OK, here's some more.
In 1971, I'd been home a year and had worked for my brother a while and a couple of other contractors. My 69 Oldsmobile and I were just about persona non gratis in the state, so my brother in law gets me a job down in San Antonio, Texas in his pals outdoor sign shop.
I blast my way down there, picking up a couple more of what made me so unwelcome in Michigan. It wasn't my fault, it was the Oldsmobile what did it. Nice car, a dark green two door hardtop 88, 455 cubic inch 400 honest horsepower engine, 140 mile per hour speedometer, the whole thing was a police special, originally specced for the Lansing, Michigan city police department. It buried the speedometer with ease and ran down most Corvettes and Mustangs so quickly they didn't know I was there till their doors came off from the suction of me going by.......
But I digress.
After falling sixteen feet or so off a well rotted sign near Kerrville, Texas one day, I quit the outdoor advertising business for good, and scrounged up a job out to McDonough Bros., a lime and cement outfit west of San Antone. The job was a night shift position driving a vacuum truck around the plant cleaning up dirt and dust. It was a ten hour shift, and I'm strictly a daytime person. I could, some nights, barely receive radio station WLS out of Chicago on the trucks radio. That helped keep me awake, but not always. I woke up one night, creeping along in first gear, blower motor (a Ford 6) wailing away, and about six feet straight in front of me was the main scale station weigh shack.
I dynamited the brakes and got her stopped, maybe a foot from the door of the shack, then got out and slid the smelly stuff down my pants legs and walked around a bit till my knees quit shaking so bad. You know how it is.......
While I got my normal aplomb back, I gave a hard think on just what the heck I was doing out there, at night, driving a dinky vacuum truck around a deserted plant for strictly minimum wage. (maybe $2.75 an hour or something like that at the time) Yep, I quit the next day, having worked a total of 12 nights.
I slept for two days straight, when the redheaded gal in the apartment next door to mine let me. (Oops, nother story!) Then I found a job with HB Zachry, one of Texas prime dirt contractors. I reported to work at the jobsite south of town on the banks of the Bexar River, for a position as a scraper hand. Wasn't sure what they had in mind, just that it was a scraper job, and it paid the princely sum of $4.75 an hour.
We didn't have to have a physical or pass a **** test in those days. That was sissy stuff. All we had to do was show up reasonably sober and breathing, preferably with two arms and two legs. I found the foreman and announced that "I was here!" He actually was quite glad to see me as he'd had two operators quit and one get hurt. So, him being short a 666 Cat hand, that's where I went the first day.
This fleet of 666's were all the "A" model. A little slow in the cut, but boy they'd scat on the haul road. We were carving out huge chunks of river bottom for a Corps of Engineers project involving widening and deepening the river channel right south of the 410 beltway. Zachry had 12 of these monsters in the spread and we really hauled some muck out of there. We had four D9G pushcats behind us most of the time, loaded in maybe 10 seconds flat. Till we hit the soft mucky spots. Then we might be stuck for an hour or so till the Cats got it figured out how to push or pull us out. No cushion hitches on these babies, they were a real HE-MAN'S machine!
It was great, I started on Wednesday, and the 666's were finished Friday at the end of the day. They had been down there for three months already and had most of the big dirt done. Now they were needed on a job down in Mexico and Zachry's mechanics were there to go right to work tearing them down for shipment. Wow, those were three great days!
The foreman came up to me with my paycheck and wondered what I was going to do with the big Cats gone, and my job with them. They were only taking Spanish speaking operators down to Mexico with the scrapers, and all I could say was "ole", and "Si!" I could speak a little Vietnamese too, but that didn't count for much. Well, I didn't know, but allowed as how I was looking for a job when I found that one, and guessed I could find another someplace.
The foreman, Dave, said "why don't you show up here Monday morning, I just might have a seat for you on something." "Ok, see you then," and I went off to party with the redhead for the weekend.
Monday I showed up and Dave slapped me on a Euclid TS14, as sweet a little scraper as you ever sat in the seat on. We used those TS14's and one D9G pushcat and a D8H dozer to finish up the cut in the river bottom. They would walk where the 666's sank out of sight and we had a ball for two months finishing up the dirt. Probably moved as much muck in those two months as the 666's did in a day.
When we finished there, we took the little blighters down to a dam somewhere south of town about fifty miles, maybe down to Lake LBJ, I don't remember. Roaded them down, took us all day. We then dug out the toe of the earth-filled dam and back-filled it all the way to the top with an additional 80 feet of well compacted fill. Took us about three weeks I think, then, here came Dave one Friday night. "Uh, these scrapers are going down to Mexico where the 666's went." "I guess you can't go, cause ya gotta speak Spanish," only he called it something else, we wasn't PC in those days either. I'd only picked up one other word in Spanish, which this being a family forum I can't repeat.
So, I was out of work again.
One good thing Zachry did that I always have remembered, was that they had a crew go around every project on weekends, and wash every earthmover on each job. The machines were then usually very clean on Monday, but you did get used to taking a roll of paper towels in to work, cause you had to wipe all the grease off the windscreen, steering wheel, other controls, and the seat cushions. Zachry used a Moly grease and lots of it, so those guys blasted it all over everything when they squirted the rigs down. Course they were in a hurry and couldn't be bothered with cleaning a little grease off things in the cockpit.
In the meantime, A tornado had came by the apartments where I was living and took out all the new construction that the owner was doing to ad more rooms. He was doing the redhead too by then, in exchange for her room rent. He politely informed me that I'd have to leave as they needed to modify my apartment so they could ad the new ones on. In fact, the carpenters had already knocked holes in the wall for the ceiling joists of the addition. But, I knew the real reason he was evicting me, so I'd found a new apartment, one with walls two feet thick, a ceiling about a half inch thick, and a place that literally crawled with cockroaches at night. It might have crawled during the day too, but I wasn't there for that. Man, I couldn't pass a little gas in that place without the guy upstairs thumping the floor with a mop handle and yelling, "be quiet down there!" I finally got mad one evening and thumped the ceiling right back with a ¾ drive ratchet handle, with which I threatened to use to install some fresh lumps on his pointy little head.
Anyway, I'd had about enough of San Antone, so, having traded in the mighty Olds for a new 71 Chev Vega panel truck, I loaded up and headed west out of town. As always, I was looking for a another job.
... be careful if you are looking at the photo gallery (like I was with my 12 year old) 'cause the page title is a bit choice :beatsme
