Novel, Part #6

Here's a tiny bit of Chapter 3 leftover from yesterday's post, which details the founding of our protagonist's hometown, Papersville, New York. Read the entire beginning of my as-yet-unnamed novel here.

The rest of the people who lived in my hometown came in the 1940s, when music was moving from the front porch to the big-time. Sheets’ sons took most of the credit for this. They had both attended Yale and took regular trips into Manhattan and even one vacation down south, where they saw the blues movement unfolding. They wisely saw the need for record albums – or what were then referred to as “disc records” – to be more widely available, or rather, available. Sammy and Larry made their senior thesis a proposal to the executives at Universal/Decca Records and pitched it to them in person, without an appointment, on a sunny day high above the streets of Manhattan in a skyscraper office that secretly boggled the minds of the two young entrepreneurs. They didn’t flinch and before three months had passed, ground was being broken on a plant that would supply millions of great songs to generations of young groovers.

Well, anyway, I wasn’t interested in working at the paper mills, and my dad was very understanding of this. It seems he secretly harnessed a grudge against his father-in-law for giving him this life, even though this is something he never would have told us. He allowed me to take my first jobs as a lawn mower and helped me get my first few jobs by doing yard work for several of his mill co-workers. One day I happened to notice a sign on the road outside of the record plant that they were hiring a junior grass cutter. I applied, got the job, and, I suppose, this is where our story begins.