TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 30

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 15, 2000006


Dearly Beloveds,

	I bought some raisin bran so that Meyshe 
and Feyna would have something to eat for 
breakfast.  More baggage, I think.  I look around 
and see that even when everything is all packed 
up, there is a formidable amount of possessions 
that will have to be taken care of after we sleep 
here the last night.  There are boxes of supplies 
from Costco that never made it up into the house 
from the garage.  There are the bedside table 
necessities that I've had to keep with me.  There 
is all the bedding that we will sleep in the last 
night (tonight).  It makes me nervous, especially 
knowing that there just has to be some mistake 
that will happen.  What mistake will that be? 
There's everything in the refrigerator and 
freezer.  What to do with all that?  My mother's 
refrigerator is already packed.  You can't bring 
perishables to Goodwill, can you?  Nevermind.  It 
will all happen tomorrow.

	Now this happens.



 
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The Family Business

	My parents started a business in the 
early sixties that they named LABINDUSTRIES.  It 
was an act of desperation more than one of 
entrepreneurial adventure.  We are not high risk 
people, the Shapiros, and starting a business 
doesn't come naturally.  But after our return 
from the east coast, my father had several 
employments that all went sour, from the firm 
that broke its promise on paying for the move out 
west, to the company that tried to steal his 
inventions.  He was forty six and that was not an 
age to be in those days.  Companies could and did 
refuse to hire someone because of age.

	We were a family of five, and that meant 
mouths to feed, backs to clothe, and rooves to 
place over our heads.  In an act of utter 
despair, they started LABINDUSTRIES in the 
basement.  The first of my father's inventions 
was the disposable hematocrit tube.  Hematocrit 
tubes (sedrate tubes) were used in laboratories 
and hospitals to measure in what proportion a 
sample of blood separates into red blood cells, 
white blood cells and plasma.  And in those days, 
every time one was used, it had to be washed, and 
the tubes were so narrow that the remnants of the 
last use had to be sucked out of the tube.  This 
was not easy and not cheap.  With my father's 
invention, the tubes were made cheaply enough 
that they could be disposed of after use, saving 
thousands of dollars a year in a time when 
thousands of dollars meant a lot.  The trick was 
to affix the decal of the calibrations onto the 
tube accurately.  And we were all busy in the 
basement, plastering decals on tubes and hanging 
them up to dry on a clothes line.

	I never read the fear in my parents' 
faces.  The assumption was that they were 
steering the ship, so it had to be sound.  I was 
in junior high school.  My understanding of the 
big world was limited.  A way was found to print 
the calibrations onto the tubes and business 
picked up.  So, next, LABINDUSTRIES moved to a 
little walk up on University Avenue, an old soft 
wood floored complex of offices off an L shaped 
hallway, whose rooms were rented out by the owner 
to businesses.  A scientific glass blower 
inhabited the front rooms; he was the owner, and 
LABINDUSTRIES was in the back.  Now my parents' 
business put another invention in the catalogue 
of one:  an automatic pipette.  In those days in 
laboratories the technicians sucked all sorts of 
hazardous liquids up a glass pipette to a certain 
mark by sucking, then covering the hole with a 
finger, letting some out, sucking up more, 
letting some out, sucking up more, and on and on 
until the measurement looked right.  It couldn't 
be very accurate and was not fast.  What about in 
trials where an experiment required that five 
milliliters be dispensed repetitively, maybe a 
hundred times, and then a variety of things had 
to happen to the dispensed amount.  It had to be 
accurate and fast.  And so he invented the 
Repipet® (repetitive pipette), eliminating the 
sucking of cyanide up a straw for lab techs 
everywhere.  And it took the medical profession 
years to accommodate to this innovation.  They 
held on to their mouth pipettes.  They are a 
stodgy lot.

	After the great government contract for a 
cadgillion sedrate tubes, LABINDUSTRIES (or: L/I) 
needed to expand and moved into a warehouse on 
2nd street near the bay in Berkeley.  Workers 
were hired, then more, then the Repipet® took 
off, and more people were hired.  At the very 
apex of L/I, there were just under forty 
employees.

