Revised 3/26/2023

Originally Posted May 25, 2013;

Just because there isn’t any smoke pouring out of the smoke stacks at a Coal-fired Power Plant, it doesn’t mean that the plant is offline.  The power plant where I worked as an electrician in north central Oklahoma had two large Buell (later GE) electrostatic precipitators.  This is what takes the smoke out of the exhaust.  The smoke is referred to as “Fly Ash”.  The electrostatic precipitator when running efficiently should take out 99.98% of the ash in the exhaust.  When running with excellent efficiency, the exhaust can have less ash than dust in the air (or 99.999%).

Sonny Kendrick, the electric specialist and Bill Rivers an electronics whiz were my mentors when I joined the electric shop.  These two Power Plant Men taught me how to maintain the precipitator.  I wrote about the interaction between these two men in the post:  Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant.  It is funny to think, 30 years later that the skills they were teaching me would determine my career for the next 18 years.  You see…. I later became the Precipitator guru of the power plant.  I once thought it was sort of a curse to become good at one thing, because then you were kind of expected to do that the rest of your life.

When I first joined the electric shop and they were deciding who was going to fix all the manhole pumps, the electrical A Foreman replied by saying, “Let Kevin do it.  He likes to get dirty.”  At that point… I think I understood why they really wanted me in the electric shop.  Charles Foster had mentioned to me when I was a janitor and he had asked me if I would consider being an electrician because I cleaned things so well, and a lot of being a Power Plant electrician involved cleaning…  Now those words took on their full meaning.

I knew I was destined to work on the precipitator from the beginning.  Sonny had been banished to work on only the precipitator, as Bill Rivers had made clear to me when I was still a janitor (see the power plant post:  Singing’ Along with Sonny Kendrick).  I was Sonny’s chance to be lifted from the curse that had been placed on him by our Electrical Supervisor, Leroy Godfrey.  I had accepted that.  I knew that I would eventually be the one to maintain the precipitators from day one.

So, here I was…  One month before becoming an electrician, I had a near death experience inside the precipitator (See the post:  Angel of Death Passes by the Precipitator Door).  Now I was going into the precipitator again with Bill Rivers.  I think at that time we were just wearing half-faced respirators and no fly ash suit.  Just a rain suit.

Not a lot of protection….

I followed Bill Rivers into the precipitator while it was offline for overhaul.  I had my flashlight securely strapped around my neck with a string.  I had a small notepad with a pen tied to it also around my neck for taking notes.

So, as Bill entered the dark cavern of the precipitator, I found that we had just entered a new world.  It was dark… Like the dark side of the moon.  We were at the intake of the precipitator, and we were walking on top of the ash as it was more like sand at this point.  We just left footprints where we only sank about 2 inches into the pile of ash that had built up there.

Bill took his flashlight and shined it up between two sets of plates that are exactly 9 inches apart.  He swung the light up toward the top of the precipitator 70 feet above.  At first as the light was reflecting on all the white ash, I was blinded to the detail that Bill was trying to show me.  Eventually I realized that he was pointing his flashlight at a clip.  There was some kind of a clip that held one plate in line with the next.

Once I had confirmed to Bill that I saw where he was looking, he lowered the flashlight to about 45 feet above us, where there was another clip.  Then even lower.  About 10 feet above us.  A third clip.  — Now at this point… I was almost ready to resign myself to another lesson like the one I had learned from Ken Conrad as he had poured his heart and soul into his description of how to lay the irrigation hose and position the water gun 3 years earlier (See, “When Power Plant Man Talk, It pays to Listen“), then I remembered…. “I know this is boring… but you have to learn it….”  A Phrase that I made good use of 15 years later when I was teaching switching to a group of True Power Plant Men that would find themselves equally bored with the necessary material they had to learn (See the post “Power Plant Men Learn to Cope with Boring“).

Bill explained…. Each clip must (and he emphasized “Must’) be aligned with the next plate.  Every clip must be in their place.  Don’t start up this precipitator until this is so.  Ok.  I understood…. Let’s see… there are three clips between each of the four plates… or 9 clips per row…. and there were 44 rows of plates for each section…. and there were 6 sections across the precipitator, and 7 sections…. hmmm… that added up to oh… only 16,632 clips that I needed to check during each overhaul… ok… I took a note on my notepad…

Bill explained…. Clean each insulator.  there is one on the side of each bottle rack holding all the wires in place. There were only 4 for each 2 hoppers.  there were 84 hoppers.  Great.  Only 168 insulators on the bottle racks….  Then he pointed out that there were also insulators on the precipitator roof.  two on each section over each pair of hoppers… One on the tension house on one connected to the transformer, or 336 more… making a total of 504 insulators that need to be inspected and cleaned during each overhaul.

Bill explained…. you need to check each of the wires to make sure they aren’t caught on a clip or broken.  Let’s see…. there were 44 rows of wires in each section… with 16 wires in each row…. and there were 6 sections across each set of hoppers…. that came out to exactly 29568 wires that needed to be inspected during each overhaul.

