Revised 1/7/2022

Originally Posted March 16, 2013:

Seventeen years before Harry Potter captured the Snitch in the movie “Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone”, the Coal-fired Power Plant in north central Oklahoma was plagued by a similar elusive snitch. Unlike the snitch in Harry Potter, which was a small ball with wings that held a special secret only revealed in the last moments of the last Harry Potter Book (and movie) “The Deathly Hallows”, the Power Plant snitch had a more sinister character.

The Snitch from Harry Potter, “The Sorcerer’s Stone”

The Power Plant Snitch reminded me once again of the phrase that “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.” I had experienced this phenomenon only a few years earlier when I was in High School, and my father was a victim of this type of corruption. This made me especially abhorrent of deceit and dishonesty in the workplace. This was the reason why I had become so upset while I was a janitor, and I learned a little “lie” that Jack Ballard had cooked up to force the employees to use their floating Holiday first so that they couldn’t use it around Christmas (See the post Power Plant Secrets Found during the Daily Mail Run).

You see, in the Lone Power Plant stationed out in the middle of the country in North Central Oklahoma, a plot had been hatched by the Evil Plant Manager that rivaled a James Bond conspiracy to take over the world. Only in this case, it was a conspiracy to take over the personal dignity of honest, descent Power Plant Men. Men who said their prayers each night when they went to bed. Men who went to work each day to provide for their children. Men who held God and country in the highest esteem.

As I mentioned above, I had seen this abuse of power before when I was in High School. It had affected my personality in a way that I became instantly angry at the site of dishonesty. This was something I had to learn to deal with throughout the years as I interacted with men of less than honorable dignity. In order to understand why, I will divert into a side story:

My parents had kept their financial difficulties and other stress out of our lives while I was in Junior High and High school back in the mid ’70’s. They didn’t tell me that my father, who was listed in the top 20 Veterinarians in the world, and among the top 5 bird specialists, was being targeted by the Dean and his minions at the University of Missouri Veterinary College in Columbia Missouri.

I remember that my mother was introducing new foods to our palate, such as Lentils and other types of rice and bean dishes. She had gone to work as a secretary at Stephen’s College to make ends meet. At the same time, I had traveled with my dad when I was 13 to Europe where I met Veterinarians around the world that all greeted my father as if he were some king.

I remember walking down the road on the way to Liverpool from the University (a 5 mile walk) where a group of bird specialists from around the world were meeting to determine the universal Latin names of every part of the bird’s anatomy (which at that point had not been defined). The Veterinarian walking with me from India told me after I had made some offhand comment about my father.  He said, “You don’t realize who your dad is. In India, your dad is the Father of Physiology! Your dad wrote the bible of Veterinary Physiology used around the world!”  

I knew the book he was referring to. My dad had worked for three years day and night writing this book. Collaborating with renown Veterinarians around the world to compile a comprehensive book of Veterinary Physiology. The first of its kind. Before this book was written, you could only find the Physiology of a Pig, or the Physiology of a Dog. My dad had created a masterpiece that included an all-encompassing Veterinary Physiology in one book.

My Dad’s book

I say this, not to lift my father on a higher pedestal than he already is, but to put in perspective, how an important person such as James E. Breazile, DVM was treated by the “Evil Dean” of the Veterinary College at the University of Missouri in 1974 and until the day he resigned on January 16, 1978. Actually, the day my father brought the gold bound copy of the book home and presented it to my mother, she stopped talking to him for about a month for the first time in her life (for a totally unrelated reason which I may relay in a future post). Though the publishing company made a lot of money for years after this book was published, the total amount my dad received for his years of work totaled no more than $10,000 over a three-year period (a crime in itself).

Anyway. To make a long story short, (because I could go on for days about this), my father was not able to get a job at any another University in the United States, because he had tried to bring the corruption of the leaders of the Veterinary School (who had been stealing money from the University through bogus expense reports) to light, only to be told by the Chancellor of the University at the time, Herbert Schooling, “Boys will be boys.” It was just like the moment when Saruman told Gandalf, “We must join with him!”

Saruman Tells Gandalf that he must join with the forces of evil in the Lord of the Rings

It was only because my father had worked for Oklahoma State University before, when I was very young, that they didn’t need “permission” from University of Missouri to hire him, and take the multi-million dollar contracts that he had with Purina (and other businesses that had funded their electron microscope and other expensive scientific equipment at the time) with him, that we were able to escape the firewall that had been placed around my father’s career (ok. that sentence is long enough for an entire paragraph).

Anyway (again)…. I can’t let this story go until I give you the moment that was the “clincher” for me. The moment that I finally believed that my mother and my father hadn’t just gone off their rocker and become extremely paranoid living in a “James Bond” world….

