OVER MY SHOULDER

Summers, school vacations and part time jobs provided me with a great deal of experience and with funds to work my way through college. The experience in learning to work, learning to get along with people, and to stay with a job or a project has over the years been extremely valuable to me. There is much practical experience, logic and general education that can be learned from work and job experiences.

I recall one summer that I worked in a rock quarry near LaHarpe, Kansas. I had the opportunity to do a number of things, but mostly I drove a ‘donkey’ truck. (don’t ask me why it was called a donkey truck---I would suppose that it was because it was a work truck). The truck was a heavy duty dump truck with a 5 or 6 cubic foot dump bed on it---there was no tail gate on the bed, and a large metal plate came up over the cab of the truck, to protect it from rocks that may go astray.

The day would be spent driving into the quarry, backing up to the large diesel shovel----where the shovel would load rock that had been blasted loose from the limestone walls into the dump truck. I would then drive up out of the quarry ---back up to the rock crusher hopper, dump the load in the hopper, and return for another load. The entire trip would take only a few minutes, but we would not stop all day, except for lunch.

During my employment at the quarry, there were rainy days that we could not crush rock, so we would spend the time repairing equipment, and preparing fuses and quarter sticks of dynamite that would later be used to break up the large rocks that were too large to load or to get into the crusher. The foreman knew how long to make the fuses so that we could light them and still get to a safe place before they exploded. In the preparation process, we would cut fuses to length, clamp the blasting caps to the fuse and box them for later use. Then we would cut the sticks of dynamite into one-fourths and box them for later use.

It was on one of these days that I learned a valuable lesson---I had been advised to wear gloves while working with the dynamite----but gloves were a lot of bother, so on this particular day I did not wear them. Within a couple of hours, I developed a terrible headache, and began to feel sick at my stomach. ----I did not know that you could absorb elements of the nitroglycerine (dynamite) through your skin, and it would make you sick. Needless to say I went home early that day, and it took me all evening and most of the night to recover.---I used gloves the next time.

When enough of the large rocks accumulated that we needed to break them up, someone would be assigned to drill holes in to each large rock with a drill and a jack hammer. As each hole was completed, a fuse with a blasting cap would be pushed into the quarter stick of dynamite, the entire thing would be dropped into the drilled hole, and the hole would be filled with lime or very fine gravel, leaving the fuse sticking out. I did this on several occasions----the jack hammer was harder work than driving the donkey truck.

About 30 minutes before the work day ended, everything was shut down, the equipment was moved to the far side of the quarry, and everyone was given an igniter with which they were to light fuses. At the signal from the foreman, everyone scrambled from rock to rock lighting fuses. After a few minutes of lighting, the foreman would give a signal for us to go to a safe place behind the equipment. (usually, we would be given about 3 minutes to get from the rocks to a safe place)

Soon the explosions would start and each of the large rocks would be reduced to smaller ones. The pieces of rock would usually be scattered all over the quarry floor, with some pieces rattling off the trucks and other equipment that was between us and the rocks. Once the charges had all gone off, we went home for the day, leaving the quarry until morning, ---in the event a charge for some reason was slow going off. The next morning, the foreman would inspect to see that all loaded rocks had exploded, the quarry floor would be ‘swept’ with the dozer, and the trucks would be running again.

Occasionally, a fuse would either have been cut too short, or it would for some reason burn faster that usual, and would ‘go off’’ before everyone got to a safe place----in this case, rocks splattering around you sure made you run faster. It did not take me very long to figure out why the same people who cut and loaded the fuses were the ones that lighted the fuses-------made one very careful to see that it was done correctly. In all the time that we blasted rock that summer, I don’t recall anyone getting injured---and only those slow learners got sick from the glycerine.

Of course, I did not make a career in explosives, truck driving, nor in the rock quarry business, but the lessons that I learned with that job were applicable to many situations that I have encountered since that time---not the least of which is to follow directions, and I did earn the big sum of about 35 cents per hour.