Atlanta Confidential/1960 Part 1

Confessions of a Meter Reader

After so many years of living in small towns, our move to the Atlanta suburbs in 1957 presented my parents, brother and sister- and me- with more than a few challenges. My dad was a construction superintendent and oversaw the construction of the Atlanta Raceway and the first permanent control tower at Hartsfield (later Atlanta International) Airport.

As always, we could expect to move when these projects were finished, so my parents rented a small house in College Park. Our latest hometown (the twenty -first rental in ten years) seemed like paradise. Not only were there three Atlanta television channels, a mile walk took me to to nearby East Point where you could catch an Atlanta Transit System bus.  Some of my rowdy friends would simply jump on a slow- moving rail car and “hitch” to the city on the tracks that ran through College Park.  The buses ran on electricity-not on rails as earlier, but with overhead electric power cables connected by flexible transmission rods that were in contact with the overhead cables. Though we seldom went into downtown Atlanta, we knew we could!

College Park High School (the twenty- first school I had attended) was incredibly good, too. CPHS was virtually new and the teachers were well- schooled (a novelty in my experience). My first- grade teacher, during a brief stay in Boiling Springs, Virginia, was Miss Williford, a red-haired beauty just out of college. She was the only teacher who left a lasting (as you can see) impression on me, that is, until my College Park High days. There, I would experience real education at the hands of teachers who had read books other than their text  books and who had attended colleges like Georgia Tech, Agnes Scott and Emory University.  Some even held master’s degrees in a real field of academic study like mathematics, physics or English literature-not just in Education.

The tree-lined streets were all named for colleges and universities. Most of the students were children, like me, who were the first in their family to grow up urban. At first, we lived across the street from Georgia Military Academy, now Woodward Academy. It was a novelty to see the cadets marching around on the parade ground in their gray wool uniforms. Especially when one of the cadets would faint from the heat-everyone simply stepped over them. I was enrolled in the Junior ROTC at College Park High as well. We wore actual World War II army surplus uniforms, olive drab jackets with “pink” (tan in color) gaberdine trousers in winter and khakis in warm weather. I made the football team and seemed destined to have a “normal” high school experience.

Then came disaster. Eisenhower was president and the post-war boom in construction came to a halt with the Recession of 1957. Most commercial construction simply stopped. My father found himself unemployed for the first time in his life. We moved to cheaper digs as my dad eked out a living, doing cost estimates and bids for a construction firm that could only pay him by the job. Those were few and far between. My mother and I both found part -time jobs. Although I managed to play baseball and football, my life increasingly revolved around work in grocery stores, the Woolworth Five- and- Dime and mowing lawns. We moved to even cheaper digs, an old two -story one built about 1900. It was depressingly set across the street from the railroad track and was the last house in town. It was so scary looking “trick-or-treat”-ers and vacuum cleaner salesmen avoided it.

College Park was solidly middle class, home to many of the people who worked for Delta Airlines, the Ford Motors Assembly Plant in next-door Hapeville or with the airport authority. The rumble of the jets taking off disrupted class discussions, Sunday morning sermons and family suppers. And dates. My ninth-grade girl friend lived next to one of the runways and the vibration of planes taking off would cause drinks, vases and windup alarm clocks to dance off their perches and crash to the floor.  Television signals were scrambled- -usually as Sheriff Matt Dillon was about to draw his pistol on TV.

I left high school with only half-formed ideas of attending college and with little forethought applied for a job with the city of Atlanta’s Water Department. It was my first full-time job. And, it was an adventure—though far from glamorous. I was hired to read water meters. As the new guy, I was to fill-in for other meter readers who were on vacation, so I never followed the same route twice -nor did I know where I would be working until I arrived at the Water Department Offices mornings about 6:00 AM.

The office was in the majestic Gothic -revival city hall built in 1929-still an Atlanta landmark today. Thankfully, at that time of day there were no panhandlers or drug addicts wandering around-much to my anxious mother’s relief. All readers began their work early during the summer months because Atlanta temperatures often rose into the nineties by midday and occasionally passed the 100-degree mark. A speedy reader could be finished by early afternoon if he started early enough.