My father (secretly) obtained a job from the Oklahoma State University in the Veterinary College. He was to start on January 9, 1978 with tenure (meaning that he couldn’t be fired without a really good reason). One week before he was going to resign from the University of Missouri. As usual, Oklahoma State University would begin classes one week before the University of Missouri after Christmas break.

During Christmas break (when I was a senior in High School), we would sneak into my father’s office at the Vet School in Columbia Missouri to remove his books and personal items from his office. We would go to this office at 10:00 pm after the school was closed for the night. At this point, I believed that both my mom and my dad had gone off their rocker and I was already planning on going through the phone book to find them a good Psychologist, or a priest to help them out.

Until (can you start a paragraph with the word “Until”?) Sunday morning, January 1, 1978. New Years Day. My mother and I were on our way to an early morning Church service at Our Lady of Lourdes. My mom said that she thought it would be safe to drop by the Veterinary school and pick up some of dad’s things from his office (Dad had already left for Stillwater, Oklahoma to deliver a load of books and personal belongings – did I mention that my dad had a lot of books?).

As we pulled into the parking lot at the Veterinary College, my mom told me that I couldn’t go in because that was “Brown’s” car on the parking lot. — She had names for the different “bad guys” in the department. The Dean was “Whitey”. There was an older lady professor named “Brown”. Then there was the one that I recognized the most…. “McClure”.

I told my mom… “Look. It’s 9 am on Sunday morning. New Year’s Day. She was insistent that “Brown” was in the building. Then finally she told me. “Ok. go downstairs (where my father’s office was) and look around. If no one is there, then grab some of his books.”

Then one of the most bizarre moments of my life occurred. I still remember every detail. It was like I had gone into a dream where fantasy suddenly became reality. I entered the dark building using my father’s key. Immediately turned left and went down the stairs into the darkness. I had to feel my way down the stairs, holding onto the handrail.

As I stepped into the subterranean hallway, I turned north toward my father’s office. I immediately stopped. About 40 yards ahead of me I could see two offices next to each other with their doors open and their lights on. The rest of the hallway was totally dark as we were below ground. Having been a “spelunker” in my youth, the darkness didn’t bother me, however, the existence of lights ahead was a total surprise.

I briskly walked down the hallway past the two doors. In the first office a lady was sitting at a desk. In the second, a man. I quietly walked on by. Then I turned around and walked past the door where the man was sitting and stopped between the two doors. I could tell that both the man and the woman were talking on the phone. After listening for a moment, I could tell that they were talking to each other, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

As a seventeen-year-old High School student, I suddenly realized that everything my mother and father had been saying for the past 5 years had been true. All the electronic bugs found in my dad’s phone. All the threatening notes.  The trips down to the gas station to use the pay phone because they were sure our own phones were bugged. The reason why he hadn’t received a raise in 5 years… All made sense! These are the guys that were crazy!

I walked south to the stairway and turned around and looked back. “Brown” (the lady), was standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips like Professor Umbridge in Harry Potter!

Professor Umbridge Holding her wand

I stood there for a second looking at her silhouetted against the light from her office, knowing that she couldn’t tell who I was in the darkness. then I darted up the stairs. Ran outside to the car. Jumped in the driver’s seat of the Pontiac Station Wagon and told my mom what I had seen.

My mom explained to me that this was “Brownie”. They talk on the phone so that no one can say that they have been seen talking together. You see…. they are supposed to be at a conference or some other “official” business this weekend so they can claim expenses for flights, hotel and food. That is why “Whitey” can live in a big ranch south of town on his measly salary. This is what my father had told the Chancellor of the University who told him that “boys will be boys”.

I didn’t know whether to lean over and kiss my mom when I suddenly realized that the list of insane people didn’t include my mother and father, or to peel out of the parking lot before Professor Umbridge made it up the stairs! Anyway. On News Years Day 1978 I had a totally new perspective on life. I can tell you that for certain.

To finish up with this side (non-Power Plant) story…. in 1980 when Barbara Uehling became the Chancellor at the University of Missouri (from Oklahoma University, where I had attended school two years before), she began to clean house. I remember the day I learned that she had fired “Whitey” the dean of the Veterinary school.

I woke from my sleep very early in the morning when the phone rang. It was my father from Stillwater, Oklahoma. He had received a call from Iowa State from a Veterinarian, Deiter Delman, who had told him that they had just fired Whitey the Dean of the Veterinary College at Missouri. I told dad that was great, and I crawled back to my bed to finish my nightly ritual of sleep.

Moments later I was woken by another phone call. One of my professors from the College of Psychology Dr. Wright had called me. He said, “I have some news that your father would probably like to know. It is really top secret!

I said, “Does it have to do with “Whitey” being fired?” In my head I could see Dr. Wright’s one fake eye spinning around in his head like Professor Moody in Harry Potter (even though he hadn’t been thought of yet in 1981).

