“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Do you have memories of a period in your life when you felt that you had reached a particular turning point? One of the most seminal periods in my life was the summer of 1968. I was eighteen years old that summer and was a recent high school graduate. I have talked in other chapters about the work ethic that was omnipresent in our family. Hard work wasn’t new to me at the age of eighteen, but that summer for the first time I was able to try out my work ability somewhere other than the farm. The Minnesota Department of Transportation was building Interstate Highway 90 that summer near the southern boundary of my Pop’s farm (the DOT had actually acquired about one acre of his land for the highway right-of-way a few years earlier.) From our farm we could watch the huge earth movers, cranes, and other construction equipment. College would start for me in the fall of 1968. My family was in absolutely no position to help with college costs, with my Pop working to get my older brother started on his own farm, and three siblings behind me. So, while he certainly could have used my help on the farm that summer, Pop gave the okay for me to work somewhere else to be able to save some money for college expenses.
Once that decision was made the question was where to find a job. It turned out that I had only to look to the southern boundary of our farm. I have spoken in other places about my Uncle Kelly. Among many other talents, Uncle Kelly was skilled at running virtually any piece of construction equipment. He was using those skills to build I-90 in the summer of 1968. He told me that he might be able to find a job for me. This was very exciting because I knew that the pay was excellent, and the hours were long. Very quickly I was told to report for work at 6:30 AM on the job site. Uncle Kelly was not my supervisor. That position was filled by one Marlin (Fats) Marinell. Fats had an uncanny resemblance to Jackie Gleason. Nevertheless, Uncle Kelly was an integral part of what we would today call my “on-boarding.” It went something like this:
Uncle Kelly: “Fats, this is my nephew, Craig. If he doesn’t work hard, I want you to let me know right away and we will change that in a hell of a hurry. One other thing, if you misuse him, I will find you and knock you on your ass.”
Fats: “Okay, looks like he should be able to work. I notice he has red hair – I’m calling him Red because I won’t remember his other name – too many kids working for me. Red, follow me. This tool is called a shovel. Get to know it because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with it.” (An aside – this fulfilled my Mother’s worst fear – she was afraid that someone would call me Red. If only she knew, Red was the nicest and the only non-profane moniker that I had while I was on that job. Profanity was an integral part of communication on the project. My vocabulary expanded.)
And so began my career in construction and my first lesson. When getting along in this world, it REALLY helps when you know people (like my Uncle Kelly) who can and will help you. We typically began our workday at 6:30 AM and stopped at some logical time in the late afternoon or evening. In a typical week we would start on overtime (meaning we had already worked forty hours) sometime after lunch on Wednesday. The work was exhausting and I absolutely LOVED it. I can’t explain, but even to this day, I love the smell of the diesel construction equipment and associate the sights and smells with so many good memories. I had doubts as to whether or not I could cut it in this environment, but I made up my mind that I was NOT going to disappoint my Dad or my Uncle Kelly. I worked hard through the searing heat of the summer and in the pouring rains in the middle of nowhere where there was no shelter to be found. I got my first paycheck with great pride, and I began to believe in myself – the second lesson of the Summer of 1968 – I can do things of value in the workplace.
Our work crews were constructing the shoulders of the main pavements on the freeway. We were placing the gravel that would underlie the pavement. We needed the surface of the gravel base to be very close to what the plans dictated so that the pavement that went on top of it would in turn be according to the design. This was primarily accomplished by motor grader operators. But sometimes their final work would be slightly off (out of tolerance as it was called) and would need to be touched up with hand work with shovels. This is where my rag-tag co-workers and I came in. One humid morning Fats rolled up to our little work crew and called me over. This conversation followed:
Fats: “Red, they tell me that you know the difference between an inch and one-tenth of a foot.” (Actually, that length is kind of close, but not the same. The DOT inspectors would give Fats a list of the areas that were “out of tolerance” and how far out of tolerance they were in tenths or hundredths of a foot. This is of course not rocket-science but still mystified most of our crew members.)
Red: “Yes sir, I do.”
Fats: “Come over here. Take this list and three of your best guys and go to these locations and get them into tolerance.”
Red: “Yes sir.”
