Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1931
The winter and spring of this year proved to be a discouraging time for me. Very fortunately Florence had steady work at RCA Victor and was so good at her job that she was kept on when may others with more seniority were let go as the depression worsened. So we had food and shelter, but I walked the streets of Philadelphia from end to end looking for work of any kind. I would have accepted anything. I even applied to the police and fire departments thinking that my service record would be a help there, but the age requirement was 25 years minimum and I was just 23. Almost the only want ads were for salesmen and, of course, I soon got caught up in the Electrolux vacuum cleaner promotion. I must have lugged that machine many miles around West Philadelphia and only sold one. Finally, I began concentrating on the employment offices because they had something to gain by getting me a job and I felt that I wasn't all alone in my search. Each morning I would make the circuit of the agencies as soon as they opened and sure enough one morning in a piddling little store-front place on Arch Street the manager said that he had just had a call from the Frederick H. Levey Company, 1223 Washington Avenue, South Philadelphia, but he warned me that it would be hard work because it was an ink manufacturing plant. Well, that didn't faze me and I was on the way as fast as I could go.
At the factory I was interviewed by the general superintendent and then given a sheet of paper with several problems in mathematics to solve. Apparently I passed O.K. because I was hired and told to come to work the next morning and my pay would be $22.00 a week. So next day I was shown how to operate a rolling mill where the combined dry and liquid materials are forced between two very smooth heavy rollers and the resulting smooth printing ink is collected by an apron having a razor-sharp edge pressed against the third, or offset, roller. The work not only was very hard, it was very dangerous as well. The factory was four stories high and every floor was completely carpeted with 1/4-inch-thick steel plates. All the materials came in steel drums or barrels and the mixing containers were steel tubs which had to be dragged from place to place so nothing but a steel floor could stand up under these conditions. Also machines, containers, tools, everything - including the floors - had to be cleaned constantly with kerosene and wiping cloths. Naturally the danger of fire was great so everything had to be kept clean and no wiping cloths allowed to collect anywhere as they could catch fire by spontaneous combustion, especially when one used cobalt dryers.
I marvel now at the way I learned to handle heavy loads, set the very critical tension on the mill rollers by hand, and endured having my hands in raw kerosene much of the time. I'm sure no one today could be found in this country who would stand up to it. The methods now used in ink and paint production have been modernised like everything else so it is no longer necessary to work under those conditions. The colored inks that we made were sold to the Curtis Publishing Company, the National Geographic, and the Cuneo Press of Chicago, in fact, to newspaper and magazine publishers all over the country. I found that inks are not as simple as they look. For example, the chrome yellow background color of the cover of the Geographic was actually made of twenty-eight different materials and it wasn't easy to make every batch match the standard in shading, viscosity and drying properties. Anyway, I had work and considered myself on of the lucky ones in those days. We could live on $22.00 a week whether Florence worked or not, so we settled down to enjoy Philadelphia. We could eat out sometimes and go to a show when a good one came to town. I never quite got all the ink off me from one end of the week to the other but we were living in a home together, and that was all we really needed to make us happy. In the late summer, Mother, Herbert and Virginia stopped in for a short visit during their vacation trip to the South.