Professor Moody… Or is it Professor Wright in the MU Psychology Department?

Professor Moody… I mean Dr. Wright…. said, “What? How do you know? This is “Top Secret?” the meeting was over just minutes ago? I told him that Dr. Middleton had called Dr. Delman, who had immediately called my father, who had already called me moments ago. — To put this in perspective…… The whole world knew within minutes. I wrote a letter to the Chancellor Barbara Uehling explaining the events that I knew about. She wrote back saying that the provost would be looking into the additional names I had given her.

End of side story…..

Back to the Power Plant Snitch… (I can tell… this has already become a long post and is probably going to break my record of the longest post of all time).

In September 1984, not one year after I had joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett, our A Foreman, came down to the electric shop (which was normal. Since he ate lunch with us every day). This time, he locked the doors. The door to the Turbine room, the door to the main switchgear and the front door…. — all locked. He said, “What is said here doesn’t go outside this shop.”

Ok…. We all went instantly into “serious” mode. Bill explained that there was something up with the grubby looking janitor (I’m sorry… I don’t remember what name he was assuming to use at the time — I’ll call him “Bonzo” from now on). The janitor “Bonzo” had been neglecting his duties as a janitor, so Pat Braden (the lead janitor) had gone to Marlin McDaniel to have him fired. Marlin McDaniel had gone to the Assistant Plant Manager, Bill Moler to start the process of firing “Bonzo”.

Marlin McDaniel (who had been my A foreman while I was a Janitor and on Labor crew after Chuck Ross had left) was told by Bill Moler that he was not going to fire “Bonzo” under any circumstance. It didn’t matter to him that he wasn’t doing his job. Marlin was told to forget about it and not bring it up again.

Bill Bennett told every person in the electric shop…. “Keep clear of this guy. I don’t know what is going on, but something is definitely wrong.” At that point everyone in the Electric shop knew that “Bonzo” was a snitch. Don’t talk to the Snitch…. Ok… from now on I’ll refer to “Bonzo” as the “Snitch”.

I know I have bored all of you by the personal story of my father and the trials that he went through, so I’ll try to keep this short: I knew a year and three months ago when I first started writing about the “Goodness” of the Power Plant Man that I would eventually come to this story. I know that the Power Plant men that read this blog knew that this story had to eventually be written. So, here it is.

Through unforeseen circumstances… and I attribute it to my Guardian Angel who has kept me out of serious trouble up to this point, I was called to Oklahoma City by my girlfriend Kelly Burgess (who ten months and 11 days later became my wife and is ’til death do us part) on February 10, 1985. I called in to Howard Chumbley on February 11 and told him I would not be able to make it to work that day. I would be taking my floating holiday.

The following Monday morning when I had climbed into Bill River’s Station wagon at the bowling alley where we met, with Rich Litzer and Yvonne Taylor and we were on our way to work, I learned about what had happened the Friday before. The day that would forever be referred to at the plant as “Black Friday.”

Bill Rivers explained the entire scenario to me during the 25-minute drive to the plant. I can’t say that I was in tears because my system had gone into shock, and I was zombified by each new revelation. If I could have cried, I would have. My system had just gone into shock. All emotion had shut down.

Bill explained to me that on Friday morning (February 11, 1985), a plant-wide meeting had been held. Everyone at the plant had been informed that a drug and theft ring at the plant had been found and eliminated. This included one lady who was a janitor. A machinist named Dink Myers. The Lead Janitor Pat Braden and two of the Electricians Craig Jones and Jim Stevenson.

Drug and Theft ring? Really? At our Power Plant?

Except for the female janitor (I can’t even remember her name), I had a personal relationship with every other person on this list (whether they knew it or not). I never worked directly with Craig Jones, but as an electrician, I did know that everyone held him in the highest esteem. I later found out that Dink Myers was a distant relation of mine when two years later I attended my grandfather’s funeral. Jim Stevenson was a close friend to the point that I used to give him Swedish Massages that would ease the pain of his rampant Eczema. Pat Braden…. Well. Pat Braden.. my Janitor lead. I loved him most of all.

I invited Pat Braden to sit next to my wife and I at my wedding 10 months later, even though the Evil Assistant Plant Manager would be serving as a deacon in the wedding ceremony (he didn’t come… I understood why). Next to Charles Foster, Pat Braden was my next dearly beloved friend. — Other Power Plant Men, such as Mickey Postman and Ed Shiever, share in my total love for Pat Braden to this day. — Not that I have asked them… I just know… They used to work for this saint.

Here is what had happened……

Eldon Waugh (the evil plant manager) had heard from a study that came out early in 1984 that 10% of a typical workforce were either on drugs or were robbing their employer. I know. I had read the same study. The company had hired the snitch to become a janitor at the best power plant in the country to infiltrate their troops and bring out the worst in them.