Bill explained…. each rapper on the roof needs to be tested to make sure they are rapping with the correct force.  That meant that they each needed to lift at least 6 inches before they dropped the 15-pound slug (to knock the ash off of the plates into the hoppers below.  Hmm… For each 4 hoppers, there were 6 rows of 12 rappers each.  There were two sets across the precipitator and there were 7 sets of rappers.  In other words…. there were 672 rappers on the roof of the precipitator.

Bill explained…. each vibrator on the roof needs to be calibrated to provide the maximum vibration to the wires inside the precipitator in order to make sure they cleaned the wires of any ash buildup as they are responsible for delivering the static electricity to the precipitator that collects the ash on the plates.

In order to calibrate them, you had to adjust the gap between the main bracket and the magnetic coil to within a few thousands of an inch… I don’t remember the exact setting now… but we used a set of shims to set them correctly.  There were 12 vibrators for each of the two sides of each of the seven sections of hoppers.   This came out to 168 vibrators that need to be adjusted during each overhaul.  Oh.  And each vibrator had an insulator connected to the wire rack…adding 168 more insulators.

So, we had 16,632 clips, 672 insulators, 29568 wires, 672 rappers and 168 vibrators that all needed to be in good working order at the end of each overhaul (on each of the two units).  Throughout the years that I worked inspecting, adjusting and wrestling with plates, clips and wires, I became personally attached to each wire, insulator, clip, rapper and vibrator.

For a number of my 18 years as an electrician, I was the only person that entered the precipitator to inspect the plates, wires, clips and internal insulators.  Some of my closest friends were precipitator components.  Each diligently performing their tasks of cleaning the environment so that millions of people wouldn’t have to breathe the toxins embedded in the ash particles.

We hired contractors to go into the precipitator to help me.  I would spend an entire day teaching them how to wear their full-face respirator and fly ash suit…. How to inspect the clips and wires…. how to walk along the narrow beams along the edge of each row of 84 hoppers on each unit to find and repair the things that were not in proper alignment.  I would check out all their equipment and give them their safety training only to have them not show up for work the next day.

Contractors would gladly be paid to weld in the boiler hanging from a sky climber in the middle of space 200 feet above the bottom ash hopper but give them one day in the precipitator and they would rather be thumbing a ride to Texas….  I should have felt insulted… after all this was my home….

Mark Fielder the head of the welders once called it my “baby”.  I knew he had never had to endure the walk on the moon when you entered the tail end of the precipitator and found yourself buried waste deep in light fly ash.  I told Mark Fielder to not call the precipitator my baby…  Not until he could find a contractor that was willing to work alongside me inside it.  He apologized.  He explained that he meant it with affection.

At the back end of the precipitator, you just sank to the bottom of a pile of fly ash when you stepped into it.  The fly ash particles there are less than 2 microns in diameter.  That meant that they would infiltrate your HEPA filter and bounce around inside your respirator on their way down into your lungs.  Building up a permanent wall of silicon in your innards that will be there until the day you die.

I noticed that after a few days of working in the precipitator that I would feel like I had the flu.  This would happen after I would smell this certain scent in the precipitator that would develop after the unit had been offline for a week or so.  I noticed that when I burped, I could taste that smell in my mouth.  I also noticed that if I had to pass some gas, that the smell would also include the smell that I was experiencing in the precipitator.

I didn’t think much about it until one day when I went to the tool room and Bud Schoonover told me that they were out of the regular Hepa-filters for my respirator.  So, instead he gave me a pair of organic filters.  They had a different carbon filter that absorbed organic particles.  I said, “Thanks Bud.” and I headed out to climb into the precipitator to continue my inspection of some 30,000 wires, and 16,000 clips.

To my astonishment, when I used the carbon filters right away, I didn’t smell the acrid smell.  The flu symptoms went away, as well as the smelly burping flavors.  Not to mention (oh… but I am) the passing of gas without the additional smell of precipitator internals….  Crazy as these seems… I became obsessed with finding out why.

You see… at the same time that this particular smell arose in the precipitator, any ash that was built up on the plates would clump up and with a simple bang on the plates with a rubber mallet would cause all the ash to fall off leaving a perfectly clean plate.  Before this smell was there, you could bang on the plates all day, and the ash would remain stuck to the plates like chalk on a chalkboard.

I had our famous chemist (well…. he was famous to me… see the post:  A Power Plant Doctor Does a Jig in a Puddle of Acid), come out to the precipitator to give it a whiff.  He said it had some kind of a sewer smell to it…. I didn’t expand on my personal sewer experience I had had with it, though I did tell him about the burping….

He encouraged me to have the safety department come out and test it to see if they could identify the chemical that was causing this smell.  You see…. It was important to me because if we could pin this down, then we might be able to inject a substance into the precipitator while it was online to clean it without having to bring the unit offline if the precipitator was to become fouled up.

