Paint factory in Carteret during high school summers

Between my junior and senior year in high school I got a summer job at a paint factory in Carteret in one of the buildings along the railroad tracks across from the Holiday Inn (which was not there at the time).  There were 3 of us who got the jobs.  We had to get “working papers”.  I worked in the main warehouse while Frank Cundari worked in the lab.

• The factory main products were all kinds of paints that they produced in large vats that held a few hundred gallons of paint each.  The engineers would formulate the paint and take a sample to the lab to verify the color and other properties.  There were machines that then filled cans and closed the lid.  We put the cans into boxes and stacked them on pallets and moved them to the warehouse storage area.  We would later fill orders and move them to the loading dock for shipment.
• They also produced wallpaper paste which was a real messy job.  We had to put empty cans on this conveyor belt quickly that flowed under a machine that filled the cans with paste and then closed the lids.  But there was lots of spillage which was a real mess.  The machine would jam and can after can would roll down the ramp with glue everywhere.  And we had to clean it up.  Ugh!

However, our main job for the summer had to do with a very large number of paint cans of all sizes that the company had bought from another paint factory that closed.  We needed to empty the paint from the cans into a large vat so they could reformulate the paint so it could be sold.   What a tedious and messy job emptying pint, quart and gallons cans for many hours a day for many weeks into large vats.  I’m  sure I emptied tens of thousands of cans during that summer.  Several times during lunch we would bring the small cans outside and place them on the railroad tracks and then see them crushed as trains went by (with us far away).

One interesting thing I remember were the days they formulated paint that was used in toothpaste tubes.  The smell of the paint was so intense that everyone had to vacate the building into the parking lots while it was created.  I can still remember that smell.