Tools

In the electrical trade there is a lot of ditching and back-filling involved in many jobs.  It’s not just a matter of going into a warm, heated building and dinging around with small hand tools.  Among electricians, there is a difference of opinion as to who should dig the ditches and do the back-filling.

I was never particular about whether or not to dig ditches.  If it would speed up the job or save money for the home owner, I was not too proud to dig.  To do a proper job of back-filling you had to tamp the earth down.  There were tools for this.  One type of tamper you directed from behind and it vibrated heavily.  Another type of tamper was called (appropriately) a grass hopper.  A grass hopper had only one handle like a shovel with a motor on it.

The grass hopper would leap into the air and come down and tamp the soil.  It worked all right, but you had to be in rhythm with the grass hopper.  I haven’t seen one for many years.  I think I know why.

One fellow was using one and it leaped up into the air and caught him under his jaw.  They hauled him away to the hospital.  I don’t really know how badly he was hurt.

Another tool used in construction is a floor sander.  Normally electricians don’t use floor sanders, but they can be working on jobs where a floor sander is in use.  One shop I worked in was located in a building that stretched from street to alley.  This arrangement did not provide much parking.  Across the alley from the shop was a hard wood floor laying shop.

Everybody from both shops wound up parking in the same alley.  One of the guys from the flooring shop was very particular as to how and where everyone parked.  If someone was parked incorrectly, he would cuss the person out, never saying politely; “could you move your vehicle?”  No one liked him.

One day I was working on a house out in the country.  This fellow was sanding the floor while I was on the job.  The home owner made coffee for us and called us in to the kitchen to take a break, but Paul, the floor sander, just kept sanding away.  Finally he stopped and joined us for coffee.

He took some pills with his coffee and said that he had tried to go a bit longer but just couldn’t.  We asked him what the problem was, and his story completely changed my feeling about him.

He had had sinus trouble and had gone to see a doctor about it.  The doctor performed surgery on his sinuses and then gave him a prescription for pain.  The doctor informed him that he must take the prescription immediately or he would suffer a blinding headache that he wouldn’t be able to live with.

What the doctor didn’t tell him was this was a lifelong prescription and that the pills cost fifty cents apiece (in the 1950s).  He had to take them every 4 hours.

If it had been me, I would have been cranky too.

Several years ago (pre-1970), I was working in the Hill County Repair shop located in Havre, Montana.  It was a facility for repairing the county’s machinery.  Since much of their machinery was diesel, it would blacken the ceiling in the shop pretty badly.

The county decision makers decided it was time to clean (paint) the ceiling.  Painting the ceiling required that we pull all the light fixtures down.  The ceiling would be painted and the fixtures cleaned up, then we would re-install the fixtures.  A rolling scaffold was rigged up for me and I would pull down a number of fixtures and go to another job.

The county had hired two out of work boys (brothers) to paint the ceiling and clean the fixtures.  We warned them that the wires were not to be touched.  They were left to do their portion of the job for a few hours, then I would return to re-attach the cleaned fixtures and give the boys more to clean.

One day when I returned to install the fixtures I found the two brothers rolling on the floor and fighting with each other.  We got them separated and asked what happened.

One of them had reached up to move the electrical wires out of the way.  (We had warned them.)  The boy got shocked, jerked his arm back and caught his brother right on the nose with his elbow.  We got everything cleaned up and they went back to work, somewhat mollified.

Just another argument for safety measures.

Another time we were installing metal boxes that were to contain clocks.  These boxes had been manufactured with sharp corners.  As I stood on a make shift platform to install one of the boxes, the platform gave way under me.  On the one hand (literally) it was a good thing that I had already securely fastened the box.  I grabbed for something to catch myself and caught the sharp corner of the box in the palm of my hand.

There was nothing else to grab hold of with the other hand and it hurt too much to holler.  My apprentice, a strong young boy picked me off of that hook like a sack of flour and sat me down on the floor.  I was younger then and healed rapidly so I didn’t lose any work.

Safety measures!  Safety measures!

I mentioned before that for awhile I worked on the missile silo program.  While I was doing so in Montana, I was camped in a little town near Great Falls.  I had a homemade camper on the back of my flatbed pick-up.

For work, the company had given me a company pick-up to use.  Near where I was camped there was a hotel where the guy I was working with was staying.  He was an older man who hailed from Minnesota.  He was a source of many stories of wild experiences.

One day when I was doing the driving we travelled to a site Southeast of Great Falls somewhere.  (That’s as close to an exact location as I can give; not for security reasons, but because it was a lot of years ago.)

We worked hard all day and when we left to go home it was already dark.  We were headed back to the little town where we were staying.  I drove a couple of miles back to a crossroads and turned left.  My partner said to me; “Aren’t you going the wrong way?”

Confidently I replied; “No.  We will just go the next crossroads and make a right.  It will take us directly to where I’m camped.”

We drove silently for awhile.  We came over a rise and there were the lights of Great Falls.  “Oh shucks.  Those lights are Great Falls, I’m going the wrong way!”  (Even then Great Falls was significantly larger than the little town we were in.)

So I whipped into an approach and performed a very quick 2 point turn, and headed back the other way.  By way of an apology I said to him: “I guess I was lost.  You were right.  What’s my name?”

We drove in total silence for about 10 miles until we came over a rise and there were the lights of the little town where I was camped and he had a hotel room.  He slapped me hard on the knee and said; “Auu-dreee-auun!”

Having grown up around Scandinavian neighbors, I was used to having my name pronounced strangely.

It didn’t take long for the story to get around about me getting lost in the countryside.  In fact one day a bunch of us were eating in a café and they gave me (a guy from Montana that lived nearby <within 100 miles>)  a pretty bad time over it.