Hey Warren,
Speaking of paper rolls being dropped, here's a story you might not have heard. Before I came to Bethel, the night watchmen in the factory used to carry guns. You probably know that much of the paper the Society bought came from Canada in boxcars. It was often quite cold when it was unloaded, so they would stack it up on end, several rolls high (20'-30', depending on the ceiling height) and leave it there to reach room temperature so it could be run through the presses. As the paper would warm up, it often made cracking noises.
One night a particularly skittish watchman was walking through one of the storage floors at night. It was dark, and the rolls were warming up and making noise. I am not quite sure just how it happened, but shots were fired into the paper rolls. That was the end of the guns.
Tom
Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!
by Dogpatch 501 Replies latest jw friends
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Tom Cabeen
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tijkmo
The rest of our presentation was Pure Praire Leauge, Poco, NGDG, and Eagles
the eagles !!!
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darth frosty
Y'no its always great to hear stories from the house of God. Richard Devine was my table head and one time he told us the story of the great apostasy. It pretty much confirmed all that has been stated here. What surprised me after hearing both sides, is his earnest and frank recollection of the facts.
Tom your paper roll, night watchmen story reminded me of one of my own. I had switched watchmen duties with a friend of mine. being a good bethelite I had nothing to do that night so me and my roomate decide to go over to the factory and have some fun. The watchmen duty as you make your rounds have to punch a key clock at various locations. Well coming accross the bridge from one bldg to another was a key punch and where they stacked paper rolls. I crouched behind a roll and my roomate climed to the top of one. As my unsuspecting friend came accross the bridge, I ran out from behind the roll yelling and my roomate jumped down from ontop of the roll. I dont think that many F u's had ever been uttered in the factory.
As far as the Karl Klein stories, I used to do a killer klein impression. I had to stop doing it because to properly mimic his constrained tone you need to swallow your tongue and the roof of your mouth.
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Dogpatch
I did a watchman night in the factory (as many of us did) one night, and a young kid broke in on the first floor at the very moment I looked down! I freaked. His lower body was sticking out of the window as he slid in on the first floor. Probably had a gun. I thought (New York was much more dangerous then) I was on 6th floor of bulding 4? (which floor was the tiny one next to the Manhattan Bridge? OMG I'm losing it!)
Instinct kicked in (not the WT's but MINE) and I was filled with anger at them breaking into God's House, so I LEAPED into the stairwell and bounced off 6 floors of walls to hit the bottom in less than 30 seconds. (We trained ourselves to do 3 steps at a time or more, using the handrails. OKAY, I did, but fess up brothas! Making yer way around Brooklyn Heights in seconds was an art. Training for the subway.
Anyway, I was unarmed and had no idea what I was going to do; more of a 9/11 kinda reaction (OMG they've killed our baby!!) which I suffered from as well. (Didn't help that my daily VIEW from my window was the Twin Towers for 6 years.)
I busted through the door and must have caught him by surprise, as he SHOT out through the exit. Some Puerto Rican kid looking for stuff. Filed a report.
Paper rolls popping was unnerving if you weren't used to it. It was worse when the crab operators dropped a $500 roll of bible paper (which is actually CIGARETTE paper, folks!) and the top 6 inch crust popped open, ruining half the roll. We did a great job of ruining the remaining half.
DON'T get me started on Wheelock and his punishments! Cabeen?
"Don't try to guess what this is for, Cabeen!"
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Dogpatch
hmmm... will this copy? WARNING... old man tinkering here...
http://www.freeminds.org/bethel/toons/convert1.htm
http://www.freeminds.org/bethel/toons/convert2.htm
the
Pressroom Conversion
Enigma (part II)The players in this drama are as follows:
Calvin Chyke and Richard Wheelock(factory committee) (Colonel Klink and Sargeant Shultz, for you "Hogan's Heros" fans)
Tom "Cab" Cabeen, Jim "Peach" Petrie and Randy "Watt" Watters(pressroom overseers) (angels, of course!)
