Chapter 10
When I got word that Dad wanted to see me, I was working at Fordland. I don't remember the
boss' name, but he had a brother on the job that lived down toward Ava. He always had
something in his lunch that looked like garlic. Anyway, when he opened his lunch box, he'd peel
one of those things and eat it while he peeled another one and would eat two or three of them
before he started to eat his lunch. Then it was almost impossible to work on the scaffold with
him in the afternoon because of his breath. His brother, the foreman on the job, was sawing a
two-by-four between two saw horses with a power saw and the lumber pinched his saw and
jerked it loose from him and the saw cut his hand from about center on the back to the center of
the palm, and it looked like he had sawed his hand in two. Someone took him to a doctor, and
when he got back he said it hadn't cut any bone in two but had just sawed around his hand. He
had a bad hand, anyway.
Well, I quit that job to go see Dad. He had been in the hospital off and on about all winter with
pneumonia, and just about the time for him to go home, they found that he had a cancer in his
stomach. They let him go home and were waiting for him to make up his mind if he wanted
surgery or not. But the day I got there he said he wouldn't have surgery. He lived just a month
after I got there.
Allen was running a job building a school and I went to work for him the next day after I got
there. It was hot. The men would say, "This is the hottest day we've had." But the next day was
hotter, and it kept getting hotter until one day it was 120 in the shade.
I got there the twenty-ninth of August and stayed 'til the tenth of December and then came back
to Springfield. Work got pretty slow here the next summer, and I went back out there. Dorothy
wasn't well and got worse, and the doctor said she should get up on a mountain or go back to
Springfield, so we left there in February.
We were building a school at Hemmitt about thirty miles from Riverside. It was a "tilt-up" job,
the first one like that I ever worked on. We had to go by the March Air Force Base going to
work. One time as we went to work, one of those big planes was burning up on the runway. He
couldn't get the landing gear down and flew around 'til he burned up all of his fuel and then came
in on his belly and it caught fire. The crash crew got all the men out, but one was burnt so badly
he died.
One time as we went to work, some men were in a hole that a plane made by the side of the road
when it crashed, looking for anything they could find of the plane. Two fighters from Merimar
Base near San Diego were practicing and collided. The pilot landed about a half mile from the
plane. There was a place near Hemmitt where they raised roses. Acres and acres of little rose
bushes they shipped all over the country.
The contractor went out of business when that job was done and we had to find other work.
Allen and I went to work on the March Air Base extending the runway. We were building places
under the runway for landing lights. It seems to me that they told us that they were making the
runway three miles longer, but now that doesn't seem possible. The planes usually came down
over our heads to land, but if one took off over our heads, we had to hold our ears with both
hands.
When I got back home, I went to work at Table Rock. I had worked there a month when they
were getting ready to start the dam, but when they got the machinery all ready to start, the laid a
lot of us off 'til they had a chance to try out all the machinery and everything. It took quite a
while for them to get everything working right, and they couldn't use a full force 'til everything
was made ready.
The Business Agent sent me and another man down there to work for the company that was
going to build the power house below the dam. They didn't have the dam done, but a lot of it was
done. What we had to do was build a platform twenty feet square for the driller to work on while
he was drilling the well. They had to cut out the rock way down below the river bed so they
could start the building away down in solid rock, maybe twenty or thirty feet below the river bed.
They set the drill rig on the edge of the rock they had left there and started the well twenty feet
below that so the driller had to have this platform.
We both got laid off on Friday night; then our boss called me back Monday morning but didn't
call the other man. I worked there seventeen months. The company that I was working for was
from Palo Alto, California. They were the mechanical contractors. M. K. did the concrete work
and E. V. Lane from California did the mechanical work, the turbines, generators, etc. I worked
for Lane.
I had to place all the embedded heat ducts and anchor them so they would stay put while they
poured the concrete. My boss was a young man. He was a civil engineer. He came with the
company from California. One morning he came by where I was working and said, "We are
making you a foreman." And before noon I was injured and had to be off a while. The way it
happened, a laborer and I were placing two big ducts. They were sixteen by thirty-two inches
and twelve feet long. They went up inside the concrete and faced out of the wall at top and
bottom ends. The wall was forty-two inches thick and had a row of vertical re-bars five inches in
from the surface of the wall on each side. They poured five feet at a time, then raised the forms
for the next pour. The re-bars were an inch and three-eighths diameter plus the deformities or
ridges. They are called number eleven bars because of their diameter. In this case, they are
located vertically five inches in from the outside face of the wall. They are placed three inches
apart, center to center, which leaves about one and five eighths inches between them. They are
long enough to reach above the "pour" about three or three-and-a-half feet. I had a ladder made
of two-by-fours sixteen feet long. I had tied the ladder to these vertical re-bars and had climbed
up and fastened a pulley to the top with a rope in it to pull the ducts up so we could anchor them
in place and had just come down the ladder and stepped out on the five-inch ledge outside of the
protruding row of re-bars. Just then they were bringing in a load of re-steel on the cableway.