There was a young lady from the safety department (I think her name was Julia, but I can’t remember her full name).  She came from Oklahoma City and gave me some monitors to put in the precipitator while the smell was present to try to track down the chemical (See the Post “What’s that Strange Power Plant Smell“).  Unfortunately, we never found out what it was.  In the meantime, I had learned all I could about Van Der Waals forces.  This is the week molecular force that would cause the ash to stick to the plate.

I studied the chemical makeup of the ash to see if I could identify what chemical reactions could take place… Unfortunately, though I knew the chemical makeup of the ash, the chemicals were bound in such a way from the high temperatures of the boiler, that I couldn’t tell exactly how they were arranged without the use of an electron microscope.  I wasn’t about to go to Ron Kilman (who was the plant manager at the time) and ask him for one.  I had already upset him with another matter as you will learn in a much later post.

So, I just continued wearing the organic filters.  This gave me the strength to continue my inspections without the flu-like symptoms.  Later on, I taught Charles Foster and Scott Hubbard how to maintain the precipitator.  When I finally left in 2001, I know I left the precipitators in competent hands.  They knew everything I did.

One main lesson I learned from my experience as the precipitator guru is this…. You can be a genius like Bill Rivers or Sonny Kendrick…. when you are given a particular job to do and you do it well, you are usually pigeon-holed into that job.  One of the main reasons I write about Power Plant Men is because they are for the most part a group of geniuses. At least they were at the plant where I worked in North Central Oklahoma.

They just happened to stumble onto the jobs that they had.  They would probably spend the rest of their working career doing what they did best…. never moving onto something where their genius would shine, and others would know about them… That is why I write about them.

Do a job well, and you will be doing it until the day you die…. that’s what it seemed to be.  I didn’t feel like I was banished to the precipitator as Sonny Kendrick was by Leroy Godfrey, who did it consciously.  No.  I was “banished” to the precipitator for the next 18 years because I was good at it.  I loved it.   I may have mentioned before, but I had a personal relationship with the 168 precipitator control cabinets.

I had carefully re-written the programs on each of the eprom chips on the Central Processing Unit in each cabinet to fit the personality of each section of the precipitator.  I had spent hours and hours standing in front of each cabinet talking to them.  Coaxing them.  Telling them that they could do it with my handheld programmer in hand…. helping them along by adjusting their programming ever so slightly to give them the freedom that they needed to do their job.

If they had been human……. I would have given them names like “Mark”, or “Thomas”, or “Millie”.  Instead, I knew them as 2E11 or 1B7.  But they were each my friends in their own way.

You see… I look at friends like this…. It’s not what they can do for me…. It’s “what can I do for them?”  I have had some precipitator cabinets that I have given extra attention because they seemed to need it more than the others, only to have them crap out on me.  I wouldn’t have done anything different if I had known all along that they wouldn’t pull through.

I have my own understanding of who I should be.  My wife may call it “stubbornness” (or “Rotten”), and that may be what it is.  I would try and try to coax a control cabinet to do what it was created to do, only to have it fail over and over again….  What was I going to do?  Give up?  How could I do that to a friend?  I would tell the cabinets that were especially difficult (when I was alone with them – which was usually), “You create your own Karma.  That isn’t going to change who I am.”

Today I am called an IT Business Analyst.  I work for Dell Computers (now I work for General Motors).  It is an honor to work for a company that serves the entire world.  I see the same pattern.  When you do something well, when you love your work and become attached to it, you become pigeon-holed into a particular job.  You become invaluable.  Almost irreplaceable.  People look to you for answers.  They are comforted to know that someone who cares is taking care of business.  I am glad to be able to serve them.

Weeks before I left the power plant, Bill Green, the plant manager asked Jim Arnold (the supervisor over maintenance) again…. “What degree is Kevin getting again?”  Arnold replied, “Oh.  nothing anyone wants.”  (an MIS degree from the college of business at Oklahoma State University). Bill was concerned that if I left, they wouldn’t have anyone to take care of the precipitators.  No.  I wouldn’t do that.  Like I said… Each of the 168 precipitator control cabinets were my friends…. I had given them the best guardians I could find… Scott Hubbard and Charles Foster.

Recently Charles Foster has retired from the plant, and his health is not good.  His son, Tim Foster has taken his place.  One of the last things Tim has told me recently was that he was going with Scott Hubbard to work on the precipitator.  I wanted to reply back to his e-mail… take care of my friends Tim….  I know Scott understands….

Each clip, each wire… I often dream about them….  Row after row….. looking 70 feet up, then down… swinging my flashlight in the darkness.   Betty, Tom, Martin…. all the clips on this plate are in their place…. Sandy, David, Sarah… lined up correctly…  Fred, Chuck, Bill…. good… good…  next row….

Revised 3/19/2023

Originally Posted May 17, 2013:

I remember the day when I walked into the Electric Shop office to begin the lunch break, and four guys from the T&D department (Transmission and Distribution) came in from the door leading to the Main Switchgear. They were obviously worn out as they were complaining about how hard they had been working that morning.

The first one said that he couldn’t believe that the guy from GE had made them work through morning break. The second guy called him a slave driver. The third guy replied that he couldn’t believe how that GE guy just kept on working from the crack of dawn without stopping all morning and without even coming up for air. The fourth guy just collapsed on one of the chairs.