Calvin Chyke, Max Larson and Richard Wheelock (factory committee on the 8th floor, above Pressroom)(won't touch that one) and Ralph Lindem (purchasing overseer) and special guest star Dean Songer (former NASA "genius")
Scenario: Bethel decides to go modern with four-color artwork in their publications, though the rest of the world has been doing it for ages. Problem is, they have millions invested in huge M.A.N. presses that print with outdated lead plates and in one or two colors!
Solution? TKS, a Japanese company, invades Bethel and says they can convert them all to offset, for a mere $1 million per press. Figure $60 million for 60 presses (includes Watchtower Farm and one or two other branches.)
Alternate Solution: Buy new Harris offset presses and sell the M.A.N. presses for much better quality and cheaper, too.
Factory Committee's solution: "We can't just throw away these giant presses!"
Dean Songer:Look! We've got all these M.A.N. folders and we can't just throw them away! It would cost $60 million to buy new presses!
Ralph Lindem:You had better figure freight, too...
Calvin Chyke:We've got to convert! It's our only hope: Get TKS on the phone, Ralph--get a bid on 120 offset units...
Ralph:But Cal, don't you realize that Cabeen says we can do it all for less than 5 million [early projections]?
Chyke:What does this mean?[duh!]
Ralph:It means that we can do our work cheaper, and with offset quality!
Chyke:Well, even so, the dryers are too expensive--we'd have to buy 500 Tec-Turns [steel rollers that redirect the web to new locations]...
Ralph:You could run the webs up here [8th floor, with all the "hot air," where Chyke and Wheelock worked]!
Chyke:Then we wouldn't have any way to cool them... HEY! Was that a rip at me??
(Wheels lamenting his bruised ego): How in the world did Cabeen come up with just $8 million for conversion to offset?
Chyke with groupies:NOW LOOK. We've got a first class print operation, and we don't want no new equipment.
Tom Combs (Job Press Overseer): But sir! Reason dictates that we've at least got to improve our printing of the handbills!
Chyke:You call that printing? Why you $#%&* goldbrick, you don't know the first thing about printing!
Combs:What do you mean? I'm the overseer of Job Press!
Chyke: You poor kid! You HAVE been through Hell!
Now Wheels, Cabeen's overseer, doesn't want this money-saving project to go to Cabeen's head...
Wheels: AND WE'RE NOT GOING OFFSET, CABEEN, SO GET THIS OUT OF YOUR HEAD!
It was, after all, a pie in the face of the factory committee...
So the conversion to offset was finally accepted, saving them $48 million. The "Harris project" was Cabeen's baby. From that point forward, we spent the rest of our days at Bethel talking about the "Great Apostasy"!
Wheels attempted to carefully shroud any factory committee projects from Cabeen from thenceforth, and often gave him a job order along with the cryptic statement...
Wheels:Now, DON'T try to guess what this is for, Cabeen!
[What You'll Never See Dept.]
onward to the witch hunt (the "Great Apostasy")
back to Bethel pages
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Dogpatch
the ideal table at Bethel, with head and tail:
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wschroeder
What a riot Randy...!!!!!
This is the first I've seen these.
When I arrived to work in the factory, or maybe it was Bethel, we were told to do our jobs and not make recommendations for changes. Bethel was already a well-oiled and efficient machine with much smarter people at the helm.
The first thing I was told when I started making recommendations to my overseers in the factory electrical dept. was that things had run very smoothly until that time, and under the auspices of those much more qualified, and I needed to have more experience and seniority before I my recommendations would be taken seriously. 6 months later I would get an important call and a dramatic shift would take place in how I operated within the department. 6 months after that point they began saving a lot more money.
Apostate knowhow was the sublimation of Bethel from within in more ways than might be imagined.
Randy and Tom,
Were you there when the new 4-color Hantscho press(es) arrived. Also, were you part of the process to convert all the MAN presses to offset? This was a conversion project to make 2 MAN letterpress into 1 MAN offset. Also, some new 4 color Hiedelbergs started showing themselves.
