I was given a couple of guys to work with me to run my transit and pull the chain for me. For those of you who are not oriented to the old fashion way of field surveying or engineering a chain is a minimum of 100 feet long metal band with foot marking and the last foot or two divided into inches as well. It was designed to not contract or expand to cause measurement fluctuations. We would occasionally check these chains for accuracy during extreme weather chains from cold to hot. There could still be as much as a quart inch variation in a hundred feet which can cause problems when measuring a thousand feet down a property line. That could cause over two inches in loss or gain. People fight over the small stuff, so you can see what I’m talking about.
Okay, so I made a rabbit trail. Hang with me. The guy I was given was not so much an addict per se’, but he made a habit of drinking Vick’s Formula 44 cough medicine. The stuff had an 18% alcohol content. You figure the math on that one. He lived in Wilmington as well and for a while he rode with David and me, but his continuous cough medication addition and propensity for not being ready when I came to pick him up led me to recommend his firing, which the superintendant had no qualms with. I needed dependable help.
I was given someone else who was dependable enough and we worked well together. I even think I had Tony Kelly hired for a while and that helped too since I already knew him.
The paperboard plant was relatively old and blueprints weren’t accurate and that made my job kind of hard. I had to measure a building one day that was supposed to have a length of something like 350 ft. I measured the building for the new steel beams that were to be made and the new plans called for 350 ft. When I measured it turns out it was something like 4 or six inched short in that distance. I re-measured and yet again and then presented my results to the engineering folks overseeing the blueprints drawings. The steel had to be precise, so I had to go back yet again with them and measure from steel upright to steel upright for each to have its corresponding new beams and uprights to match. That caused some delay, but we got it right and the building blueprints were redrawn to match.
Chlorine was a major issue for us to be aware of. The paper pulp was bleached white in the chlorine building and we often walked through this building as a short cut from some of our work areas. We were told that there would sometimes be leaks and chlorine would blister our lungs if we inhaled, so we had to be careful when we smelled it. We were passing through there one day and I wasn’t paying particular attention and walking right into a vapor cloud of chlorine and it dropped me to my knees, which was fortunate, since it was hanging around head level. Once on my knees the chlorine vapor was above me and I was able to escape without any injury other than a hurt knee perhaps.
There was also dangerous chemical flowing about most anywhere. I always wore boots I didn’t care much for because sometimes those watery puddles I’d walk through really weren’t water, but something on a caustic level. I made the mistake one day of not having my old boots to wear to work, so I work my most favorite ever doe skin suede boots. I wore them because I was required to wear boots with steel toes and these had that requisite. Well, to make a long story short, I found myself having to traverse and stream of purplish blue liquid running down the road I was walking on and I accidently stepped into the with one of my boots. Well, I got another pair of boots for the next day, but a couple of days later I realized the stitching that held the sole on my boots had been completely eaten away and I had to have them re-stitched. Lesson learned.
The days on the job at Federal Paperboard were a time of extremes. There were days when it was so cold I would go for a cup of hot coca and before I could walk back to my work area with it, it had already gotten cold. Then on New Year’s Day it was seventy degrees and I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. You can never say the extremes of this day topped previous years. They’re all the same. People just don’t keep track of these things.
Mike’s Debbie (my brother’s long time friend and confidant) asked me recently how I remembered so many things about my past. Well, really, I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last evening, but the thing that strikes me most is that when I start to typing, my mind seems to return to the time I’m writing about and memories come flooding back. In fact there are things that come to me later on that I forgot and plan on returning to write them in where they fit. And if I may insert this here, I’d like to say that Debbie has been the most influential and stabilizing people in Mike’s life that he could have ever met. This paragraph is totally out of sync with the story, but let me have some latitude for a moment. The whole reason for this story is to introduce family and events in my life. Mike and Debbie and the only members of my immediate family I have left, aside from Mike and Theresa Lewis. Theresa is my cousin in Morehead City, daughter of James and Marian Lee, Marian being my dad’s sister. Then down in the low country of all places named Lowland near Hoboken in Pamlico County is Diddle and Marsha Ireland. Marsha is my cousin, daughter of dad’s other sister. There is an assortment of nieces and nephews I have never even met in these circles. Now, let’s get back to the story at hand.
The job at Federal got tiring from the driving and the chemicals. The superintendant wasn’t the happiest soul in the world and David N. wasn’t the most hospitable. I’d had the guy helping me fired and I wanted a more controlled environment. To put it this way I missed DuPont in spite of not being particularly happy with shift work.
