[Jolly Amaranto]

Before WWII, my dad have various jobs from working in a leather jacket factory. He operated a band saw used to cut out pieces to be sewn together with other pieces. A stack of leather sheets with a pattern on top would be placed on the saw table where he would cut all around the pattern. One of his first big jobs after high school was for Allis Chalmers. One of his first assignments was operating a large drill press used for drilling out the center hole in castings for bogie wheels for tracked vehicles. After he punched in for his shift he would check out a freshly sharpened bit at the tool cage and mount it in his machine. Then wrestle a bogie wheel blank into a jig on the press and clamp it down. There was a cast hole in the blank that would be drilled to machine tolerances with the bit. After he was finished the blank went to a guy on a lathe who mounted it in a jig using the new hole. After a while it all became very monotonous. One time he forgot to clamp the blank down so it just spun around. The power feed on the drill press pushed the drill through the cast hole like a big screw. There was no way he could extract the bit. He removed it all from the machine and took it back to the tool pusher. "Something wrong with this drill bit sir!"