This was not what you are imagining. And, it was not what I expected in 1960. Our equipment was simple. The only tool we needed was a meter reader’s stick, which was an aluminum tube about 38 inches long. On one end was a three- pound brass hook.  On the other end was a rubber wedge, used to wipe the meter lens off so the dial or dials could be read. The most important function of the weighted tube was self-defense. 

“Aha”, you say, at last realizing that there are dogs in the streets, dogs alarmed by every pedestrian. Dogs hungry for the entertainment of chasing mailmen and water meter readers. Menacing German shepherds, pitiless-eyed  pit bulls, vocal beagles (the worst because they stalked readers in pairs or packs), tall, hoarse -voiced shepherds, square -headed boxers with chains for collars, and of course the assorted terriers and lapdogs and -oh!-the  sneaky Chows (silent until they were close enough to breath on you in the first light of dawn).  Retrievers-labs and goldens-could not have cared less as along as we fed them. We carried dog treats in our pockets. 

You cannot imagine how reassuring it was to have a weighted stick in your hand. They were weapons.  Some readers, though instructed not to do so, also carried pocket weapons as well-the odd blackjack or switch blade, or a small club. One elderly reader even carried a pistol in his pocket, contrary to Water Department policy.  Mornings and afternoons, when we were all in the Water Department offices, we shared updates on where and when rabid dogs had been seen or had bitten some hapless person who would have to endure painful shots or contract hydrophobia. Older readers seemed to enjoy describing to me the death throes of anyone bitten by a rabid dog (or in one case , a racoon).

 My day would begin about five AM.  I had to walk to East Point to catch the bus to get to City Hall (near the Capitol Building).  I had no car and my $265-a-month salary offered not even a whisper that a car might be in my future. So, you say you have seen guys riding around in Water Department pickup trucks. One guy drives, another gets out to read the meters. Not the case in Atlanta in 1960. We were each given our aluminum stick and two bus tokens a day. Utilizing bus transfer slips, we could get to and from every part of Atlanta, anytime of the day or night, using a single token -so long as we did not exit the bus.

The second token brought us back to City Hall where we sat down at a huge table to check over our figures and expand on any notes we had taken (“car covering meter,” “street closed due to fire trucks,” “body lying on meter” and so on) and turned in our day’s readings  and headed for home- or rather got on another bus that took us home.  

Besides our hooked (and weighted) wand, we had to carry a canvas and cardboard- bound record book about 6 inches tall and 12 inches long. The thickness depended upon the number of meters in the route, each represented by a single page held in place by locking posts, similar to a timekeeper’s log book.  In it, as we walked, we entered the reading taken at each meter on the day’s route and calculated the usage as we walked.

 Think back to those guys you imagined riding around in a city pick up with the air conditioner on full blast.  We walked. And we walked, and when we finished, we had to make our way back to a bus stop, sometimes back at the point where we began the day.  I have personally read 1,400 meters in one day. You would have to try it to appreciate the challenges involved. On the first day I weighed 142 pounds. Five days later I had lost ten pounds. Meter readers left notes in the book to indicate where water was available, and where vicious dogs roamed. Water is too heavy to carry along. Occasionally, on hot days, a resident would see me coming and rush out to offer a glass of water or to call an ambulance.

There were assorted dangers. In some neighborhoods, the water meters were the distribution drop-off stations for moonshine. I stopped to read a meter in front of a barber shop one day and was mystified why everyone came out-customers and barbers- to watch me open the meter box. When I lifted the heavy lid, I was startled to see half a dozen quart jars of amber liquid and knew immediately it was a cache of moonshine. Frightened as any sensible person would be, I dropped the iron lid into the box, shattering all six jars.  I walked-no ran-as quickly as I could to a city bus that had stopped just ahead and jumped on.  I skipped over several blocks of my day’s route, and simply reentered the amounts recorded for the previous month by the reader for whom I was substituting.  Not quite eighteen years old (I fibbed about my age to get the job), I was quite pleased with myself, imagining I had acted with presence of mind and decisiveness in the face of imminent danger.

