Great piece of film making. It’s as much a lost art as the work in the ax factory.
I’ve been through Oakland, Maine. It’s near Ogguster (the capital) and Waterville (a somewhat large but somewhat downscale city). The Messalonskee Stream is pictured and mentioned in the video. It widens out after that and becomes a creditable lake. The population of Oakland has doubled since this video was made, but that’s not saying much. About 6,000 people live there. There are a lot of towns in Maine with about that many people bothering their neighbors in them.
These fellers all have Yankee-sounding names. Maine was like that back in the day. It’s not like 1965 is ancient history or anything. These guys are old enough to be my grandparents, or maybe an older uncle. I worked in construction with guys like these when I was young and they were looking forward to a gold watch, a two week-vacation in Florida, and their complimentary myocardial infarction. They’re hardly mysterious to me.
Of course axes used to matter more in the twentieth century than the twenty-first. Firewood for heating fuel is still a thing here, but it’s dying out now. In 1965, I’ll bet lots of Mainers felled and split their own. I’ll bet Earl and Elwood did.
If that factory was still open, I’m pretty certain they could be selling fancy axes for beaucoup bucks on the interwebs. Making axes is one of the intertunnel’s favorite things for cubicle dwellers who want to feel outdoorsy for a few minutes. They watch videos of people making fancy knives and axes and medieval armor, and then go back to working on their fluorescent light tans.
People might snicker when the narrator mentions that Elwood makes $1.25 an hour making axes. Not many would bother to do the arithmetic to figure out what kind of travesty that might be. The narrator certainly seemed to think it was some kind. He mentions that Elwood will leave to get a buck bump in his wage just by pushing a broom in a Connecticut factory. I’ll bet he’s obliquely referring to the Collins Ax factory in Connecticut. I’ve been in the Collins Ax factory building. It’s offices for interior decorators and dentists and stuff now. I also own a machete made in the Collins Ax factory, that I bought in Guatemala, but that’s a story for another day. Stanley Tools bought Collins, I think, and closed it down in 1966, so Elwood would have been out in the cold anyway, and far away from home to boot.
The median wage for an individual in 1965 was $3,360 per year. If you worked 2,000 hours per year, that’s about $1.68 an hour. I’ll bet everyone at the ax factory worked more than 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, so while they weren’t getting rich, they weren’t starving compared to everyone else or anything. And it was cheaper to live in Oakland, Maine than most of the rest of the country. Still is.
So if Elwood worked 2,000 hours a year at that rate, he’d make $24,360, if we adjusted for inflation. The median income in Oakland Maine a year or two ago was $34,934, although it’s lower for women, at $24,286 per year. That’s probably because there are only two types of jobs in Oakland. Construction, usually heavy, and being clerks in schools, hospitals, and the government. I’ll leave it to you to decide who does what.
So work like the Pioneer Ax factory had to be shipped overseas. It would have been fairly simple to update the processes shown in the video to increase production, increase wages, and make life somewhat easier for the workers. How hard would it have been to bump Elwood’s wages to match today’s median in Oakland? Not hard. But it was more profitable for a few people who farm mahogany in skyscrapers to ship all the factories overseas, to make axes in conditions far worse than shown by the banks of the Messalonskee, for slave wages, and then sell very shitty axes in Home Depots nationwide. The payoff for this creative destruction was the creation of lots of paper-shuffling jobs that pay less than the crummy wages mentioned in the video, but that anyone can do, because they’re not doing any real work.
We didn’t choose, but whoever chose for us chose very, very wrong.
2 Responses
I’d pay good money to see Earl & Elwood make a per diem run through hell to tune the furnaces that now burn the paper-hangers who closed their factory in the mid-Sixties. I’d even pay for the granulated borax flux.
Excuse me–“whoever did it”–how about taking a look at Bill Clinton. He and Jimmy do good opened the world, gave away the Panama Canal, freed up the airlines to wreak havoc on the world (de-regulation), attempted to open the borders and created havoc with our young people who did not have college educations. When Bill Clinton created his “let it burn” policy and forced thousands of men out of the timber industry he was heard saying something about getting jobs at McDonalds. They may have come along in 1977, so they were certainly not the first, but boy they sure gave free license to the world’s worst offenders! And, here they looked so virtuous!