The operator of this cableway is up on the hill and a "bell boy" is at the place where the load of
re-steel is being taken to tell him with a walkie-talkie radio which way to move and how far. The
cable (which they called "a gut") is three or four hundred feet high and is stretched between two
towers up on the hill, one on each side of the river. This load of re-steel is suspended from a
trolley on that cable. This load consisted of about four or five tons of number eleven bars sixteen
feet long and about a dozen number six (three-quarters of an inch diameter) bars twenty-six feet
long on the top of the load, which made them stick past the main load five feet on each end. As
he was bringing this load in, it was hanging down about twenty feet from the wall and the bell
boy said, "Upstream" just as it was swinging downstream, and when the operator started it
upstream, that made it swing a lot farther. I saw it coming just about the right height to get me in
the belly, and I caught hold of two of these protruding bars; just then the cableway swayed down
enough that these protruding bars are striking the re-steel over the wall. The bell boy said, "Hold
it; you've hit a man." One of these bars struck me in the leg and the others struck and bounced
back. I held to the two bars and swung down to the ground. I first thought that I'd just walk
away, but my leg was giving me so much pain that I just fell over on the ground. A young man
that must have been just back from the army rushed over and jammed his thumb into my thigh
and stopped the blood. I said, "Rip that breeches leg open so we can see what it has done." He
said, "Just lie still."
They put me in the ambulance and took me to the hospital in town about four miles away. They
x-rayed my leg, then took me into the operating room and the doctor started to work on my leg;
and it was hurting so bad I could hardly contain myself. Then a nurse came in with a big tablet
and said, "Take this. It will stop the pain." It seemed like I had just barely swallowed it when
the pain completely stopped and never did hurt anymore. When the doctor was getting about
through, I asked him if he could tell how deep the bar went in, and he said, "About five inches."
I doubt if my thigh is much more than five inches thick. He said something to someone about a
room for me, and I asked him, if I have to stay in a hospital, could I go to Springfield, and he
said, "Yes. Who is your doctor?" I told him and he called the doctor and told him I was coming
and he was out there and met the ambulance. I asked if I could call my wife, so they rolled me up
to the phone and I told her where I was and she came over there. I was in the hospital a few days
and came home for a few days. My boss called twice to see when I was coming back to work.
He said if I could, to come and just be there to tell the men what to do, even if I couldn't work.
So I went the next Monday. I had been off nearly eight days.
When I went back, they hadn't poured any concrete on that wall, so we still had to set those big
ducts. When we got them set, they were ready to pour that wall, and I was supposed to stay late
because the night shift was going to pour it and I'd have to be there to see that those big ducts
were exactly in the wall where they should be, but the boss came by just before quitting time and
said I could go home because the night foreman said he would be sure they were all right. Well,
he didn't do it, and when they got the wall up to where the form for the next pour would come up
to the top of the ducts, they were in the way of the form. Now, the bottom part of the ducts had
been poured in. That is, they poured five feet at a time. So they had already made two pours up
on the ducts. They set the forms and poured five feet. Then they raised the forms and poured
another five feet. So now, as they go to set the forms for the pour that would take in the top of
the ducts, they were in the way of the form. They were leaning over so that the part that should
be against the form was sticking out three-quarters of an inch too far, and I had to cut them off to
make way for the form. Guess what. I sawed them off with my old hand saw. It was an old saw
that Dad had bought at a public auction before I had ever started doing carpenter work. It was an
old saw blade without a handle, and had a dent in it about six inches from the point. Dad kinda
beat the dent out and put a handle on it and gave it to me. It was an eight-point saw and was so
old you couldn't read the name on the blade. The duct was made of steel that was about an eighth
of an inch thick. The line across the top of that duct was thirty-two inches across the top,
eighteen down each side, and thirty-two across the bottom. That is one hundred inches of steel I
had to cut on each one of them. The boss tried to get me to let him buy me a new saw, but I
wouldn't. Every evening when I went into the office to turn the time in, he would ask what kind
of a saw did I want. I finally told him if he wanted to buy me anything, just get me a twelve-foot
rule. The next morning when I went to work, the rule was there for me. Some time after that as I
was climbing the ladder out of the hole at quitting time, I remembered I'd left that old saw down
where I'd been working. The laborer asked if I wanted him to go get it and I said, "No, it will
probably be there in the morning, and if it isn't, it isn't much of a saw anyway." Well, the next
morning it was gone.
