Way back when I was 20 years old, just married for one month, a student at Seattle Pacific College, now University, I had a part-time job with a freight company. My job was to find records of items shipped that didn’t arrive at the point of destination, at least claimed by those who were supposed to have received the item. The claims were primarily bogus, so they could get a refund for what they had received but claimed that they hadn’t. This was before the days of computers, so all records were on paper in cardboard file boxes stacked in piles in the basement of the freight office. There were no stairs to this basement, just a freight elevator, raised and lowered by an electric winch on the top of the wooden box that one rode from the main floor to the basement. My job was to go through the boxes and find the records proving that the item shipped had reached its destination. I got paid $2.00 an hour, but I received a bonus for every claim that I proved was not true or at least not our company’s fault. There was one light bulb in the basement over a table, so I would carry a box that I thought had the information that I needed to the table and go through it, and if I didn’t find the evidence I needed, I would carry it back and do the same thing with another box. This era was before headlamps and LED lights, so I had a big, clunky flashlight with 5 D batteries. Did you know that D batteries have been around since 1895? I used that flashlight to read the labels on the front of the boxes and to find my way around the basement that was my office.

I would get to the freight office at 2:00 pm and work until 5:00 pm each weekday when they closed. One day, I got so intent on my detective work that I lost track of the time and went well past the 5:00 pm closing time. The workers on the main floor thought I had already left, so they all left and turned off the electricity in the building. The light in the basement went out, and the elevator no longer worked, so I was stuck in the basement of this office building on Queen Anne Hill in downtown Seattle. I hunted around the basement with my flashlight, looking for some outside entrance or way up to the main floor. I found a metal chute where mailboxes were sent down to the basement from an outside hole. The chute was held up tight to the ceiling by springs, but when it was loaded up with mail, the weight would cause it to sag to the floor, and when the mail had slid down, it would pull back to the ceiling. I stacked cardboard boxes to stand on to reach the chute, but the boxes kept collapsing under my weight. Finally, I found some heavier boxes to hold my weight, and I reached the chute and pulled it down. I had to climb up this steep, slick metal chute to the small hole to the outside and freedom. I was trying to grip the outside edges of the chute and kept badly cutting my hands on the sharp metal edges. By the time I finally managed to climb the chute and squeeze my way through the hole, I had blood all over me from my cut hands. When I climbed out, many people were walking along the sidewalk, and they looked at me, screamed, and ran away. There were a couple of guys who offered to help me; I looked like I was the victim of an axe murderer who must have chopped me a bunch of times. Patty always picked me up from work in our 1952 Volkswagen Bug, and she had been driving around and around the block because there was no parking, wondering where I was. She came around the corner and saw me shortly after these two guys started trying to help me. She saw me covered with blood, her eyes got huge, and it looked like she was trying to scream but nothing was coming out of her mouth. I jumped up, ran around, and got into the car before anybody could call an ambulance. I yelled at her, “Go, go, go!”

On the drive to our apartment, I explained what happened to Patty but never said anything to my bosses. I always kept an eye on the time after that.