One other thing to mention that coincided with my graduation was the coming birth of my youngest brother, Tad. I should say his name is really Jamie Van Rowe. My mom bought a pink maternity dress to go to my graduation. She was five months pregnant at the time I graduated. That’ll lead to another story that occurred on the day of his birth. But for now lets concentrate on me getting a job. I had a few carpentry skills having worked for my dad on weekends whenever he had to work building a house. So that following Monday morning I was to be at the gate to the job and wait for Van Sexton. He was my dad’s carpenter superintendant. I got up early and drove the twenty five miles to the job site and stood at the gate, but after about an hour or so I didn’t think he was coming so I went home. Boy was that a mistake. Dad got home that afternoon and was angry with me for not sticking around. I told him I stayed for at least an hour and a half and went back home. If someone is going to come get me I figured he’d of done it by that time. But dad said Van went to the gate and I wasn’t there. For all I know he did and went back and said I wasn’t there when in fact I was there and he just didn’t know who to look for.
Anyway I was back there on Tuesday morning and Van showed up and took me in and I was put on the payroll and given my brass. The brass was a brass disk with my employee number on it with little else. I was to pick it up on the way in at the start of the day and drop it off at the end of the day. This was their way of accounting my actually showing up for work.
I was assigned to work as a carpenter apprentice in the saw shop with my dad and Shorty Henderson. What that meant was I got to be the lackey. I was given a grain shovel and told to empty the saw dust box everyday from the wood cut the previous day. I learned a lot while in the little shop though. I wasn’t allowed to actually cut anything, but I fed and pulled a lot of boards through that saw on the table that was probably about thirty feet long. It had to be able to feed a sixteen foot long two by through it. It could shoot some wood out the back end of the building if you didn’t have a good hold on it too. We cut stakes for the field engineers. We cut chamfer strips for the carpenters to put on the grade lines inside the concrete forms to show where the concrete was to be poured to as well and 45 the corners of the top of the walls. These pieces of wood would get away from you the easiest. I remember one day in particular. The construction site was riddled with port-a-johns. Those nasty, stinky little buildings would make a maggot gag. If it wasn’t the strong smell of the disinfectant they put in them it was what some construction worker could leave after a night of heavy drinking and bad food. Well, not to gross you out totally, one was placed strategically about thirty feet out from the end of our saw table. This particular day one of those construction workers had gone into it and locked the door. We were cutting two by fours into two by half inch to make stakes for the field engineers. We had about three or four inches cut off the end of a shovel handle with a sixteen penny nail driven in the end and sharpened as a tool to spike the wood to keep it under control. It didn’t always work if you didn’t spike it soon enough. Well I missed the spike and the strip got caught by the saw blade and flung it out the end of the table, out the end of the shop and it hit that port-a-john like a knight’s lance. It hit it so hard it made it wobble. Now remember there was someone in there. In a split second the door flung open and out ran this guy pulling up his pants and running with what legs that were available out those pant legs. His hard hat flew off and the dust was flying. Everyone within the area stopped and when to howling at him. It was quite funny to me, but I did get a bit of “help” with not letting the wood get away from me the next time.
At one point in my short three months in the saw shop I was able to help with something I hadn’t ever thought of. You don’t always need electricity to make a cooler box. The site had water coolers all over the site and there was a guy who did nothing but drive around with a tractor and a trailer loaded with ice. He would stop at each cooler and make sure it had ice and fresh water in it for the men. Well, dad and Shorty talked to him about getting blocks of ice and they were able to arrange it. So we set out to build a large box. It was about three feet back, five feet wide and at least three feet deep. Then they put these three inch blocks in the bottom and I filled the bottom with saw dust up to the tops of the blocks. They then nailed three inch blocks on each side at the bottom of the box and then built another box exactly three inches smaller than the bigger box and put it inside the big box. After that I filled the sides up with saw dust to the top and they then put blocks at the top to steady the smaller box inside and then capped the top off to seal the saw dust inside between the boxes. Next came the lid which also had a lid with a saw dust inlay in it that would go down inside the smaller box to make it a completely insulated ice box. With hinges put on it with a lift handle we were done. Our lunches were put in there with our drinks and the ice man would come by every day and deliver a fresh block of ice. The other workers found out about it and we would store whatever we could in there that it would hold. It was always cold inside it. Our little shop became a lunch time haven for anyone who kept their lunch in the cooler.
This leads to a description of some of the workers. From my first hand experience I can tell you these guys are probably close to what the stereotypical description is. They’re a hard working, hard drinking bunch of people of which some can tell a lie and hold a straight face. And don’t leave an impact wrench laying around or it will be out the gate and gone home with someone. There was a couple of these types that would come into our shop at lunch, get their lunch box out, wolf down a couple of sandwiches and then proceed to tell stories that couldn’t be verified by the longest stretch of imagination. Take a couple of these for instance. There was the deer whose rack of horns was so big it could only run fire lanes through the woods to keep from it getting hung up in the tree branches. Or how about the snake that was so long that when they saw it crawling across the highway it’s head was going into the woods as it’s tail was coming out of the woods on the other side of the road. Either it was a very narrow road or the biggest lie you’ve ever heard. The guy who told those lies was a heavy equipment operator and I can swear by whatever that you put him on a road grader and you could count on him working a site to the fraction of an inch. Later when I was a field engineer I saw the same guy grading an area where we set the grade to be cut to with blue tops and he could put a grader blade down and skim right across the tops of them and never pull a one of them out of the ground. See, blue tops were two by two stakes driven into the ground all the way to where we wanted the ground cut to. Then we would take a big blue crayon and color the top of it blue so they could see them when they went to work the ground. This guy was good.
Let me make a note on Shorty. He was a good man. He and Leedy Henderson, his cousin, where drinking men. They also had a hand in shine. They could find, if not make, some of the best shine anywhere around. It would be so smooth you’d think it was water, but it would put you on your butt drunk without warning. Dad didn’t drink, nor did I at that time. Dad said beer tasted like piss. Which led me to wonder how did he know what piss tasted like. Oh well. Shorty would sometimes not make it to work on Monday. The weekend of drinking would get the best of him. So this would have to be my example of the drinking crowd.
This isn’t to say there weren’t some Christian men among the sites many men. Some were preachers on the side or is it the other way around. I don’t know. There would sometimes be prayer meeting during lunch. Rarely, but there would be.
But one thing is for sure. These men worked for their money. They worked hard in the hot sun, cold days and got the job done the old fashion way with lots of sweat and knowing how to do a job. These aren’t just my observances. I was a part of this crowd. They expected you to pull your load and pull my load I did.
