at the end of november, the berks encore senior center in wernersville hosted a poetry reading for this project. willie kramer from the first volume of poetry in 2015 visited as a featured guest, which he kindly did a number of times last year as well.
and like he's done before, he brought a lot of samples of different kinds of leather for different purposes, in addition to tools and upkeep supplies for them, from when he worked at garden state tanning in fleetwood for many decades in his life.
willie and his wife gerry are also members of berks community strollers, the wanderers of berks county, and the berks community hiking club. this is how i met them a few years ago, and while out on a trail, willie first told me about his tannery career.
during this particular reading, we ended up getting into conversations about other kinds of jobs which seniors in attendance had. one man used to drive tractor trailers up and down the east coast, sometimes to miami, and carried produce. he had a lot of stories about how people don't realize the difficulty in accurately and safely driving big rigs. he also had a horror movie-like recollection of a woman chasing a man behind a restaurant in the south with a butcher knife, when he stepped out of his truck and was looking for a place to get a meal. it unfortunately had to do with racism and segregation, at the time.
another man mentioned that he worked in the kitchen at the wernersville state hospital, which is the campus of where this senior center is located. and a man who lived in maryland for a long time worked behind the scenes in the newspaper industry in running the actual presses.
nancy speicher courteously offered assistance with most of the photography for the morning.
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