I remember the name of the last guy. His name was Foote. I remember him because he was really proud of his heritage. The first time I had met him, I asked him his name twice, because when he told me it was “Foote”, I wasn’t sure I heard correctly, so I asked him again.

I guess that he must has guessed what was going through my mind because he must have had the same reaction from a thousand other people in the past. I figure that because my last name is Breazile (pronounced “Brazil”) and I have had many conversations with people explaining the origin of my name.

Anyway. I don’t remember Foote’s first name because I think he only had initials for his first name on his hard hat, and I’m more of a visual person when it comes to memories. I clearly remember his last. If I remember correctly, one of his ancestors was a naval officer in the Civil War, though, I don’t remember for which side. I guess it doesn’t really matter much now, since both sides were Americans, and I think everyone is responsible for their own life, and not the lives of their ancestors.

This reminds me of a side story that I must tell…. Years later in 1997, when I was on the Confined Space Rescue Team, one guy that was from North Dakota named Brent Kautzman was constantly being “harassed” for being a Yankee, because he came from a “Northern State”. This was kind of a mute (or is it “moot”) point to me, because I knew that North Dakota didn’t become a state until well after the Civil War.

Anyway, one day when Brent was trying to defend himself from the hardcore confederates of the group, he pointed out that the North won the Civil war. A couple of other members disagreed, claiming that the South was going to “rise again”. One of those that believed in the Confederate resurrection turned to me and asked me, as if I was the resident historian (well… I did have a college degree… and I did have a minor in History…. and I was known for telling the truth when it really came down to it), “Kevin…. Did the north win the Civil War?”

Not really wanting to hurt the feelings of my southern friends, and also wanting to stand by Brent who was really correct about the outcome of the Civil War, I replied with the following explanation: “Yes. The North must have won the war. Otherwise, the South never would have let all the carpetbaggers from the North come down there and steal their property and their dignity.”

Brent was satisfied, and the southerners had to agree with my logic. They still insisted that the South would rise again. I couldn’t argue with them about that…. It has never ceased to amaze me how bigotry can be passed down so easily.  Or I suppose in this case it was a lack of historical understanding.

With that said, I would say that the Power Plant Men that I worked with that believed that the “South would rise again!” didn’t really understand what that meant. I say that because they never would have given a thought that the men that they worked with that were African American such as Floyd Coburn, or Bill Bennett, were nothing less than members of their own families.

I know that they each personally loved these men with all their hearts. I thought it was more of a nostalgic feeling than a desire to see the return of slavery or even the bigotry that crippled the southern states for decades after the Civil War.

End of the Side Story…. Back to the worn-out T&D workers.

By the sound of it, I figured that this guy from GE (General Electric) that had come to work on one of the Main Auxiliary Transformers on Unit 2 that had a problem with the Tap Changing Mechanism, was some kind of slave driver. Some hard-liner guy that wanted to work our employees to the brink of exhaustion because he wanted to be done with the repairs as quickly as possible so that he could move on to some more important work. You see. For this job, GE had called on one of the top Main Power Transformer Geniuses in all the country to work on this transformer.

The T&D guys sat there for a while and then walked out into the shop to eat their lunch. Shortly after that, the slave driver from GE came in the back door…. In stepped a man that immediately reminded me of Arthur Fielder from the Boston Pops.

He sat down…. opened his brown paper bag. Pulled out his sandwich. Carefully unwrapped it and began to eat. Charles Foster and I were sitting there quietly watching him. After hearing the horror stories from the T&D crew, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to engage this seemingly mad man in conversation, so I waited a while.

I ate some cherry tomatoes and Banana peppers that Charles brought for me each day…. and with each bite, I took a bite out of my ham sandwich. Then I looked over at “Arthur Fielder….” (I don’t remember his real name).

Finally, I decided that this slave driver in sheep’s clothing (well, an old frail man costume really), might come up with some interesting conversation so I asked him…. “Say, old man…. how old are you anyway?” He looked up from the total enjoyment of his sandwich, and with food still un-swallowed said, “I’m 83.”

“83?” — Either I said that, or Charles did… because we were both stunned by his answer…. “Yep… They called me out of retirement to work on this transformer. Seems I’m the only one that knows how to fix ’em. But I’m teachin’ your fellows how to do it, so they don’t have to call me again.”

Charles and I were so flabbergasted by his reply that we couldn’t leave it alone. One of us (Charles and I were always on the same wavelength, so usually when one of us spoke, it was what we were both thinking) … So, one of us asked…. “You’re retired and they called you up to work on this transformer!?!? Are you such a Transformer guru that you were the only one they could send?” (Hmm… must have been me…. I don’t think Charles would have used the word “Guru”. He would have used something like “expert” or “talented” or maybe “genius”).

He said, “Yep. They paid me enough that I agreed to take a week away from my wife to come here to take care of business. It would have to take a lot to take me away from my Jenny.”

