Page 42 - Rukert - 100th Anniversary

BELOW:
Norman Rukert Jr. as a mechanic at Lackland Air Force Base (1961)
In fact, when Helen Delich married William Bentley on June 7 of that year, it was Cap who walked her down the aisle. The pair grew closer over the years, each becoming veritable stalwarts of the Baltimore waterfront.
Norm joined the company full-time on June 1, 1960. He was paid $1.80 an hour—quite an improvement over his first wage of $1 per hour in 1957. When Norm arrived, his grandfather Cap had been at the helm for 39 years and his father Norman Sr. had been there for 29 years. For the next 14 years, three generations of Rukerts would work for the company at the same time. Aside from six months of service in the Air National Guard in
1961, Norm spent the next five years learning all aspects of the business, from Fells Point to Canton. Norm started at the bottom before working his
way up, just as his father had. This meant learning the operations not from the inside out, but literally from the outside in. Like generations before and after him, Norm’s early days at the family business were spent outside with a broom or a shovel. In 1966, Jimmy Hickman and Bill Fleischmann arranged for the young man to join the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) checkers union for five years so that he could become a timekeeper for the company and gain experience in the stevedoring operations.
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