In 81-82 they bought a new high speed burst binder and tried to connect it to the WOODHOE (through the floor). I think the integration was a major flop. At the time I was developing a barcode reader for the new highspeed gatherer, that not only would read marks at the folds to "know" if the signature was in the correct bin and not inverted, but also read the collated signatures to check for correct order and kick out bad combos without shutting down the machine.
The presses were already producing "burst" sheets to allow glue flow at the folds. I was already having meetings to discuss the extra printing marks necessary at the creases, but soon I decided I was pretty bored of Bethel at this point and would leave in some months. With most of my confidants gone, and only a huge influx of newboys to deal with. It was like starting over and at the same time the "chill" was in effect. It was very risky to think out loud.
Warren -
biff mcfly
This is my first post, so bear with me. I wanted to comment on the Kline comment about the Mongoloid baby. I too remember everyone being upset about the comment and how amazed I was that he actually apologized for it later. I've been out for a couple years now and have been shunned by the "theocratic" side of my family, while my dad, brother, and most of the other "hangers-on" continue to talk with me.
Some random assorted memories from Bethel:
1)my friend from Florida, Dave Hausen, gettting drunk at a party i hosted, climbing out my window in the Bossert (I had an old..huge..sprawling apartment..one of the units before it was renovated) he climbed out onto the scaffolding and up a few stories...I had only been at Bethel a few weeks and can't believe that I never heard anything from anyone about that fiasco.
2)that same friend, Dave Hausen, upon leaving Bethel, stuck a knife into a letter to his roommate which he had placed on his desk. The note (paraphrased said) "Ed, take this knife and continue the wanton murder and mayhem that I have engaged in at Bethel". As you might have guessed by now, Dave was a complete nut, but not a murderer though. A housekeeper found the letter..and knife..turned him in..and to make a ridiculously long story short..George Couch gave a thirty minute lecture a few days later warning us boys on how rock music (Dave confessed to being a Led Zeppelin fan) can twist us into knife wielding maniacs.
3)does anyone remember the whole Bethel family marching over the Brooklyn Bridge, down to City hall in 1987-1988 to make our voices known regarding the city's decision to vote on the proposed apartment high-rise on Columbia? I was working night shift and remember being dragged out of my bed by my roommate to engage in the march on city hall.
4) Getting drunk in our rooms before some special lunch. Was it the Gilead Grad lunch? everyone got out of work early and went to some private party or another to consume mass quantities of alcohol. I always had plenty of booze and liked to invite new boys over to see them stagger down to lunch. One boy fell down several flights of stairs in the Bossert on one occassion. I know...i am evil.
5) Having my music collection analyzed by the Bethel police. While I was in the Bossert..which was like living in another country during the remodel, i never had any problems with Bethel spies. Then I moved to 124 Columbia and all hell broke loose with my music collection. I was summoned on multiple occassions to meet with some dick or another to discuss my music. I'll never forget some ass, can't remember his name, but I believe he was George Couch's number two boy...asking me about my Pink Floyd The Wall album..as a fan you may recall some disturbing images from the cover. It didn't matter to them when I told them I didn't listen to my albums because my turntable hadn't had a needle for over a year...the fact that they might demonize someone was the issue:) They insisted that it was up to me on whether I got rid of them, but made it clear that the shite would hit the fan when I didn't. I hid them somewhere and told them I threw them out..which caused my roommate a nervous breakdown, he was sure he would be implicated. Later they met with me to find out my reasons for throwing out the albums. Since "because you F'ing told me to" didn't sound very good, I lied and told them that the spirit had moved me.
6)The best of all. I was a servant in a South Bronx KH. When I put in my notice to leave, my PO , Bob Jones, who was also a heavy in the Service Dept, had a meeting with me and told me I would not be re-appointed to be a ministerial servant because I had made it known that I was not happy at Bethel. He actually told me that I must be committing secret sins which were grieving the holy spirit, since no one could serve at Bethel and not be happy..I swear to God he told me this. I told him, I wasn't sinning...nothing big anyway..I just hated NY city and the Bethel lifestyle. Sure enough, they sent a letter back to my cong. stating that I could not be recommended to serve as a MS since I had left under bad circumstances.....the next week I got a letter from the WT thanking me for my loyal service..geeszzzzzhhh!