Then this feeble old man with the white moustache explained that he didn’t like to be away from home. Every night since when he was young, he has played the piano for two hours. — Wait… I wasn’t sure if I heard that right, so I asked him…. “What? You play the piano for two hours… every night!?!?” (Notice… already I have used “!?!?” twice in one post… just goes to show you how surprised I was to run across this man).

He reaffirmed what he said, “Yeah. I had to find a hotel that had a piano, so I could sit in the lobby and play it before I go to bed. I can’t sleep well unless I have played the piano first.

After that, he began to tell us about his career in the Music Industry. He had played for many Big Band orchestras in the past. He talked about playing with Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. Names that I had learned from my Aunt Pam Sorisso in Kansas City that gave me an Eight Track Tape of Big Band music when I was in college that I used to listen to often. I had become a fan of Big Band and had a great respect for these Big Band Leaders.

Here sitting in front of me was one of the geniuses of the Big Band era in the electric shop at a Coal-fired Power Plant in the middle of North Central Oklahoma. All I could think of was, “Who would ‘a thought it?” Though I was impressed as all get out… I tried to act calm…. I wanted to jump up with a piece of paper and ask him for his autograph….

This old guy suddenly had all my respect. It cracked me up to think that this 83-year-old man was outperforming the younger T&D workers. He was running them ragged (pronounced “rag ed”). He explained that he didn’t like to stop for break. It made the day go a lot faster if he just kept working until he had to stop. He wouldn’t have stop for lunch if all the workers hadn’t just dropped all their tools and left.

It amazed me even more that this man who was a big band musician of the highest caliber had ended up working for GE.  Not only had he worked for GE, but he had become the ultimate authority in large transformer repair. I mean…. How cool is that?

I can’t tell you how much I instantly fell in love with this guy. He had talked and talked about his days as a big band piano player. What really came out of his conversation what just how much he loved his wife.

The two things he loved in the entire world was his wife and to play the piano. He said there was nothing more soothing than playing the piano. As he walked off to go back to work at the end of lunch… the only thing I could think of was one of my Big Band favorites…. Louis Armstrong….

For those people who stopped to really think about it…. This truly is…. A Wonderful World!

Comment from the Original Post

Ron Kilman May 18, 2013:

1. Great story. I met a lot of really neat guys at the Power Plant – experts in their fields – bladers, winders, crack-checkers, boiler gurus, balancers, . . . I remember making a factory “balance expert” really mad. He was sent to balance the Buffalo Forge FD fans at Seminole. He was the “lead” and I was just “checking” him. We used a modern IRD balance analyzer with a Teflon shaft rider and he used a pencil! When we both had taken our “readings” we shut the fan down. When it coasted to a stop, he began yelling “My marks – my marks – you wiped out my marks!” (With a German accent). On the next balance run, I took my readings first, then he put his pencil marks on the rotating fan shaft. We got the fan smooth. He was a cool guy but used 19th century “technology”. I never asked him if he played the piano too.

Revised 3/4/2023

Originally Posted on May 11, 2013:

If you crossed Walter Matthau with Howdy Doody, you would come out with someone that would remind you of Bob Kennedy. All right. Bob Kennedy looked more like Walter Matthau than he did Howdy Doody, but I could tell that when Bob was younger, even though he didn’t have red hair and freckles, I could picture him as a little boy playing with his stick horse wearing a cowboy hat, and to me he would have looked a lot like Howdy Doody…

The day I first met Bob Kennedy I instantly fell in love with him. He was an electrician at the Power Plant in Midwest City, and I was there on overhaul for three months during the fall of 1985. Bob was assigned to be our acting foreman while Arthur Hammond and I were there for a major overhaul on Unit 5. — Yeah. Five. They actually had 7, but all of them weren’t operational at the time.

Actually, I think it was Unit 3 that was a small generator that came from a submarine. — Half of the plant was like a museum. I used to park at the far end of the plant just so that I could walk through the museum each morning on my way to the electric shop. I think years later they may have torn that part of the plant down, which should have been illegal since to me it easily was a historical monument.

I called this post “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy” because Bob was tall and when he walked, he sort of lunged forward and walked as if he was a giant walking through a forest that was only knee deep to himself. Bob had been an electrician for over 35 years. I know this because one of the phrases he would often say was, “I’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years!”

He had some other phrases, that I will probably mention in a few minutes. First, I want to tell you about the relationship I had with Bob…. So, often in the morning after the morning steam horn would go off signaling that it was time to go to work (yeah…. isn’t that cool? A horn powered by steam would go off when it was time to go to work! My gosh… That horn alone was a monument of the 1930’s each morning when I heard it!).

Bob would come out of the office to where I was standing in the shop and say, “Kev. Follow me. I’ll show you what you’re goin’ ta be workin’ on today.” Then he would head for the door. I would follow along behind him. I could tell that he preferred that I walk behind him. When I would walk faster, he would spread his lanky legs even farther to keep me one step behind him… so I quickly assumed my place two paces behind Bob.

