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When my father’s company couldn’t survive the massive inflation the US went through in 1980 and the highest interest rates in modern history he needed to declare bankruptcy. Not long after that he hired on as acting president of a small steel fabrication company, Universal Steel, a mile and a half from our house. A couple years later he got me a summer job as an unskilled laborer in the shop working for Tom Patterson, the shop foreman. My father told Tom that I was working there to save money for college tuition since, at the time, my father was only off bankruptcy a year and trying to build his finances back from $0.00. Tom was average in every way except for one thing, he didn’t talk much. Well, I guess that was also average for the shop. Nobody really talked much.

I was 15 years old, biking to work every day that summer, doing what ever they told me to do, and doing my best to avoid dismemberment or a fatal injury.

Darryl the forklift driver picked up steel plates weighing thousands of pounds and moved them out of the way to get at the plates stacked underneath them or slid them on to a 100 foot long table made of steel slats for cutting. The steel plate would then be cut into weird shapes by a huge torch connected to an arm that would roll along the side of the table. It was my job to place 6” long  4×4 wood spacer on the floor under the steel plate so the forks of the forklift could slide out from underneath the plate. If any of my appendages were to ever get pinched in-between the wood  and a steel plate, well Ill just say that you would’ve noticed almost 40 years later. I think Darryl and Tom were friends, they both seemed about 40 years old and seemed to talk a lot. When I say a lot I mean they communicated with full sentences at least 5-6 times per day. I ID’d Darryl as a joker from the first interaction. It really came out after the first few years on the job but during the first year it manifested itself by jiggling the 2000lb steel plates with the fork lift when my hand was placing a woodblock underneath. Yea it was really funny…….years later.

Another job my first year consisted of walking atop  the flame cut tables, pick up the weird shaped parts and stacking them on a pallet near by, while the torch was cutting parts on the other side of the steel plate. Thick leather gloves and steel toed work boots didn’t stop my hands from heating up  to near painful levels and my boots from smoking and melting on the recently red hot 2” thick steel slab. Oh and yes, this was the middle of the summer and no matter how hot it was outside, the heat inside the shop was 20 degrees hotter.

Ivan ran the flame cut table, and raised rabbits for food as a side gig. Ivan was about 50 yrs old, maybe 5 foot tall with jet black hair and a permanent sneer on his face. I’m not sure how many words we traded over the years but it was not many. I’m sure Ivan could have waited until the parts had cooled before ordering me to remove the parts from his table but if he could make someone else life more miserable than his, he jumped at the chance.

Dave ran the shear and he was much more talkative than Ivan, I mean he actually used two or three words when telling me what to do instead of just grunting and pointing. Dave was probably mid 30s and seemed to have a problem with showing up on time, and smoking, and drinking and drugs and a few other things but when he was at work, he worked like a dog. Helping Dave could be one of the reasons my hearing is deteriorating today.  Imaging slicing a steel plank with a 6 foot long blade and having the slices fall on the floor. Now imagine me as a 15 year old crouching behind this 6 foot blade picking up the slices from the concrete floor but instead of a plank they are 8 pound pieces of 1/4” thick steel and when the parts fall on the floor and land on each other it sounds as if your dad just dropped a stack of dinner plates, but much louder.

By the end of the summer, Tom expanded my repertoire with a grinder. Yes, a handheld grinder equipped with a 6” diameter 2” thick 5 pound grinding stone running at 8,500 rpm. This setup no longer exists for two reasons, first it is almost impossible to hold on to it let alone control, second, its really fucking dangerous. I have scars on my knuckles 40 years later to prove it.  My new job, when I wasn’t involved in a crushed arm, burnt hand or permeant ear ringing activity, was to grind the burrs that would develop on the back side of a part cut on the burn tables. The grinding was almost fun but the high pitched ringing coming from the grinder made my ears hurt. The sparks hurled into my belly ate little holes through my t-shirt quicker than you can say “Bobs your uncle” and my arms ached as if I’d been hanging off a cliff for hours, even though is was a few minutes. That was my life the first summer. Biking to work with steel toed boots & biking back home exhausted, covered in carbon dust, holes in my shirt and small pieces of steel impregnated in my belly from the grinder. My least fondest memory was blowing my nose in the shower every day and seeing black chunks of soot and abrasive dust fall out and down the drain. Gosh, seems like yesterday.

 I passed my drivers test before winter break and purchased my uncle Allen’s 1972 black Oldsmobile cutlass supreme so my bike was no longer needed for transportation.  I came back to work over winter and spring break and quickly remembered how wonderful my life was outside of that dudgeon.

