Part Sixteen...

The three of us packed up our few belongings and headed west to Parkersburg, WV. The little trailer Sam and I lived in before had been sold, but the same landlord had a basement apartment he let us have. It was one large room except a bathroom had been walled off. He threw in an extra bed at no charge, so we each had our own. The main room was divided by a low divider, separating the kitchen/dining area from the bed spaces. Again I was elected cook, Sam was the dishwasher, and Joe became the house cleaner. Sam and I called him our house whore. His response was "just go ahead and try!". Joe was a big man, with a perpetual grin and a practical joker in his own right. His two favorite pastimes were eating and finding ways to get Sam's goat whenever possible, such as pushing him out the door and locking it just as Sam was getting ready to step into the shower. There were a lot of people around, fortunately all of them adults. Or leaving Sam to pay the grocery bill for all three of us at Kroger when we knew Sam wasn't carrying enough money to cover it. Sam looked like a whipped puppy standing in front of that cash register all alone with the cashier holding out her hand for the money. Sam paid us back at a restaurant, though. He was the first in line to check out as we were leaving, and he cut a silent but otherwise magnificent fart that reached the cashiers nose at the same time we stepped up to pay. Before we could blame him, Sam was out the door and looking back laughing. It was an embarrassing moment, especially for the girl behind the counter. She turned red, thinking that one of us did it, while wondering if the one of us that didn't do it thought that she did. This is when Joe hung the nickname "Wormy" on Sam.

Sam was back at his Thursday night rendezvous with his friend from Charleston. Joe didn't approve, being Sam's neighbor back home and all, but he never said anything to him. Sam would always want to drive the first leg home on Friday evenings, so he could climb into the backseat when one of us took the wheel. He needed to make up for sleep he lost the night before. Joe made sure that sleep never came.

Summer finally turned into autumn, and then the chill of winter set in. Actually, the job was more outside work than inside, and it gets mighty cold along the Ohio river. It was while getting ready to return to work one December Sunday, that I realized I wasn't the tough old boy I pretended to be. There was no doubt I was dieing. Carolyn called an ambulance and they took me to hospital where two days later I passed a bouncing baby kidney stone. It was just barely large enough to see with the naked eye, but that thing sure did hurt. I missed a week's work, Tennessee beat Arkansas in some obscure football bowl game, and life returned to normal, except that over the next four years I would pass six more kidney stones.

Joe and I had saved enough to take off a couple of months, so one Friday in January 1972, we told Sam we were dragging-up the next Friday. He said he wasn't going to do so, and got a little peeved that we were. In fact, he drove up by himself that Sunday, and hardly spoke to Joe and me the rest of the week. On Friday, he too quit. It was the last I would hear from him until June, but Joe told me Sam had gone back to NYC to again work the Trade Center.

In March, I became restless and tried to find something in the valley, but the pickings were slim. On a Sunday morning, I took off to Pittsburgh, PA. I won't say much about my time there except I never did find a tramping buddy, and I did like the hell out of that town. I also joined a nudist colony just south of there in WV, something I had always dreamed of. It was on a dare from another tramp, but I never did go to the compound; I was still a very shy boy. The cost of traveling and living alone, plus the fact that it was too far from home for travel each weekend, caused me to drag up after only three weeks. I returned home and waited for the valley to open back up.

In June, Carolyn told me to get a job. I called around and found work back at Amos powerhouse in Charleston. Once there, I had to stay at a motel until the rooming house we had stayed at before had an opening. One evening, I was at a department store, and ran into Sam's friend, the very same one whom met him each Thursday while we were in Parkersburg. I'd always known she was a looker. Model slim, medium tall with almost black hair nearly to her waist; she was a keeper, for sure. She had her daughter along, and we sat at cafe and talked for an hour while her youngster played on some swings and slides. Soon, she asked me about Sam, and I told her the last time I saw him he was mad and not speaking to me. She invited me over to her home for the next evening, and I went and we sat on a swing and talked for awhile. It was becoming obvious she was wanting Sam back at work in the valley, so to speak. She had tried to get over him, and hadn't had any contact with him since right after he left Parkersburg. I told her I would try to get in touch with him that weekend when I went home. It just so happened that Sam had just quit NYC, and was longing for the valley, again so to speak. I told him I had seen his friend and she wanted him to contact her. That Monday evening, I got a call from him on the motel phone, and he was working in Charleston but at a trucking company that was under construction. Next evening, he moved in with me at the motel, called his friend, and all was right with the world.

Sam finally got referred to the powerhouse, and ended up on the same crew as I, but we had the same foreman as before, and he wouldn't let us work together. We got our old room back at the rooming house, and went into our routine; except for one thing. Once after a hot and dusty day at work, Sam talked me into going into a beer joint with him. I had no intention of drinking a beer. Never had drank one and saw no reason to start. A couple hours later I was buzzing right along on 3.2 Pabst Blue Ribbon. I was hooked, and it changed my life completely.

Stopping at the bar became a daily ritual. Beer was cheap, and we were making good money. Sam was back to his Thursday night meetings and all was well. We stayed together until February 1973, when Sam and his friend had a falling out, and he left for greener pastures farther north. Then in March, I completely lost my sanity and went home to work for $3.90 an hour as a maintenance electrician at the local Magnavox cabinet plant. Except for the money, it was the best job I ever had up to that time.

Next: Magnavox, back to Atlanta, and then home to Texas Instruments...

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.