He would have these large strides when he walked that would cause his body to move in a left and right motion where his arms were swinging at his side. I loved everything about Bob. I loved the way he talked… I loved the way he walked… I wished that I could be a miniature Bob. So, I started to imitate him.

As Bob would walk across the Turbine-Generator floor toward Unit 5 from Unit 7 (where the electric shop was located), I would follow along two paces behind him trying my best to walk just like him. I would make very long strides to match Bob’s. I would swing my arms and lean left and right as I walked just like Bob. Bob was my hero and I wanted to let everyone know that I loved Bob and I wanted to be as much like Bob as I possibly could. So, as I walked, I had a tremendous grin on my face. My expression was full of the satisfaction of knowing that I was literally following in Bob’s footsteps!

Operators and other maintenance workers that would see us instantly understood my intentions as they would grin, or laugh, or fall down in a total convulsion of uncontrollable laughter, sharing in my elation of being a miniature Bob.

I wish I could say that my time with Bob was one of total contentment and joy at being a miniature Bob that had “done it this way for 35 years”, but there were some setbacks. The first problem was that Arthur Hammond was with me on overhaul, and there was one major flaw in this combination…. Arthur liked to argue. See my post from two weeks ago called “Power Plant Arguments With Arthur Hammond“.

Before I go into the contention part, I want to first tell you about my second-best Bob Kennedy Phrase. It is…. “I have a tool for that.” You see. At this older gas plant where Bob Kennedy had spent the greater portion of his life, he had created a special tool for just about every difficult job at the plant to make it easier.

Often in the morning when Bob would show me the job that I was going to be performing for the day, he would qualify it by saying, “I have a special tool for this.” Then he would take me back to the shop, reach under one of the work benches and pull out a work of art that comprised of chains, levers, pulleys and specialized cables that would make a seemingly impossible job, possible. He had a tool for everything.

So, when Arthur and I realized that Bob had a tool for everything we came up with a song for Bob that went to the tune of Big John. And old song about a guy named Big John that worked in a mine that collapsed one day. If you are older than I am (52 — well, now 62), then you may have heard it before.

In case you haven’t, here is a YouTube version of Big John sung by Jimmy Dean:

Now that you have listened to the song about Big John, here is the song that Arthur and I devised about Bob Kennedy:

Big Bob…. Big Bob….

Every morning when he showed up at the plant, you could see him arrive.

He was 6 foot 6 and weighed more than than 145.

Wore a chip on his shoulder.

And kinda wobbly at the hip.

Everyone knew he didn’t give a flip… That was Bob….

Big Bo ahh… ob… Big Bad Bob. Big Bob….

Bob didn’t say much ’cause he was quiet and shy,

He hummed and we hawed, and we didn’t know why.

That was Bo ahh…. ob…. Big Bad Bob….

When he would say, “I’ve gotta job… for the two of you…

Follow me… and I’ll show you what to do…

” That was Bob…. Bahhh….ob… Big Bad Bob….

When somethin’ didn’t work, he would say real quick,

Just spit in the back and give it a kick,

That was Bob…. Baaahhh…ob…. Big Bad Bob.

When you’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years,

It doesn’t matter what problem you’ve got sittin’ right here’s….

‘Cause I’m Bob…. Baaaah….ob…. Big Bad Bob…..

You see, I have a tool to fix it up just right,

Let me show you how it’s done. I’ll show you the light….

That was Bob….. Baaaah…..ob… Big Bad Bob!

Arthur and I would sing or hum this song as we worked. It made the day go by so fast that we wondered if Bob himself was warping time using some tool he kept under a workbench in the electric shop.

Like I said…. I love Bob, and I have since the day I met him, and I always will. There came a day when there was contention in the ranks…. I saw it beginning when Arthur was arguing each day with Bob. I think it had to do with the fact that Bob liked to argue also… and neither of them liked to lose an argument. So, each morning, either Arthur or Bob would win the argument (which sounds a lot like a Dilbert moment today) ….

My two friends whom I love dearly (to this day) quickly were at each other’s throats. I didn’t realize how much until the morning of December 18, 1985, just before I left the shop to go to work on something and Bob Kennedy said to me… “That Arthur Hammond…. He sure can dish it out, but he just can’t take it”. I walked straight from that conversation down to the mezzanine level of unit 5 where Art was working on a motor. The first thing Arthur said to me was, “Bob sure can dish it out but he just can’t take it.”

At that point I told Art to just wait a minute. There was something I had to do…. I went back to the shop and told Bob that there was something at the motor where we needed his help. As I was walking with Bob across the mezzanine and down to the motor, my heart was split in two. Here were two of my friends at odds with each other…. Two people whom I would spend the rest of my life praying for their happiness. Yet they viewed each other as mortal enemies…

I had to figure that both of them were right in their own way, yet both of them were wrong about each other. So, when Bob arrived at the motor, I told them both (as if I had suddenly turned into their mother) …. “A little while ago, Bob told me that ‘Art can sure dish it out, but he just can’t take it.’. Then I walked down here, and Art tells me the exact same thing about Bob. Now…. what is going on here? Bob?”