I'll post more later if anyone finds this crap interesting.
later.
Jim Abbott
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AllTimeJeff
So while Ray Franz ("anointed") and Ed Dunlap ("other sheep") were assigned (by Karl Adams, Writing Department Overseer and also "other sheep") to write study articles and study books, Karl was assigned to write articles for Awake about things like dung beetles and banana trees. Other writers told me that it used to burn him up with envy. So he played a key role in the 1980 "Franz/Dunlap" incident, thus eliminating his rivals. Finally, he got to write some "outstanding" Watchtower study articles. My favorite was his classic about "tacking into the wind." In that article, he destroyed any credibility the WTS may have had by revealing their secret: that no one at WT HQ had divine direction, nor any clue as to what they were talking about; that they were all just feeling their way along like blind mice looking for their tails. Or is it "the blind leading the blind?" That was adapted from one of his service talks. (I'll bet Karl Adams was ready to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge when that one got published.) Yes, Karl was one of a kind, a true "Watchtower man."
This is what rocks the boat of every JW, to hear stories like this. From then on, you must make a choice: feed the dissonance and keep fooling yourself, or stop the bus! I've got to get off. Loonies!! Bethel cured me of the Watchtower. Once you lose all respect for these old men in diapers, it's over for any serious religious experience. You are simply remaining in a stupid, poorly run corporate bureaucracy with no imagination and no hope. There is life outside the WT, folks!
Well said Randy. What did it for me is seeing the GB while at Gilead. It was amazing how little they thought of their own example. They truly walk around like they own the place. (well, I guess they do) When you see Cary Barber still flirting with young sisters at the age of 100 (he hit on my ex wife in his charming old man kind of way during our tour of Brooklyn) and hear Anthony Morris drop the names in his concluding prayer of the annual meeting of Freddy Franz and Nathan Knorr several times, you realize what you are up against. The JW religion is designed to deify the Governing Body. We were taught (indoctrinated) at Gilead to respect and cherish our religions past. We were told that we were going to "walk the same streets that Russell did" when visiting Brooklyn. Bethel is the cookiest place I have ever seen, ever.
Mark Noumair recommended to our Gilead class that we read Karl Klein's life story. I had heard Klein give several DC talks through the years and after meeting him thought the man a genuine kook. But because he was so "human", we future missionaries were told there was a lot to learn from his mini-memoir. The message I got from that article was that I could do a whole lot of sinning and be an idiot and it was still ok. Then I had to watch other people who didn't get away with being idiots because they weren't true "Watchtower men".
Great thread and comments!. Thanks to you truly courageous ex Bethelites of old for having the courage and honesty to leave and for sharing your experiences. I want to add as a comment that I come across several JW's or ex JW's who are totally guilt stricken because they still think they have left Noah's Ark and they can feel the rain. Sharing the true real experiences of Bethel really helps all who are leaving or are thinking of leaving.
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AllTimeJeff
4) Getting drunk in our rooms before some special lunch. Was it the Gilead Grad lunch? everyone got out of work early and went to some private party or another to consume mass quantities of alcohol. I always had plenty of booze and liked to invite new boys over to see them stagger down to lunch. One boy fell down several flights of stairs in the Bossert on one occassion. I know...i am evil.
Oh yeah!! I forgot about this. There were actually a couple of special lunches in 2005. The first one was in June (?) 05 when the Walkill factory was dedicated. Everyone got out at 11:00 to drink! We Gileadites were told it was a Bethel tradition for special occasions. I couldn't tell you how happy I was... lol. My ex and I had a glass of Cab with Lawerence Bowen and his wife and 2 other couples from our class. At lunch, Gerrit Losch presided, AND HE GIGGLED THROUGH HIS ENTIRE COMMENTS!! We were laughing our @$$es off at our table. Naturally, whatever biblical comments that supported wine and happiness were used by Losch. I am sure that Losch took full advantage of that Bethel tradition all day long.
That was one of the few fun days I had at Gilead, and yeah, it took alcohol to get there........