One day I had noticed a job for a surveyor at Boiling Springs Lakes. It was in its infancy at the time and there was a lot of work to be done there, so I told the superintendant I had some business needing taken care of and since I was on salary I wouldn’t miss any pay he was hesitant, but let me go. I went over to Boiling Springs Lakes and applied for the job and went on home. I really didn’t like the idea of working there so I figured it was worth the afternoon off at least.
Well, after five months of cold winter weather with occasional spring like conditions the day came I had been hoping for. I got a call from DuPont’s personnel office. I was ecstatic. I was going back to my real job.
I came in for my routine pre-employment physical. I was in tip top shape and weighed in at 145 this time. I didn’t even have an inch to pinch as the commercial back then used to say. I didn’t have six pack abs or anything like that, but I was solid. My only downfall in those days was I smoked those Marlboro reds to the tune of about a pack and a half a day. They were cheap still at about twenty-five cents a pack. Like gas, the future held some serious price increases to be seen. The taxes levied on cigarettes today are much more that the cost of a pack back then.
Well, I reported to work and the whole crowd I was with back then had been recalled. We were already trained, seasoned spinning machine operators. We just had to bring the idle machines back up and get them running. Of course the first few weeks were exhausting, since a newly brought up machine would have bugs to work out. We did it though and in no time we were able to doff our cycles (remove full tubes of yarn and put fresh empty tubes on to the windups) and have very few breaks. Breaks could lead to a huge mess. It would be easy to happen, but take a while to clean up. If a thread broke it would wrap around a roller and fill up to the point it would start shredding and throwing pieces of broken thread everywhere which was multiplied by the other threads breaking to and making the mess grow exponentially. You see each machine ran eight thread lines to eight tubes per windup. There were thirty two windups per machine and it could get really bad if the shift was having problems with speeds or low quality yarn.
Some of the people I worked with was of the likes of Randy, who went to school where my wife went, Cherry, as we called him (his last name). Jim M. who was friends with none other than my ex-brother-in-law, Bennett L. along with Fulton, Tony, Bob and a long list of others. Bennett and Nancy didn’t last long after he went to work at DuPont. Marriage wasn’t a good survivor in this line of work since the schedule didn’t allow for much of a home life. I’ll even admit that one time during my career there that Julie and I came to a point she was packing to leave me. She would put clothes in the suitcase and I would pull them out as we shouted at each other. It really wasn’t the best way to make a living as a married couple. Bennett eventually married a woman who worked the same shift and as far as I know they are still together. The last time I saw Bennett he sat down beside me at a funeral for a member of Julie’s family. I don’t remember who that was, but the really weird thing about it that when he sat down beside me in the chapel he looked so much older than his know age, I thought he was some little old man. The bad habits he maintained looked as though they had sucked the life out of him and left him just a mere empty shell. I was told after the service that I had been sitting beside Bennett and I was shocked.
Okay, back to work. One thing I did enjoy about my work schedule is I had days off when no one else would. Middle of the week was my time off three weeks out of the month and the days varied. I had a nice three quarter acre yard and I loved working in it and most of all I had a garden back then that I spent a good bit of time in. I grew tomatoes, corn, string beans, squash, leaf lettuce, cucumbers watermelons and okra. Oh yeah, okra.
Dad and mom came to visit one time and I took dad out to see the garden and he was impressed with my tomatoes but he wondered out loud if I would ever get any tomatoes of the plants. You see, I had put huge wire fences around them, threw some nitrogen on them and they turned green and started growing like miracle grow could never do. These plants were nearing six feet tall, filling the fences I had them in. It was later in the season than usual for them to supposedly have small tomatoes already on them, but I was just now starting to see buds forming. Oh well. When they did produce I had more tomatoes than I knew what to do with. By the time the summer heat took hold my leaf lettuce was spent, but it was neat to go into the garden and pick a few leaves for salad or grilled hamburgers. Oh, I forgot, I great cabbage as well. It was a fair size garden at around twenty rows about fifteen feet long.
This mention of Dad reminds me to put in some family news here. Before this time Danny had decided to not finish school and joined the Army and got his GED. He became a helicopter mechanic. He was stationed in Ft Belvoir in Virginia. He spent a few years there, but as I remember it he got out on a medical discharge. I can’t say for sure why, but later on in his thirties perhaps the happening then told the story on that.
I guess I should digress just a bit. Time at home during the early seventies wasn’t something I remember well in the order of things happening. Danny was dating and Mike was beginning to drive and work on motors and such. Timmy was hitting mid-teens now.
I do remember some sketchy things about home back then. Before Danny went into the Army I do remember one story that was very memorable.