Bob looked at the two of us like the time had finally come to let it all out…. he said, “Every time we have an argument about anything Art here runs to Ellis Rook complaining about me. If he has something to say, he should come straight to me. Not run to our supervisor!”

Art said, “Now wait a minute! It isn’t me that is running to Ellis Rook! Ellis just spoke with me this morning about sending me back to the plant because I don’t get along with you (meaning Bob). Each time we have an argument, you run to Ellis Rook. Ellis has been telling me that he is thinking of sending me home because you can’t get along with me!” Bob had a shocked look on his face.

Playing the facilitator role, I asked Bob… “Is this so?” Because I remembered that one day before (on December 17, 1985) when I had to leave for part of the day to get my blood test because I was going to be married (and in Oklahoma you still needed a blood test to be married) …. when I had returned, I met Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) in the elevator, he had asked me about Arthur Hammond.

As a side note, because of the new changes in overtime rules, if I left the plant in the middle of the day, I wasn’t supposed to stay long enough to collect overtime. Ellis Rook started to tell me that I shouldn’t have come back to work after getting my blood test, because I wasn’t eligible to work overtime after taking off part of the day. After apologizing to him (humbly and profusely), he said, that it would be all right just this once… I figured it was because I was going to be married that Saturday on December 21, 1985. Ellis said that he had heard some bad things about Arthur, and he was considering sending him back to our plant.

This would have been a terrible disgrace for Arthur and would have been on his permanent record as someone that wouldn’t be able to go on overhaul anymore. I assured Ellis that Arthur Hammond was the most upright of employees and that there wasn’t any reason to send him home.

So, I asked Arthur…. was it true that he had been going to Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) to complain about Bob each time they had an argument… Arthur assured the both of us that not only wasn’t it him, but that it was Bob that had been complaining to Ellis Rook about him each time they had an argument. That was why he said Bob could dish it out, but he just couldn’t take it.

Bob replied, “It wasn’t me! It was Arthur! Every time we had an argument Ellis Rook would come to me and ask me about it. That is how I know that Art has been running to Ellis complaining about me. I would never tell Ellis about it! I would deal with it directly with Art.”

Art said, “Ellis Rook was asking me the same thing!”

So as the two were standing there a little dumbfounded, I asked…. “How would Ellis know if neither of you went to him to complain? I wouldn’t have told him….” This led us to the third person that was present during every argument….

You see, there was another electrician from the smaller plant across town that was there every time Ellis came to Bob asking about Arthur after an argument… Let’s call it Mustang Plant (since that was the name). In order not to embarrass him, I won’t tell you his name, but his initials are “Randy Oxley”. Randy Oxley desperately wanted to move from Mustang Plant to the plant in Midwest City… (all right… since I’m already naming names of plants, I might as well say “Horseshoe Lake Plant”).

For a time during this overhaul, I spent a great deal of time in the electric shop working on motors. Each day I would stand at a workbench disassembling motors, cleaning out their sleeve bearings (yeah. these old motors at the old plant had sleeve bearings) and measuring them and re-assembling them. During that time there were two things that I listened to. The first thing was the radio…. At that time in history… the leading rock radio stations would play the top 20 songs only. That meant that after listening to the top 20 songs, the only thing left to listen to was the top 20 songs all over again…. To me… It was like a nightmare.

The songs I listened to 100 times were songs like these:

“Say you Say Me” by Lionel Riche,

One More Night by Phil Collins:

Every Time you Go away by Paul Young:

We Built This City by Jefferson Starship:

Something in the Air Tonight by Phil Collins:

I’m sorry to do this to you, but this last song I know I must have listened to about 50 times as the top 20 played over and over again about every two hours as it has been drilled into my head. I know. I can feel the pity from every one of you who have just read this post.

Today I have “Something in The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins on my iPod only because when I listen to it once each week it reminds me of the time I spent in the electric shop at Horseshoe Lake plant working on those motors working around Reggie Deloney, Steven Trammell (otherwise known as ‘Roomie’), Paul Lucy, and the others that were there during that overhaul.

The second thing that I listened to while I was working on the motors in the electric shop was Randy Oxley. Randy was much like Steven Higginbotham, the summer help that I had worked with the first summer I had worked at our plant. See…. “Steve Higginbotham’s Junky Jalopy Late for the Boiler Blowdown“. He liked to talk.

Randy didn’t consider me as an important asset, so he didn’t talk much to me. He did, however, talk to one of the Maintenance Supervisors, who happened to be his uncle. You see… Randy wanted desperately to move from Mustang Plant to Horseshoe Lake Plant. There was an opening for the B Foreman at Horseshoe Lake plant because a long-time foreman was retiring, and he figured that one of the men in the electric shop would surely get the new foreman opening, which would leave an opening for an electrician.

So, Randy would try to butter up his uncle (His uncle was called “Balkenbush”). He didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there carefully honing a sleeve bearing for an old GE motor. He openly expressed his opinion. It is only because of his blatant disregard for discretion that I don’t feel any guilt passing on the conversation.

