“Are summer jobs particularly hard to find this year?”

I was sitting across from a man I came to call “Old Man Hager,” behind his back. We all thought of Mr. Hager as “really old;” he was probably sixty. He had more hair on his thick forearms than he had on his head, a wiry guy about five-seven, when I was “almost five-eleven and a hundred-fifty-five pounds soaking wet.”

“No, I don’t know, but I heard you were hiring and paid decent.”

“Ha. I suppose that depends on whatacha mean by decent, son, but we do hire extra help for the summer season, ice cream bein’ a summer thing, you know.”

I don’t remember where I heard about Hager’s Ice Cream Factory or that they were hiring. As for decent pay, I think it was somewhere north of $2/hour, which, in 1966, I probably thought was pretty good. All I knew was I was home from my freshman year of college and didn’t have, and definitely needed, a job.

Mr. Hager’s interview was to explain expectations and hardships. “Everyone around here works hard, son. If you don’t pull your weight, ya won’t last past two weeks, but if ya still want the job, you’re hired. Can you start tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Okay, you go over there and tell Stacey to fill out some paperwork; then be here at 8:00 and ask for Mike.”

So I began work at Hager’s Ice Cream Factory in Somerville, Massachusetts.

One might say it was a strange job for a liberal arts theatre major college student. Before that time, not counting lawn mowing and snow shoveling, my work experience was golf caddy, Howard Johnson’s soda jerk, busboy, and waiter, gift store stockboy and sales clerk, and shop assistant at the college theatre.

I had an affinity for ice cream, still do. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream,” was a family chant as we were served our favorite dessert by itself or on top of my mother’s pies.

Hager’s made “specialties,” knockoff versions of popular brands, Good Humor (chocolate-covered bars), Fudgesicles (fudge-pops), Creamsicles (orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream bars), Push-Ups (swirled vanilla and chocolate ice cream in a cardboard tube), and Hoodsies, (multiple flavors in a cup). They also made half-gallon cartons for grocery stores of vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and Neapolitan (vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate in stripes).

The factory seemed huge to me at first, but it was really just one big room. There was “the mix” section, big vats into which we dumped sacks of sugar, bottles of flavoring, and where the milk came from tanker trucks’ hoses outside, and it would be mixed with water, some “butter-fat,” and filler as needed for the “lines.”

Each multi-purpose line could make specialties or half-gallons, so there was a big changeover process between long product runs. Mix moved by overhead pipes to the six lines. The mix was warm, but it was gradually cooled as the product pipes were surrounded by coils of piping filled with ammonia gas.

This factory was built in the 1920s. The pipes were old. When a product pipe broke, they shut the line down and called Mike to come fix it. All the line workers went to other lines, moved finished product to the freezers, or cleaned up.

When an ammonia gas pipe broke, an alarm bell rang. They shut the ammonia valve off, and all the lines, and everyone cleared the factory, usually at a run. Ammonia gas burns your eyes, your throat, and your lungs. People get nauseous, and sometimes are sent to the hospital. Then Mike went in to fix the ammonia pipe.

I never really figured out what Mike’s title was; Plant Manager? Chief mechanic? COO? Mike was about thirty-five and had worked at Hager’s for twenty years. Mr. Hager treated him like a son, but he wasn’t related. There were Hager family members who worked there, but not in positions of responsibility.

Mike did everything. He trained me on my first day. “You can eat whatever you want. In three days, you’ll get ‘overeat’ and never want to look at product again.”

He showed how to work the lines, pack pallets, and take finished pallets to the freezer using a hand-operated forklift. “You’re gonna want to go in the freezer in short sleeves. Don’t! It is ten below zero in there, and the lock is temperamental. Use the parka.” There were navy blue expedition parkas with fur-lined hoods, very warm, and I was glad I had one on when the door lock broke, and it took fifteen minutes for someone to respond to the emergency bell I kept ringing.

The staff was great. Everybody helped each other out. The older women laughed at how much ice cream I ate. “Kid never developed ‘over-eat,’ probably gonna single-handedly screw our Christmas bonus.”

The “boys,” summer hires mostly, were the ones who ran the pallets. Brian rode a Harley-Davidson Classic, which he proudly called a “panhead.” Brian made fun of me on my Vespa 150 wearing a helmet, until he followed me up the Mystic River Parkway after work. “Kid’s crazy. Cranked that scooter to the double-nickel around those curves. A helmet’s probably a good idea.”

Hager’s didn’t make very good ice cream, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know how. At the July 4^th company picnic Old Man Hagar served me a delicious custard cream base with whole fresh strawberries.

“Mr. Hagar this is really good ice cream! We should sell this.”

“Ha! Real cream and butterfat, fresh strawberries, and fresh boiled strawberry syrup? No money in selling ice cream like this, son.”

What did I learn at Hager’s?

• People are people: I was a college student, a theatre major, who grew up in an upscale suburb. Many of these folks worked their whole life at Hager’s. I remember being pretty quickly accepted, having discussions about stories in the newspaper.
• Sometimes the work you do is less important than who you work with. The atmosphere at Hager’s was fun. Everybody pitched in and helped each other. Then I just thought, “Aren’t these people nice?” I know now that “family culture” doesn’t happen by accident. There was zero tolerance for not behaving well. Old Man Hager and Mike were quick to fire someone who was lazy or “difficult.”
• Most mistakes are not the end of the world. I learned that you can get a hand forklift to ten miles an hour down a slight incline, but you can’t make the corner with a pallet-load of half gallons of ice cream. It helps when your manager doesn’t freak out, but asks, “What did you learn? OK, Good. Now clean up the mess and get back on line six.”

I also learned about market segmentation, though I didn’t know it at the July 4th picnic: “No money in selling ice cream like this.” In these pre-Häagen-Dazs days, I took Mr. Hager at his word, and I was thrilled when he presented me with a quart. “You seemed to appreciate this, so I saved you some. The bag has dry ice, so it won’t melt. Stay safe on that scooter going home.”