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When
I worked for Bank of New York -- BNY was/is a huge stock transfer
agent; it's a very lucrative business -- anyway, it was the Bank's
duty as agent to forward the various annual reports from hundreds of
companies to shareholders. Every year, around March and April, the
first-class mailroom would be extremely swamped with big envelopes
of various weights; processing them was a major pain in the ass. As
a "special" mail clerk, handling only registered,
certified, express, and special-handling mail, I was not required to
participate in the craziness involved in processing the first-class
annual report mailings, but I pitched in nonetheless to help out. |
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So
around 7pm each evening I would go to the 2nd floor at 110
Washington Street in Lower Manhattan, and pick up a huge dolly full
of mail trays with the envelopes containing annual reports
that had been stuffed all day by temps. While the work sucked, one
of the side advantages was that I had access to all kinds of annual
reports, including the annual reports of all the major defense
companies.
Salivating
After
helping out with the sealing and adding postage to the mail, I'd
sneak back up to the 2nd floor and help myself to the defense
company reports. As a certified "Missile Man," or more
appropriately as "Dick the Missile Man," these reports
were almost as appealing as raw pornography. Like drooling over
x-rated actresses, I would salivate over the erotic pictures of
fighters, bombers, tanks, aircraft carriers, artillery systems,
bombs, bullets, rockets, helos, and of course, missiles. Eventually
I cut out whole bunch of the photos and pasted them into a collage
on a poster board, and slept soundly and securely for many years under
a full wall of military hardware photos, as opposed to say, a Farah
Fawcett-Majors poster. (I had her on the wall in my teens. What a
terrible and profoundly tawdry influence SHE was.)
This
was right at the dawn of and early stages of the Reagan defense
build-up (oh those multi-hundred-billion dollar defense
appropriations years!) and all the big defense contractors, since
reduced to a mere handful, put out splashy and graphically thrilling
reports. Many of the companies have been absorbed and combined, but
back then there were several big defense contractors, all waiting to
wage the finishing stages of the worthy Reagan-directed Cold War.
Bombs
Away
Lockheed,
McDonnell Douglas, Grumman, General Dynamics (Electric Boat), TRW,
Rocketdyne, Rockwell, Northrop, Fairchild Aviation, FMC, Ingalls,
Sikorsky, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, Westinghouse, General
Electric, Honeywell, and Newport News among others, all of these
companies, their annual reports were Dick the Missile Man's
equivalent of Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse, Blak Skwak, Pictorial,
&ct magazines. And while the arousal from these glossy war
machine depictions wasn't and still isn't sexual, there's nothing
quite like a carefully staged and beautifully photographed shot of
an SSBN surface-cruising on a sunlit sea, ready to wreak havoc and
death half a world away. Nothing like an M-1 tank rolling off the
page and into the twisted grandeur of your imagination.
--
Dick Acorn
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