Not only was I succeeding at my new job, but I had also already gotten a promotion and was supervising other people!! Well, not really, but I took it with great pride that someone who was evaluating me was willing to place some trust in me. Lesson number three – this math stuff actually has some value in the real world. And so it went, throughout the summer. Later we had this dialogue:
Fats: “Red, can you run a compacting roller?”
Red: “Yes sir.” (I had no idea if I could, but I had run lots of different farm tractors and figured that it couldn’t be too hard.)
Fats: “Put your shovel in the back and come with me.”
This actually WAS a bit of a promotion, because we were a union contractor, and the union agreement classified a roller as “equipment” and thus I was an “equipment operator” and was entitled to another $0.50 per hour. Later on in the summer this discussion:
Fats: “Red, can you operate a rotary broom?”
Red: “Yes sir.”
Fats: “Shut that compactor off and come with me. Sweep the pavement from Station 195+00 to Station 255+00. And Red, I’m telling you, this roller will really go when you put it in the fastest gear. Don’t do that.”
Red: “Yes sir, I mean, No sir.”
Of course, once hearing the second part of my instructions, I absolutely HAD to try the fastest gear. And I found out that thing really would go, I mean like forty miles per hour! I also learned that it had so much power that you could “lay rubber” on the new concrete pavement when you started out leaving black marks. It was great fun. But this led to this conversation a couple of weeks later:
Fats: “Red, what is the problem?”
Red: “Not sure Fats, somehow the drive shaft has ruined the universal joint on the sweeper.”
Fats: “Red, you son-of-a-bitch! I saw that you have been laying rubber with that thing all over the job. You get your ass into town, find the replacement parts and don’t you go home until you have it fixed and know that the machine is ready to go in the morning. Tell the parts store to charge it to our account. If you do that again………….”
Red: “Yes sir.”
And so, it continued throughout the summer. Lesson learned, if you work hard and try to do your best, you can sometimes overcome some errors in judgment. Even with my elevated status running the roller and the broom, our days were long and arduous. Our normal work schedule was 6:30 AM to 6:30 PM Monday through Friday and 6:30 AM to 4:30 PM on Saturday. But many if not most days we worked well beyond 6:30. One extremely hot day while moving down the road with my roller, I noted a maroon air-conditioned car. The orange DOT inspectors’ trucks were clustered around it. I made a mental note that someone associated with construction work knew something that I didn’t. Who gets to do nothing but ride around in an air-conditioned car? After the car left, I asked Harold, our DOT inspector, what was up. He said that guy was the Project Engineer and that if I ever saw him again, the best thing to do was to be inconspicuous because he was the Big Boss. Lesson learned – there are better ways to be involved with construction than what I am doing.
A few days later at the end of a particularly long and hot day, Fats rolled up by me on my compactor and we spoke:
Fats: “Red, go to the liquor store in Rushmore and buy a case of Waldech beer. Bring it out to the bridge site on TH 60 by Worthington. Here is $10, I’m buying beer for the boys.”
Red: “Fats, I’m only eighteen. They won’t sell me beer!”
Fats: “Wear your hard hat and tell them that I sent you.”
Red: “What if I get in trouble?”
Fats: “You won’t”
So off to the municipal liquor store in Rushmore, Minnesota I went. Trembling, I went into the little shop and mustered up my most mature voice:
Red: “Fats said that I should pick up a case of Waldech beer.”
Squinty little liquor store clerk (hesitantly after looking me up and down): “Cans or bottles?”
Red: “Ummmmmm, cans.”
Off I went to meet Fats and the rest of the crew. You know I love beer. But I don’t think that beer has EVER tasted better than it did that evening, sitting around on the job with Fats and my compadres, toasting each other for a great day of work, with ice cold Waldech beers!!! This was certainly not the first beer I ever had, but in that setting, absorbing the satisfaction of a job well done, in the fellowship of my boys, it was an awesome feeling. Lesson learned, there is great satisfaction in knowing you are a part of a team and basking in the glow of a job well done.
Ahhhh, the bravado of youth!! By now I was feeling that I was really getting this working thing down. My lessons were all good (well maybe not my expanded vocabulary.) I began to think that maybe I was getting this LIFE thing down. But the second part of the Summer of 1968 taught me some other less uplifting lessons.