	At one point or another, all of us 
Shapiro kids worked for LABINDUSTRIES in one 
capacity or another.  It was my first real 
employment, and I took the job of boss's daughter 
seriously.  When I worked, I worked doubly hard 
and fast, and frequently finished my work well in 
advance of the bell.  So I'd go in to my mother 
and ask what else I could do.  She'd give me 
something to do, and I'd do it, then go to her 
for more.  Finally, there would be nothing left 
for me to do, and I'd go out to my desk to write 
short stories or mail ridiculous letters to 
unsuspecting friends.

	One thing I did was invent WAZOO 
enterprises.  I had a logo and a letterhead that 
I fashioned with a new technique that allowed the 
repetition of art work and typewritten text 
executed on a special material.  I cannot recall 
the technique accurately.  So WAZOO enterprises 
was born and I had to give it a byline, like 
General Electric (where progress is our most 
important product).  WAZOO enterprises (take a 
breath of this, Mr. Tipplewater!)  I had WAZOO 
producing all sorts of bizarre products: robot 
dogs who ate real food and crapped real shit, new 
manufactured antiques (I have been proven right 
on that one), praise-on-call services for the 
depressed and self denigrating, escort services 
for the socially unacceptable, servants for hire 
by the half hour, people who will write nasty 
letters for you (I have been proven right on this 
one, too).  WAZOO enterprises, the famous 
producer of nodules.  WAZOO did everything, and 
from my desk, letters went out to the north, 
south, east and west.  And of course, I had 
franking privileges at LABINDUSTRIES.

	I did not earn points doing my work fast 
and well, and having time left over for other 
pursuits.  The other employees saw this as a 
threat to their jobs by comparison, and routinely 
requested that I slow down, which was impossible 
for me to do without purposeful slacking.  I got 
fun jobs, too.  My mother and I would sit in her 
office inventing advertisements, and I got to go 
to conventions where we could guess the specialty 
of those myriad attendees meandering up the 
aisles.  Look, there's a chemist.  And that one 
must be a biologist.  Those are hospital 
directors.  There's a bunch of teachers of high 
school science classes.  We were mostly correct. 
We got good at it.

	The biggest convention of them all every 
year was the FASEB (Federated American Societies 
for Experimental Biology).  Seventeen thousand 
attendees would register in Atlantic City.  This 
was before it was a gambling center, when it was 
still the Monopoly game board.  Yes, 
Mediterranean Avenue is mostly low class, and 
Park Place and Boardwalk are the choicest real 
estate.  At FASEB, there were rows of typists 
working at special machines that would stamp out 
what looked like credit cards, your name, 
institution and address in raised letters on 
plastic, that you would carry with you to the 
display booths, and proffer when asked, so that 
the businesses could put your card through their 
little rented flip flop machines and put you on 
their mailing lists.  There was plenty of time to 
walk the aisles and collect the giveaways.  After 
a few days, you'd get to know the employees in 
the booths across the way, and there would be 
casual chatting in dull periods.  My brother and 
I were good partners in crime at the convention. 
We approached the bank of typists, with our forms 
filled out, and handed them to the dead pan 
workers who would type up ANYTHING you put on the 
card without raising an eyebrow.  This is why for 
years and years, I would still get scientific 
instrument promotional mail addressed to me, 
Glottle Stopf, at the GLAND PUSTULE LABORATORY at 
my mother's house.  Nothing phased these 
automatons.  As hard as we tried, they just 
stamped away at their machines.

	At one convention, my mother and I were 
trying to come up with a good advertisement for 
the LABQUAKE®, a test tube rocker that gently 
shook up the contents of test tubes instead of 
the standard violent shakers.  The LABQUAKE® was 
a big seller.  This was our ad: a picture of a 
stripper in a sequined strapless gown, about to 
drop her feather boa, and the caption would run, 
"Don't bump and grind your tubes.  Shake them 
gently with the L/I LABQUAKE®.  We presented this 
to our ad man, Fred Schott, who was touring the 
convention, and he said.  "Yes.  Yes."  Then he 
looked at me and said, "And you'll be the 
stripper."  I still have that photograph, the 
opposite of who I am, all made up and shiny. 
WAZOO enterprises wrote back to an admirer who 
wrote in to the boss about the woman in the ad. 
I wrote, "This is the boss's daughter.  I am the 
one in the photograph.  The boss damaged her head 
when she fell after reading your provocative 
letter.  But in answer to your question: Yes, 
that is I, and yes, they are mine."

	My playground, LABINDUSTRIES, inc.

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net