chips, unclamped the key blank and checked its straightness or trueness in a cylinder. Each day, I would cut 225 keys for 8 hours.
Running the machine, I was thinking about the start of my music studies at the University of Illinois and wondered if I’d ever have a chance to be a musician. There was a numbing monotony to this job, but one could get into a groove (so to speak) and produce a large quantity of keys daily. In fact, the foreman said they never had anyone produce so many accurate keys on the machine. I kept reflecting on my personal survival and wondered how many of you had difficult or even horrible jobs when you were young? Factory work was an opportunity to connect two worlds – where you were and where you wanted to be. The job also taught me some important lessons such as being on time, being accurate and developing consistency. When I left for college, I kept one of those keys as a reminder of my days before I was a musician. It was a key to life, after all. Those experiences are still fresh in my mind. What’s your story?