The second summer started with a new skill. Tom told me to report to Curtis for my new job. Now, I had met Curtis because he started in the fall and I worked near him during the winter and spring break from school. When I say I met him, I meant, during morning break and lunch, I sat at the end of the lunch table as Darryl, Curtis, Dave and Ivan played cribbage. They didn’t talk much and they certainly didn’t talk to me. Most of what I heard during lunch consisted of “fifteen two fifteen four pair for six”, “nobs” and “my crib”. I did find out that Curtis was on work release from prison. It didn’t surprise me because if you were to picture a guy that would be on work release from prison, your first thought was pretty close to Curtis. He was a little shorter than me, frizzy mop of brown hair, matching full beard and a body as thick as tree a trunk. His arms were massive and his legs even more so. He looked like a hairy troll.

So the first day of summer break from school, I’m 16 years old and I am walking up to the scariest person I’ve ever met to find out what life threatening job he has in store for me. “Hey man”, Curtis said with a smile. I was so excited that someone smiled at me and attempted small talk I almost forgot that my life was certainly going to be in danger any minute. So Curtis showed me how to weld up a blow hole. When the torch burns a hole into a thick piece of steel plate, sometimes the initial cut creates a gouge in the part being instead of a smooth cut. My job was to fill-in the edge of the part with a weld and then grind it smooth.  Curtis had made a table to preform this application. He grabbed the 70 pound curved boom arm with two hands off a stack, shoulder high, placed it on the table between the fixture points, welded up the indentation, ground it smooth, then flipped it over. He repeated the process and then stacked the finished boom arm on a new pallet behind me. He then told me to do it and he reminded me to use welding shield cuz my eyes would really burn at the end of the day if I didn’t.  I put both hands on the top of the next boom arm and lifted it just like Curtis, although unlike Curtis, it only rose two inches before it fell back on the pile. I then grabbed the part with both hands from underneath, rolled it over my arms into my body and heaved it with both arms on to the table. Curtis looked at me with a grin and I new I was in trouble. After walking me through the process for a couple parts and giving me a few more tips, he said good luck and walked away. All I could think about was, how could Curtis lift up those boom arms with two hands like he did, he much have the hand strength of a gorilla. That’s it, he wasn’t a troll, he was a gorilla dressed up as a terrifying human sent to make my life miserable.

It took me a three  full days to get through the first pallet of parts. I then had some Ivan and Dave salve labor on my plate for the rest of the week. Over the next couple of weeks my job was a mix of boom arms and other death defying acts until the day I walked in and I knew something was wrong. There seem to be even less conversation and Tom pointed me towards the boom arm area and told me to get going, “we’ve got a deadline to hit”. By this time, I was getting really good at these boom arms. I could pick them up with my hands, still not like Curtis but one under and one on top. I could weld up the blow hole without too much slag and my control of the insane grinder had been driven into my muscle memory so intensely I can still feel the gyroscopic spin of the wheel pulling on my forearms today. A day and a half, that is how long it took me to get through one pallet of parts. I looked at the 4 pallets left after the end of the week and thought to myself, OK just two more weeks of this, I can do it.  I came in on the following Monday and there were 10 pallets stacked chest high in what had become my own little slice of hell. They must have worked through the weekend to cut all of those. How could they do this to me? I heard something about overtime during lunch but I didn’t dare ask for myself.  Tom caught me at the end of the day and said they can pay me overtime if I want to work this coming Saturday so I said sure. “OK”, he said, “we start at 5:00am”. I thought he was kidding but I wasn’t going to argue. Saturday came, I showed up at 5:00 am and Tom was there with Dave and Darryl to let me in. Ivan didn’t work weekends, he had his rabbits on the weekends. I worked my ass of to get at least one Pallett done. I worked so hard that I didn’t even notice it was almost 4:00 and  we were still working. I asked Tom how late we worked on Saturdays and he said “we work twelves” and walked away. Well, I finished a pallet that day. It felt amazing to accomplish something if that something was only a pallet of parts.  Monday arrived with Darryl dropping off 5 more pallets of boom arms in my area. My heart just dropped. I was feeling so great last Saturday and now, staring out into a sea of boom arms I just felt sick. I walked up to Tom and asked him to do something else today. He slowly turned around, held up his fist like he was about to point at something over my shoulder, maybe like a new torture device known for severe flesh wounds but instead he hit me in the chest. Really hard. I took a step back and he looked me in the eye and said, “The reason you are working here is to save enough money to go to college so you don’t end up with a job like this for the rest of your life, like us.” Then he turned and walked away. I never complained again. In fact I don’t think I said another word for a few weeks. I did my job, as best as I knew how, worked twelves every Saturday and finished the boom arms in record time.

When I told Tom my summer break was ending he said, I was a great worker and asked me if I would work every Saturday during the school year. The pay was good, the work was nothing but a series of unforgiving torture treatments but the satisfaction at the end of the day was something I still strive for today.

 I worked there every Saturday and every weekday during summer, winter and spring break until I went off to college. My fondest memory of Tom was one Saturday during my junior year, only four of us were working. I believe it was during winter break.  We were sitting down for lunch and he looked my way and said,  “wanna play cribbage?” and at that point I knew I was part of the group.