The 1^st National Bank

Glasgow, Montana was and still is a small town.  In a small town you get to know at least half of the people fairly closely.  As a family we knew the First National Bank President, Vice-president, and the Farm Home Loan officer.  My wife had gone to school with some of the tellers.

One winter the bank did a remodel and the shop I worked for had the electrical contract.  Inside the bank, scaffolding was erected over the entire bank floor.  We did all of our work over the top of the ongoing banking operations.

The General Contractor Company was out of Minnesota and the job foreman, a great big Swede, came with the job.  He was quite a character.  When it was time for him to saw a board, he would look around for the girl with the big black up-do on her head.  Then he would saw the board so that the sawdust drifted down onto her head.

I don’t know if she ever caught on to what he was doing but I heard her and another teller talking once.  The girl with the up-do said she had to wash her hair every night; “It is so messy.”

One time I was cutting off a length of conduit and I made the comment “Shoot!  I cut it off twice and it’s still too short.”

The big Swede was standing there.  He looked at me in a stunned way and said; “Of course it’s too short.  Did you think it would get longer?”

He walked over to one of his crew and said; “That crazy electrician cut off a conduit twice and says it is still too short.”  No wonder they do terrible work.”

I just let it go.  Some people don’t understand a joke.

Two other electricians were working with me on the job.  Somehow, though there was no official word on the subject, I seemed to be the one running the job.  A  point in the job came when we were all on the roof.  We were working on the air conditioning and heating units.  The other two men were standing and counseling together discussing how we would hook up all the equipment together.

I walked over and laid out the plan; “First we will do this (indicating one portion of the job), then we will do that (another portion), and then we will do that, and it will all work.”

They looked at me and asked; “How did you figure that out so fast?”

I told them; “Well there must be some reason why the boss put me in charge of this job.”

What I didn’t tell them was that I had been going over the job in my mind for some weeks.  (No time for singing on this one.)  I rarely bragged about anything as I had found it can have pretty bad repercussions.  However, it felt pretty good to be able to excel in this instance, as these two guys had been a little critical of me at times

Not so much after that.

A Song Bird I Ain’t

I have always enjoyed music.  If I hadn’t taken up electrical work, I might well have been a musician.  But, you can’t do justice to two jobs at the same time.  And I enjoyed the electrical trade.

It has variety (unlike being a washer crammer in a shock absorber factory), interest, feelings of accomplishment, and constant “improvement.”  I also enjoyed the different challenges affiliated with being an electrician.  If I saw something wrong on a job, I just had to fix it.

As a consequence, unless I really had to concentrate on a particular problem or repair, I would sing as I worked.  One day when I thought I was all alone on a job and was enjoying the various challenges and variety, I was singing as I worked.  A voice from behind me said; “Can you sing tenor?”

I was surprised and a little embarrassed and questioned him; “What is tenor?”  He responded; “Ten or twelve blocks away from here.”  I realized that there were some people in the world who did not appreciate my beautiful singing.

Another time I was singing on the job and one of the people that heard me said that I should be on the stage.  I thought; “This sounds better.”  So I asked; “Do you really think so?”  He said: “Yes, the first one out of town.”  So I thought to myself that perhaps my singing was not as good as I thought it was.

One day my sister Kay told me; “Adrian, you should sing solo.”    I replied that I thought I had been doing so.  She said; “I meant – ‘So low no one can hear you.’”

Well, … I can still whistle while I work.

Then the day came when I was working on a job and whistling away.  Two other guys were working in the same room.  One of them also started to whistle as he worked.  I was unable to tell if he thought he could improve my whistling or was trying to harmonize.

Soon we both paused at the same time to catch our breath.  In the silence the third guy piped up and said; “I need to cut back on you guys’ bird seed.”

After that I just concentrated on the electrical work.

Besides, my whistler doesn’t work anymore.

Sorry, Mom.

Show Biz

One of the jobs I worked on in Glasgow, Montana was an old theater in town that had been shut down for quite some time.  We were re-wiring it.  I was working on removing the old copper wiring and putting in new wiring.  I had a pile of old copper wire about 3 feet high and 5 feet across.  I was intending to get the owner’s permission to take it to the local Pacific, Hide and Fur and recycle it for cash.  I was waiting until I had the job completed before I approached the owner.

About the time we were concluding the job I went on vacation.  When I got back one of the other guys told me I had missed a great opportunity.  The owner had told him to go down in the basement and haul that pile of copper wire to Pacific, Hide and Fur.  He told me that they had gotten $60.00 for it.  That was in 1953.

The boss had taken them all to dinner at a nice restaurant.

Rats.  Foiled again.

A number of years later they built a new theater in town.  “The Survant.”  It was built by a California contractor who apparently had no idea of how cold it could get in Glasgow in the winter.

It was built with minimum insulation.  The local heating contractor knew about Montana winters.  He put in a bank of four 200,000 BTU furnaces.  Winter was coming on so they had the furnaces running to keep it warm.  Every once in a while we would hear a big WHUMP!  The whole building would seem to shudder.  We didn’t know if it was an earth quake or someone running into the building.  We looked around for the cause.  Everything seemed to be working fine.  No damages anywhere we could see.

One day the California contractor’s foreman went up stairs to the projection room where the furnaces were located.  Shortly afterward I had to go up stairs to check something or other.  I had my head just about level with the floor and could see the foreman leaning down looking at something on the furnaces.   All of a sudden there came that WHUMP!

Fire came out of the furnace, covered the whole floor almost to where my head was at floor level.

The foreman was dancing around to an unheard tune and to an unknown beat trying to evade the fire.  When it was all under control we determined that furnace system had a faulty control.

One of the units would fail to ignite and gas would spread across the floor.  Another unit would come on and ignite the gas that had come from the first unit.  Hence, the shudder and Whump.

I have notice in recent years that The Survant is no longer in operation.

Sorry.  Nobody got into the movies.

We didn’t even make the news.