I don’t know all about him since pedigrees in an operation like Lippit’s did not very much matter, but once, quite a while back, I think he drove semis. He still says every so often, “There’s just two things makes me sick. The smell of diesels and the smell of greasy spoon diners.”

With that kind of an attitude he didn’t push trucks very long. Though he stayed in the union. He must have picked a good one, and at the right time, because he never pushed trucks any more but told others to do it. That was on the east coast, Boston-New York, though he never mentions much more than to say it was east. “I used to be active out east,” was his phrase. And I think he knew a hood or two and I know he learned a trick or two because when he showed up here he had money to start with and an eye for organization.

I don’t think he was ever a hood-which is almost being a company man-and I never saw him act as if he could be hired.

He showed up here and felt pained, was his phrase, at the state of the union. The truckers on city deliveries were holding their own, especially with the ten or twelve men who owned or ran all the jukes in the area. Those jukes need a lot of delivering, what with new sets of discs every week. “This gave me a pain,” he had said, “which is why I took an interest.”

It was organizational interest (his phrase again), and as a fact, it fit. All those juke owners, for example, in a while just disappeared. With Lippit telling the truckers how to truck, all those juke owners-their deliveries faulty-reaped only the spottiest income. What it came down to was that Lippit sort of gathered all of them up, beat them down, mashed them all into one, and what he ended up with was his. Thirty square miles of nickels were his, and they have been having babies ever since.