People will steal water if they believe they can get away with it. So, as meter readers, we were trained to spot the miscreants who sought to cheat the Water Department. And we did it like the highly trained professionals we were. We turned them in when we uncovered the most obvious cheating schemes. Institutional loyalty might sound like an oxymoron to today’s adolescents, but it was ingrained in our happy little corps of about a dozen meter readers. Any negligence on our part would be easily discovered by our supervisors, so with nothing to gain, we made a fetish of honesty. The cat and mouse contest between meter readers and water thieves was our entertainment in a career likely to be otherwise boring at times. As always, the lower the stakes, the greater the competition.

The old mechanical meters were driven by the very water they were measuring. Lock the needle on the dial in place (with a pair of pliers) and the water pressure would strip the hand free from its stem. Then, you could adjust the loose needle so that it never registered use above the allotted monthly minimum. Clever, until a reader opened the glass cover with a flip of his stick and tried to clean the mud off the dial. This would cause a loose needle to move freely, demonstrating that the meter was broken. If the homeowner tried this again, he got a visit from the Atlanta Police Department. And, some cheaters would simply forget to advance the needle for the next month’s reading…water thieves were fundamentally stupid since there was no escape route!

Another technique for avoiding paying for the water you used worked like this. A new house is going up next door and the water meter has already been installed so the workmen have water. While the earth is disturbed, our water thief could simply run a water line from a point on the home side of his service line to connect to a point on the line to the new house.  It would cut the thief’s bill in half-unless his neighbor had a pool or a terrible leak, in which case our cheater was stuck when he had to share the bill with his unaware neighbor. Not exactly a game for the sharp witted.

Another challenge was swimming pools. Keeping one full could be costly, so there were alternative sources you could tap.  You could connect a hose to your neighbor’s outdoor spigot while they were at work or on vacation;  or, you could remove one of the hose covers on a fire hydrant, drive a wooden plug in with a threaded water pipe inserted, attach a spigot and hose, take a wrench to the control on top and you were off to the races.  Free water! -and who was to know since fire hydrants were not metered.  The city soon came up with a “fix.” They allowed pool owners to rent a “fire-hydrant key” to use the nearest fire hydrant to fill their pool for a fifteen- dollar fee.  Most took the bait—after all there were not many pools then and water thieves usually lived within a few feet of the hydrant. They were soon under suspicion.

One of my routes began at 14^th Avenue and ran along Spring, Peachtree and West Peachtree Streets as far out as Pershing Point. Imagine walking up and down each of these, as well as those streets crossing east and west in 90 degree weather. There were big buildings I had never encountered before on my routes, insurance companies and bank buildings, hotels and restaurants. I was unprepared for the enormous amount of water these places used and felt intimidated by the responsibility. Whereas the average family might consume twenty or twenty- five gallons a month (much less than today’s thirsty homes), a high rise might draw 10,000 gallons in a week. Manufacturing plants used many times more. And the dials were small. So small. Errors were likely. I made an error once, recording 40,000 gallons used instead of 4,000. I heard about this from the head of the Water Department who had received a burning complaint.

Despite all the incentives for personal development, government employment convinced me I should attend college after all. I resigned from the Water Department in August after a last-minute acceptance by West Georgia College, a former Agricultural and Mechanical School cum junior college suddenly inflated to senior college status by the baby boom.  The Water Department head urged me to stay on, tempting me with promises of promotion to head water meter reader someday. I was not to be dissuaded by flattery and the promise of riches.

 I had saved a little money, about half the cost of the first quarter of college. I would wing it. West Georgia allowed me to enroll paying only half my tuition and board. I had no clue what would happen at midterm when I ran out of money. When it was discovered that I could both read and do long division, there was an all- out effort by the college to keep me aboard.  I was able to finish thanks to the good-hearted people who helped me work my way through four years. When I completed my degree, I accepted a teaching job in the public schools. Before college, I earned $265 per month. As a teacher my pay was $300 a month. Education is critical to success, right?

Coming next: Atlanta Confidential/1960, Part 2: Men and the Mail in Underground Atlanta