History of John Smith Griffin
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Early Washington - 1932
The lead painter gave me some paint and told me to go up on the 12th floor of the office building and coat in the walls of an office. I went up there and went to work. I was determined that I was going to be very careful to do a good job as I did not want to go back to moving furniture. I stroked and cross-stroked every brushfull. Finally the lead painter came up to see what was taking me so long. When he saw what I was doing he said to just slap it on and get the job done. we left and in a few minutes the Master Painter (the man in charge of all the crews all over Washington) came in. He said, after watching me for a few minutes, " "Griffin, where did you learn to paint?". I told him in the west.
He then asked "Havn't you ever used water color before?" I told him I hadn't. He then told me to just slap it on and not worry about the brush strokes showing when it dried. He left and I then slapped it on. The next day they put me on a job painting floors. At the end of the day the lead painter called me aside and told me that they were laying me off as the master painter didn't think that I had had enough experience as a painter. The same identical thing happened to Larry Manwaring and so the next day we found ourselves back on the moving crew.
They sent us both out-to a garage in the Nortwest part of town where they were storing old copy from the Patent Office. There were about seven or eight of us out there with enough work to keep two of us busy. Larry and I, being very anxious to hold on to our jobs, would watch carefully for the supervisor and whenever we would see him coming up the street we would get a push broom and start sweeping the floor. We would sweep dirt from one side of the big room and then sweep it back across to the other side so that we would look busy. This lasted only a few days when one evening I returned to the boarding house to find a letter from the Department of Justice advising me that I had been appointed as a messenger in the Federal Bureau of Investigation at $1,200 per annum.
You cant imagine how happy I was. The next morning I reported for work and was taken around by another messenger and shown where to pick up mail and where to deliver it. I had to go in and out of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover's office several times a day. I was told that I should be very careful not to make any mistake because Mr. Hoover would not tolerate mistakes, a fact which I later learned was certainly true. I served as a messenger for only a week when I was promoted to a clerk-typist at $1260 per annum and placed in the fingerprint name files. In this job we searched the name files on new fingerprints that were received to see if we could identify them by name.
A name card was made out for every fingerprint that was received. This was filed in a big room. If a criminal were later apprehended and gave the same name, we could often identify him by name so that it would not be necessary to conduct a long search by fingerprint formula. The trouble was when we came to names like John Smith. There were several thousands of them on file and it was a real chore to try and pick out the right one. Occasionally we would pick up a wanted man - that is, a man might be arrested say in Chicago for drunkeness or some other minor offense. They would fingerprint him and send the prints in to Washington. We would then search the files to see if he had a criminal record. Once in a while we would find a man that was wanted in some other part of the country for murder or some other major crime. If anyone ever missed one of these "wanted" cases he was through; they did not give you a second chance.
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