There was a boy working for M. K. that they said wasn't quite old enough to work there, but they
let him work because his dad had worked for them for years. He was running a crane. This boy
was working on the dam, and just before quitting time his boss told him to close the valve that
was on a line that ran along the face of the dam. After all that crew had gone home, someone
noticed the boy's car was still in the parking lot, and they started looking for him, wondering why
he hadn't gone home. When they couldn't find him, they asked his boss if he knew why the boy
hadn't gone home and he told them about having the boy to close the valve. So they went to that
place to see if he had closed the valve. It was a place he would have to lie down on the gang
plank and reach out about as far as he could to close the valve. The valve was closed, but they
could tell that he had fallen off and gone down the face of the dam. They could see where he
went between a pipeline and the dam below. The pipe was about six or eight inches from the
face of the dam. He had fallen into a pool of water where water was pouring down off of the
dam. They shut off that water and started hunting in the water for him. They hunted for him all
night. The next morning about nine o'clock I could tell from where I was that they had found
him and were trying to get him up into the skip. His clothes were nearly all beaten off of him by
the water. He had been in there all night and was tangled in some old crooked re-bar that had
been thrown down in there.
M. K. did all the concrete work. The outfit I worked for did the turbine, generators, piping, etc.
When they came to that job, they bought two pickups, a station wagon, the biggest truck that
Ford made at that time, and a thirty-five-ton Lorain Crane. The railroad this stuff came in on was
about eight miles over the hill from the job. They would take the truck and the crane over to the
railroad and put on a load of stuff and then bring the crane back with them to unload the truck.
When they got ready to put up the bridge crane, they used the Lorain to help put it up. The walls
of the building were sixty feet apart. They each had a parapet built out on them with a railroad
rail on top of that for the bridge crane to run on. It had a two-hundred-fifty-ton capacity. This
bridge crane was two large beams set about ten feet apart with the motors, reels, etc., built on
them. They had to put these beams up one at a time. When they got ready to put them up, they
brought the Lorain in the building to help the cableway crane lift them up. They stood the beam
of the Lorain as straight up as they could so it would be able to lift its part. They hooked it so the
Lorain would be lifting about a third of the weight and the other was lifting about two thirds.
And when they got ready to go up with it, they yelled for everyone to get away from under the
cableway because they thought they might break it down. And it was supposed to carry four
yards of concrete, which wasn't nearly as much weight as that pick.
That crane and the trucks were about worn out when the job was done. The railhead was over
the hill and down in the creek that runs through Branson.
A laborer that worked for me on the power house had worked for M. K. before the power house
started. He told me that one day he was standing on a slab of concrete that was about the level of
the river and a man fell within twenty feet of him and landed on his head on the concrete.
They got their gravel from a hill nearly a mile from the dam and brought it to the job with
conveyors. One would bring it a distance and dump it on another and so on 'til it got to the job.
They drilled for the dynamite shots mostly with wagon drills, but some of it had to be drilled
with a jack hammer. One man was drilling with a jack hammer and instead of holding both
handles with his hands, sometimes he would get tired and throw one leg over it or lean over it
with his belly. Anyway, he drilled into a shot that hadn't fired and when his drill hit it, it blew up
and some that saw it said he went seventy-five feet high. Dorothy and I were down there one
Sunday. They had a place for visitors to go and watch the job from a hilltop. We were standing
there looking and the man that got blown up came. Some people brought him in a wheel chair,
and I talked with him about the accident. He said he would never be able to work again.
Someone told me that the insurance companies would rather a man would get killed than badly
injured because if he's killed, they pay a fixed sum, but if he is crippled for life, they have to keep
paying.
I worked for M. K. while they were setting up the job, before they got ready to start pouring the
dam. I was working on the tunnel that the crushed rock came through. They were going to bring
the rock on conveyors and the last three or four hundred feet it went through a tunnel for cooling.
