A Job You Are Bound to Love: Working at Dillingham's Book Bindery in Bangor Maine

"Here, Take this over to Dillingham's Book Bindery," said the man at the State Employment Office in Bangor, Maine, as he handed me a job referral.

I walked down Harlow Street to Franklin where the bindery was located. My palms were sweaty and my heart danced a tango as I climbed the worn stairs to the second floor. An elderly man showed me around the place. The building was old; a 19th-century workshop straight out of Dickens. The air was heavy with a sweet but harsh smell. Four or five women and a couple of men were bent over their work. I don't remember a thing the old man said. When he finished the tour, I thanked him and left.

I didn't want to work at Dillingham's. I called the old man up and told him so. I was eighteen and figured that jobs were as plentiful as copies of Jaws at book sales. For three months, I didn't work at all. When I couldn't find another job, I went to Vermont to do volunteer work at the church my brother had recently started.A few months later, in early April of 1975, I returned to Bangor, Maine. The first morning at home, I walked down to the employment office again. I ended up talking to the same employment counselor I had talked to the previous Autumn.

"Here, Take this over to Dillingham's Book Bindery," he said, as he handed me a job referral.

As Yogi Berra would say, "It was deja vu all over again." I walked down Harlow Street and around the corner to Dillingham's. The old man was gone. He had sold Dillingham's to a firm that owned newspapers, magazines, binderies, radio and television stations.

The place still smelled. I was still nervous and not terribly interested in the job, but I was seven months older-and wiser. I took the job. Derek Gibbons, the manager, was a kindly old gentleman from England. He had worked in the British Museum, in a special climate-controlled room, unrolling and preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls. He took me over to a table piled high with National Geographics, medical journals, legal journals and other publications and showed me my first job.