Loose Laces

Part Fifteen...

Clarksburg must have some very good qualities, other than housing some fine, mixed heritage people. I suppose their biggest claim to fame is that the town is the birthplace of "Stonewall" Jackson, a famous Confederate general during the first US Civil War. At the time I was there in 1971 the city probably had a population of around thirty-thousand, but that is a guess. Sometimes we worked jobs out in the middle of nowhere, but the entire city was that way. In an ethnic way, it may remind you of a small version of Pittsburgh, PA.

The job was a powerhouse, and it was in the middle of nowhere's nowhere. Why is WV so popular for powerhouses? The main reason is King Coal; the place is rife with it. In fact, the strip mines were the most unsightly thing I've ever seen. Beautiful high mountains were being reduced to barren piles of dirt and rock. Around the deep mines, slag piles were devastating the hillsides and creeks. The loveliest region of our nation was being raped.

I don't recall the name of the powerhouse. It was located just north of the city on a creek that had to be damned so it could provide enough water for generation by two turbines. Sam and I were assigned work on the "bull crew". Our job was to run and maintain temporary power cables to anyplace they were needed on the work site. Actually not bad work most of the time. Our biggest problem was mud. Sometimes we had to wade in gooey earth up to our knees or higher to get power and lighting to places where there would be night work going on. They provided us with rubber knee-high boots, but they tended to stick in the mud and completely sap our energy.

We didn't like our foreman, and he didn't like us. It was a dislike at first sight thing for all of us. He was a member of the Clarksburg local union, but lived in California, at least until that job began and he got to be a foreman. Most foremen on most union construction jobs were members of the local that had job jurisdiction. The majority of them were pretty good people. This is a place where most of the valley locals were an exception. Most local members looked down on us tramps, even though a majority of them worked away from home most of the time before the "big job" came to town. Parkersburg was different, though; we were always treated well there. Most of Clarksburg's members spent most of their time and even had permanent residences in Pittsburgh. There is a union law that states if a member is called to come to his home local to man a job, he had better do so or he can be kicked out of the union. That's how Sam and I got the worm from CA as a pusher. WV is a very strong union state, at least it was then. They were a "closed shop" state, meaning if a plant or any work place had a union, all workers must join it and pay dues. And, most people there drove American Iron, Fords, Chevys, Dodges, etc. This old character came to work riding a small and foreign made Honda motorcycle, and wearing a pair of wrap-around sunglasses to go with his white handlebar mustache. Not only that, he thought he had privileges because he was a foreman. He always went to the change shack well before quitting time, which gave Sam and me the right to the same honor. The first day we followed him in about twenty minutes before the horn blew, he blew a fuse and demanded we get back to work. We told him to f**k-off. He was supposed to have long enough to do paperwork each day, which took about five minutes to check-off a couple of boxes and sign his name. Anyway, it caused him and some other foremen to change their schedules a bit, and got Sam and I on everyone's shit list.

We ended up on turd chopper duty. The toilets for the job were at the end of the long building where we changed clothes and kept our personal stuff like hand tools, etc. The waste went almost directly to the poor little creek. There was a thing located about twenty feet away from the building called a turd chopper. It was at an open point in the discharge pipe, and was just below ground level in a concrete box-like structure. The turd chopper did just that; chopped big solid waste (turds) into smaller ones that wouldn't clog the pipes and probably so they wouldn't look so bad floating in the creek through people's back yards. At times, the turd chopper would quit, usually due to an over sized turd jamming the too small of a machine and causing it to kick the motor protection circuit breaker. We had to climb into the hole, take a pipe loose, and dig out the jammed crap with a stick, and then reset the breaker and be done until the next fellow came along whom hadn't had a bowel movement for several days excreted a monster.

The company was supposed to purchase union made materials when they were available for the entire job. These jokers started buying the wire we used for temporary service from a company in Alabama and that definitely was not union made. We had an Operating Engineer buddy (a heavy equipment operator) from my neck of the woods whom I'd known all my life to bury the offending conductors. We were reprimanded for "losing" the material, but that was all that came of it.

Our living quarters there were a warehouse that had been converted into barracks to house transient workers at the job. We had a two-bed room on the second floor, and everyone had to share a bathroom and showers. The place had a restaurant downstairs, but the food wasn't great and had only one kind of meat and a couple of vegetables each day. They served liver and onions on each Wednesday; nothing else. We learned to love Ronald McDonald. Sam's next door neighbor from Bristol—I'll call him "Joe"—and also a brother electrician, had joined us on the job a few weeks after we arrived there. His room was two away from ours and Sam decided he was going to surprise Joe with a good wetting in the middle of the night. To do so, Sam would have to remove a ceiling tile, climb into the crawl space with a container of water, and carefully make his way across to Joe's room on the wall headers without falling through the ceiling. A loud squall from Joe indicated that the mission was successful.

Again, another autumn was coming, and we wanted to get established on a job a little closer to home. We called Parkersburg, and the B.A. said he could place all three of us back at the DuPont plant. Soon, we were heading 50 miles west on route 50 to settle in for the winter in familiar territory.

Next, Parkersburg, Pittsburgh and back to Charleston.