The concrete has to be mixed at fifty-four degrees. So the aggregate has to be cooled before it is
mixed. That is why the tunnel. To build it, we stood up four-by-sixes with a bevel cut on the
top. Another shorter one was fastened to the top of that and continued on up on a forty-five
degree angle and it was connected to one that ran across level, and the other end was connected
to one that went down on a forty-five and it is connected to one that is plumb. So starting from
the concrete base they stand on, they go up plumb, over on a forty-five, then level, then down on
a forty-five, and finally straight down. These timbers are four-by-eight inches, and a man with a
big Dewalt saw cuts the angles on the ends of them. They are stood together flat wise and are
nailed together with square nails that are one-half inch by nine inches long. One man stands it up
in place and another man with a power drill drills through the first one, but the nail has to make
its own hole the rest of the way. The man that is drilling these holes let the drill get two close to
him and it caught his nail pockets and wound them around the drill and tore them off of his
overalls. A man with a six-pound sledge hammer is driving the nails horizontally through the
timbers to fasten them together. When it is done, we have made a tunnel six feet wide and eight
feet high. It is covered, sides and top, with dirt and will be refrigerated inside, and the rock will
be brought through it to cool before it goes into the mix house, which is sixty feet high and is
built on this bluff that is three hundred feet above the river. I was driving the nails and, believe
me, before the day is done you are wishing you could change off with someone. When we got
that done, we started on the mix house. The structural steel was already up. We had to bolt two-by-fours to the steel so we could nail corrugated iron to that. It was quite a job to nail the
corrugated iron because it is two feet wide and is put on vertically, so to nail where it laps over
the other sheet you have to lean out and reach over that sheet and hold the nail with one hand and
the hammer with the other. We were supposed to wear safety belts to keep from falling.
The cables that reached across the river to carry the concrete to where it had to be poured on the
dam were called a "gut." One of them carried a six-yard "bucket" and the other a four-yard
bucket. One end of each of these big cables was fastened to a tower on the north side of the river
and the other end was fastened to a tower that traveled on a track so they could move it up or
down the river to pour where they wanted the concrete. The track that this tower runs on is one-hundred-ten-pound railroad steel (that is, it weighs 110 pounds to the yard) that is fastened to ties
just like a train runs on, and it lies on an angle of about forty-five degrees. That is, the rail next
to the river is higher than the other so the weight of the concrete bucket will be pulling against
the track. I don't know how high the tower was that ran up and down the track, but it had to go
back to the mixer every time for a new load. One night the wind was blowing so hard during a
rainstorm that the bucket with six cubic yards of concrete in it got to blowing so bad that it
turned the tower over. And they didn't straighten it up and use it, but cut it up with a torch and
dragged it out of the way and built another one.
This thing they used to carry the concrete to the place to pour had a "sock" on the bottom of it to
guide the concrete to the right place. They let it down to where a man can reach the trip lever,
and when he opens it, the cable it rides on begins to pull it up, and if the operator up on the hill
isn't careful to pay out some cable, it will take it up out of the reach of the man that is dumping it.
When they brought the drill rig in to drill the well, they picked it up with the cableway up on the
hill and let it down to where the well had to be drilled. When that old big rig is hanging up there
in the air, it looks like it might fall. They drilled that well three hundred feet deep, I think, and
they drilled with a large bit away down in the rock, then took a smaller bit and drilled the rest of
the way. They put casing down as far as they drilled with the large bit and then poured grout
around to seal off any water that might come in above the proper depth. When they drilled in,
they got a good head of water. My boss said if they didn't get ten gallons of free flow a minute,
they'd have to put a pump on it. Well, they got many times ten gallons. They would pour
concrete 'til it got about to the top of the pipe; then they would put on another joint of pipe, then
pour up to the top of that and put on another joint. They brought the pipe in with the cableway
and let it down to be screwed to the one that is already there. They put the casing head on the
new piece of casing, and when they put on a new piece, they take the head off and put it on the
new piece. The casing head has a hole in the side of it that will take a two-inch pipe. When they
are putting on a new joint of casing, that two-inch hole is the only place for the water to get out.
