Dear Chuck,
When I was a teenager, working my way through college, one of the jobs I did before I got my teamster card was working on the docks, painting bollards and other fixtures. I frequently heard the term "holiday" until I learned how to paint properly, but I had no idea of its origins. I just thought the dock master thought he was funny. As an aside, I knew an old navy man who used to sit in the dock masters office, and when I was on a break, he would tell us stories of the four ships he had shot out from under him (the last costing him the sight in his left eye - he always wore dark glasses with cardboard taped to the side to protect his blind left eye from sunlight, which he said was very painfull). The first ship he told me about was a ship on the Yallu (spelling?) River in China in 1936, which he said was the first U.S. Navy ship sunk by the japanese in the build up to WWII. The only other things I clearly remember about the guy was that (1) even as an old man he was strong enough to lift a bollard (weighing at least a couple of hundred pounds - I couldn't even budge one) and (2) he had dozens of tattoos, each with a story behind it. I fond him even more interesting than the old ex-wiseguys who sat in the same office telling stories about long dead mobsters from the 40's and 50's. It was definitely an eye opening time for me, a young kid without a clue.