You wouldn’t think a pocket full of rocks would have any value.  However the phrase as I came to know it had its basis in a time when a pocket full of rocks kept our family financially cared for.

My father was pretty good at pitching a baseball.  Back in the Homesteading days in North Dakota, neighboring farmers would get together and form a baseball team.  My father was a better than average, dare I say good, pitcher.  In fact I will, because that’s how I remember it now.  He was accurate and fast and could put it where he wanted to.

I remember that when I was a kid, he still had some of the mitts and bats, and we would play with them.

During the 30s when the Dakotas had no rain, and thus no crops, and thus no income, the farmers had to look elsewhere to find income.

At that time they were building a highway just a few miles away from our farm.  My Dad got a job moving dirt with his horses and a Fresno road building machine.  The machine was designed to be used like a modern day front end loader crossed with a grader.  One of the neighbor farmers with a large family like ours also got hired on.

The highway construction company had a policy that forbade using whips on horses.  However they also had a quota to meet for the amount of dirt moved.  Because our neighbor was unsuccessful in getting his team of horses to work hard enough, he was unable to meet the quota and was let go.

Every morning my Dad would hitch up his horses to go to work on the highway, and he would fill his pockets with small stones.  (There was no lack of small stones around there.)  During the day while he was working the horses, if they weren’t fulfilling their potential, he would take a small stone out of his pocket and whip it side-armed at the horses back side.  And he always hit his mark.

A side-armed throw kept his hand from moving up around his ear.  He was never found out for pitching rocks at his team.  My Dad was able to keep the horses moving, and thus keep his job, until the construction project moved out of our area.  I guess you could say it was a great motivational tool.

Many years later when I had my own business and was hiring men, there were mornings I contemplated filling my pockets with rocks……

Of all the many jobs I’ve been on, and all of the different equipment and machinery I’ve hooked up, I’ve only ever hooked up truck scales once.  That job was truly unique.

It was necessary to dig a ditch from the site of the office, past the diesel pumps (a low explosion potential), to the area that had been set aside for the scales.  To get that far, we had to cut a chunk of concrete out of the sidewalk next to the office wall, in order to get power from the office to the scales.

We rented a backhoe to get the digging done.  Incidentally, the backhoe accidently damaged the housing for the scale mechanism.  (It was all the backhoe’s fault.  There was no operator error involved.  Really.  But the incident is the source of our since established policy of “All Digging By Others.”)

We ran conduit from the office to the scale area and then from one end to another to get all the wiring in all the right locations.  It was very involved.  The company supplying the scales sent a representative to teach us how to wire it correctly.  It seems a shame that after all that work and learning and correcting first time errors, that I never wired another scale.

I found it interesting to see how the scale functioned.  The scale was actually a very stiff piece of steel.  Very thick, and difficult to bend.  In fact it was designed to bend no more than ¼ of an inch to calculate the weight of a truck.

Eventually that scale was abandoned.

Comparatively I’ve done quite a number of X-ray machine hook-ups.  Once we learned how to wire up an X-ray machine, we not only wired quite a few, but we also moved many and hooked them up on their new location.

For the first one the machine supplier also sent an expert so that we could learn correctly, but after that we could do others without the experts.

One other machine that has become ubiquitous is the trash compactor.  Those machines did not require any expert guidance.

A trash compactor seems like a very useful piece of machinery.  We have wired smaller, residential sized compactors for some home kitchens.

One of the jobs I worked on was to wire up a chip mill in St. Marys, Idaho.  Our boss took us to a map and explained to us that if we took a specific short cut, the job site was just inside the border of the Subsistence line.  What this meant was that he did not have to pay for sleeping and eating arrangements at the job site.

A cost cutting measure, I presume.

Our crew was 3 journeymen and an apprentice.  We drove back and forth every day.  It was about an hour and a half drive each way, if we took the short cut.  The short cut was about 65 miles, the long way was about 85 miles, but only took about 10 minutes longer.  I’m not sure how the math worked out for saving subsistence versus paying about 10 hours each way just to travel.

It did, however, make for some scenic drives and interesting trips.

One day we were following another car when a pheasant flew up out of the ditch alongside the road.  The car ahead hit the pheasant, and when we got to it, the bird was flopping around on the road.  The guy in the front passenger seat opened up his door and snagged the bird as we passed.  He took it home for supper that night.

Waste not, want not, right?

The job site itself had a pond used to float logs.  An arm of it was located near our work shack.  Someone had thrown a 2×6 across one end of the arm of the pond and the workmen had taken to using it as their own personal “urinal.”  One time the apprentice went to the “urinal” and while using the facility, one of the journeymen decided to joke with him a little.  The journeyman wiggled the 2×6 to scare the apprentice.  It did.  The apprentice fell backwards and landed backside first in the pond.

Seems like an appropriate worksite behavior.

That apprentice took a lot of harassment from those journeymen.  I always thought that we should be teaching the trade instead of harassing the students.  Many of those apprentices, upon becoming journeymen, became just as bad or worse in dealing with the men under them.  It seemed to me that they had it backwards.

Kindness and understanding were just as easily passed along as harassment and initiation.