So the men have to take hold of the new joint and pull it down against that water pressure 'til they
can get a thread started, then they screw it on. I've seen four men take hold of that new joint and
try to pull it down against that water pressure with a sheet of water squirting out all around, and
sometimes they would have to turn it loose and back out of the water so they could get their
breath, then try again. The project manager was a short, fat man. Some called him "Tubby." He
stayed in the office most of the time, but if he knew when they would have to put on a new piece
of pipe, he would come down where he could watch and would laugh the whole time.
That machinery was shipped on flat cars and most of it was covered. They had built a housing
over it. When they unloaded a car, they'd set that cover off and bring the stuff down to the job;
then they would bring the cover and set it down over it and I had to make a door in it so we could
go in and see if all was OK. Some of it had to have heat in the winter to keep it from getting too
cold, and most of these "shacks" had electric heaters put in them to furnish the heat they needed.
A man came from Westinghouse to supervise the erection of this stuff, and he would go with me
once in a while to check on the heat. I asked him once why they had that hole in the shaft that
turns the generator. The shaft is thirty-six inches diameter and fifteen or sixteen feet long and
has a one-inch hole through it from one end to the other, and I asked him why that hole was in
there. He said, "You'd be surprised." I said, "Yes, but I'm still curious." He said, "When they
make that shaft, they have to x-ray it to know if there are any flaws in it, and they put something
in that hole so they can x-ray it for flaws." When they assemble that thing, this shaft goes up out
of the turbine into the generator on the next floor, and it is what turns the generator. And here is
something that seems impossible: He said that shaft raises up on oil when it is running, but this
is the first one that raises up as soon as it starts to turn. Others raised up after they had turned a
little.
The generator has a shell that fits down over it and is bolted down to the concrete with twenty
bolts. They are two inches diameter. Eight are fifty-four inches long and twelve are forty-eight
inches long. They have a four-inch sleeve and a six-by-six-inch plate on the bottom that is one
inch thick. These bolts are set in pairs that are sixteen inches apart. That is, I took two-by-sixes
and bored two-inch holes eighteen inches apart and hung two bolts from that. They are not on
the same plane. The long ones are set eight inches lower than the short ones. That makes their
bottom ends fourteen inches lower than the others. They go around a circle that is twelve feet
diameter. The sleeves are anchored at the bottom by three re-bars welded to them and welded to
number eleven re-bars that are already set in concrete. I set the bolts by measurement and
plumbed the sleeves and had them welded in. A center point is established by measuring from
north and south, and east and west lines. My boss sets his instrument on the center point with the
bob hanging down to the point. When the Westinghouse man came down, I asked him how
much tolerance we would give them, and he said for elevation an eighth of an inch is all right,
but sidewise about a sixty-fourth of an inch. Each bolt had a dot in the center of the top end and
that is what we measure to. We measure from the bob hanging on the instrument for radius.
From the center lines for the tangent, then from one bolt to another around and around the circle.
The Westinghouse man is standing there writing down the measurements as we call them. When
we've been all around, he tells us to move such and such a bolt so much this way and another bolt
so much a certain way, etc. Then he puts that chart away and gets another and we go around
measuring again. Then he tells which ones to move, and after we have gone around until he
doesn't find any that are not right, we still have to check them all again twice. I said, "With all
that room to drift in those sleeves, why be so careful?" He said, "If you get them right, you don't
have to drift them."
The steel case around the turbine where the water is that turns the generator is one inch thick.
Every joint is a V. They go around with a bead welded in the bottom of that V. Then they go
around with a bead on top of that bead; they go around with a bead that fills up the V. Each weld
is checked to be sure it is properly welded. Then they lay a six-inch steel strap over that weld,
and it is and inch thick with six rows of rivet holes, three on each side of the weld, and they are
riveted with seven-eighths-inch rivets about three inches apart. When all this stuff is checked for
exactness, which takes several days, then it is encased in concrete.
The "pen stock" that brings the water down through the dam from the lake is eighteen feet
diameter and is so steep I could just barely walk in it without slipping. As soon as it came to the
face of the dam, it stopped; then our company had to connect it to the turbine with a tapering pen
stock. It gets smaller and smaller until it reaches the turbine and then goes once around, getting
smaller, so the water out of the side of it going into the turbine strikes the turbine on all sides
with the same pressure. They told me that the water, when it hits the turbine, is traveling at the
rate of one hundred fifty miles an hour. The water goes straight down through the turbine and
then turns horizontally, then comes to a pier point that divides the water into two streams; then it
gradually goes back up to the river. All the different changes it goes through after it goes through
the turbine are to slow down its speed before it gets to the river.
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