The one phrase that sticks in my mind is that Randy, while trying to convince his uncle that they should hire him in the electric shop at Horseshoe Lake, he said, “I am the best electrician at Mustang Plant. The only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it!”

I’m not kidding…. “I am the best electrician at the plant… the problem is that I’m the only one that knows it….”

This became one of my favorite phrases of all time. I couldn’t wait to share it with Arthur…. I told him… “I am the best darn BS’er of all time… the only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it…” Art would say…. “I’m the best goof ball of all time… only I’m the only one that knows it…” I know I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.

Actually, I use this phrase to also remind me to never get such a big head that I really think that I’m better at something than others think I am… because they usually know better than I do.

So, this brings us back to the Art and Bob Cage Fight….

It became obvious that both of them had become snookered. Every time Art and Bob had argued about anything, and Randy Oxley was around, Randy would run up to Ellis’s office and tell him that Art and Bob were at each other’s throats.

Randy was trying to butter himself up to Ellis so that he would hire him when there was an opening in the electric shop (which one was supposed to be coming up on the horizon). Art and Bob each thought the other had been running to Ellis complaining about the other….

That was when the other shoe dropped….

Many years before, when I was still a summer help, and when I was a janitor, there was an electrician at our plant named Mel Woodring. Mel had decided that he didn’t have a future at our plant, so he applied for a job at Muskogee. Of course, Bill Bennett and Leroy Godfrey (or was it Jackie Smith at that time?) were glad to give him a glowing recommendation because they thought that when Mel left, it gave them an opportunity to hire someone that would…. let us say… fit their culture in a more effective manner.

Because I was a janitor at this time, I was not eligible to apply for an Electrical job, even though Charles Foster had become my mentor and had me beginning to take electrical courses through the company.

I had worked the year before I was working with Bob Kennedy at the plant in Harrah, Oklahoma at Muskogee plant around Mel Woodring. I never worked directly with him, so I will just say that he met the expectations that had been set by my bucket buddy back home, Diana Brien.

Fast forward a year later to when I am on overhaul at Horseshoe plant…. Steven Trammell, Bob Kennedy and a few other electricians that had spent many years at the plant, all thought they would be possible contenders for new foreman’s job. Any of them would have been excellent candidates.

To their stunned surprise… Mel Woodring from Muskogee was given the job! To me, this was an obvious case of the “promote someone in order to get him out of the shop” syndrome.  Sort of like a modified “Peter Principle”.

It turned out that the foremen at Muskogee (John Manning), including our illustrious Don Spears, that I had the momentary lap dance with the year before (see, “Lap O’ Luxury at the Muskogee Power Plant“), had decided to give Mel the highest rating possible so that he would get the job at Midwest City, thus relieving Muskogee from the burden that our plant had placed on them by suggesting that Muskogee transfer him from our plant.  Maybe someday Mel will be promoted to VP.  he would fit right in.

Not only was the Horseshoe Lake plant in a state of shock, but so was Randy Oxley. This meant that there wasn’t going to be an opening in the electric shop, and all of his “schmoozing” had been for naught.  I could tell by the look on the face of Joe Balkenbush that he wasn’t buying Randy’s story anyway and was probably going to warn Ellis Rook about Randy by putting in a good “truthful” word about him.

The last day of the overhaul was December 20, 1985, the day before my wedding. I remember that Paul Lucy wanted me to go to a “gentleman’s club”(quite the oxymoron if you ask me) to celebrate and have a sort of a bachelor’s party…. I remember looking straight at Art Hammond right after Paul asked me, and Art shook his head and said…. “Don’t listen to him. Do what is right.” I assured Art that I had no intention of ruining the rest of my life the day before my wedding.

I went directly home.

The next day, Art Hammond was at my wedding with his wife. It was, and still is, the most blessed day of my life. Partly because Art was there at the reception dancing alongside me. I was lucky that I didn’t have a black eye… (which is another story — See the post A Slap in the Face at a Gas-fired Power Plant)… and lucky that Art and Sonny Kendrick (who sang at my wedding — See the post Singing Along with Sonny Kendrick) were there. Of all of my friends at the power plant, they were the ones that came to my wedding reception of all the people my mom had invited from the plant.

Years later, I traveled with Bob Kennedy on a bus from his plant to Oklahoma City to visit the new Transmission Control Room and back. We sat together and it was just like we had never been apart. Bob talked… and I wished in my mind that I could be a miniature Bob walking behind him every step of the way.

Today any time I have to take a big step for whatever reason…. Bob Kennedy immediately comes to mind. I think about when Bob climbed out of that bus… These words come to my mind….

Through the dust and the smoke of this man-made hell walked a giant of a man that ‘lectricians knew well…. Like a Giant Oak Tree, he just stood there all alone….Big Baaah…. ob…. Big Bad Bob…. Big Bob….. Everyone knew it was the end of line for Big Bob…. Big Bad Bob…. An Electrician from this Plant was a Big Big Man… He was Big Bob! Big Bad Bob! Big Bob!