I distinctly remember the snitch walking into the electric shop once as I was walking out…. He paused… looked at me as if to say something, then went on…. (– my interpretation…. “Oh… a victim….”…. Guardian angel response…. “This isn’t the droids you are looking for…”) He went on without saying a word.

These aren’t the droids you ar looking for (Star Wars — A New Hope)

So, the Snitch nailed a good friend of mine, Jim Stevenson…. I remember in January just before the verdict came down…… Leroy Godfrey had gone on a frenzied hunt for the portable electric generator. It had turned up missing…. Everyone in the shop was sent to look for it… After a day of searching, when it was time to go home….

I remember that as we were walking out the door to the parking lot that Jim Stevenson said, “They are never going to find the generator.” Bill Ennis asked, “Why Not?” Jim answered, “Because their snitch has it. If they are going to let a crook like that work here, they are going to have to live with the consequences. He took the generator.”

A few months after “Black Friday”, Jim Stevenson was suing the company, and the specifically the Plant Manager and the Assistant Plant Manager.  Lawyers came from Oklahoma City and interviewed people that had worked with Jim Stevenson and Craig Jones. I was in a quandary. I knew if they asked me about this situation, I would have to tell them what Jim Stevenson had said. Jim had been fired for helping the snitch load the generator in the back of his truck months earlier. The funny thing was… I was the only one in the shop that they didn’t interview. I had never been on Jim’s crew, so I wasn’t on their list. At that point, if they didn’t ask me, I wasn’t going to volunteer.

The thing about this whole event was that it was setup from the beginning…. The Snitch asked Jim if he would help him lift the generator into the back of his truck…. This by itself was nothing out of the ordinary, since people could “check out” the generator for their personal use.

Portable Generator

Jim had known that the Snitch had taken the portable generator and said to Bill Ennis that if they wanted to keep scum around like that, then they should incur the cost of that decision. What Jim didn’t know was that he was being secretly taped while he was being entrapped into loading the generator into the back of the Snitch’s truck. Jim reminded me of Dabney Coleman:

Dabney Coleman reminds me of Jim Stevenson

I won’t go much into the stories of Dink Myers, who shared a joint with the Snitch in the locker room, and Craig Jones who pulled up some “hemp” on the road to the river pumps to swap for a “stolen knife set” (though he didn’t know they were stolen) since these were “no-brainer” stupid moments in the life of young Power Plant Men… but I will defend Pat Braden…. The most honest and loving of souls (and again… I apologize for the length of this post.

In previous posts I have mentioned that Pat Braden reminded me of Red Skelton.

This Picture of Red Skelton reminds me of Pat Braden

Today, when I want to reminisce about Pat Braden. All I have to do is watch an old episode of Red Skelton. As kind as Red Skelton was in real life… there was Pat Braden. If you don’t know about Red Skelton… Google him…. He was a sincere soul… He was a soulmate to Pat Braden.  — I finally found an old photo with Pat Braden.

Pat Braden (left) with Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs

This is the story about how Pat Braden was fired…… The snitch came to him one day and asked for the key to the closet so that he could get the VCR…… Weeks later, the VCR turned up missing and Pat was asked if he knew where the VCR went. He didn’t know.

When I was a janitor, I used to go to Pat on a weekly basis and ask for the key to closet for the VCR. I had to regularly move it to the control room or the Engineer’s shack for training sessions. It was just part of our regular job and Pat Braden would have not thought twice about it.

As it turned out, the snitch had taken the VCR from the closet and had brought it straight to Bill Moler, the Assistant Plant Manager and handed it to him and told him that he had stolen it (even though technically, it hadn’t been stolen). Then about a month later, Bill sent out the request to find the VCR. At that point, Pat, who was the same age as my father (It’s funny, but a lot of people at the plant were the same age as my father), and on blood pressure medication that made his head swim when he stood up, didn’t remember anyone taking the VCR four weeks earlier… So, he was included in the “Theft and Drug ring at Sooner Plant on February 11, 1985”.

The story about Jim Stevenson is almost as tragic, though he had enough money to take the Electric Company to court. Pat’s income of $10 an hour didn’t quite leave him in a position to complain about being unjustly fired.

As the Tape recorder tapes revealed about Jim Stevenson (yeah… Like Watergate) … The evil Plant Manager, Eldon Waugh had told the Snitch to specifically target Jim Stevenson. The way it was explained in the recording between Eldon Waugh and the Snitch (as recorded by Jack Ballard, the head of HR at the Plant at the time), if Jim Stevenson were gone, then Leroy Godfrey’s only friend would be gone… Then Leroy would have to turn to Bill Moler or Eldon for friendship…… I want to continue printing periods as you ponder this thought……

So…. Eldon and Bill had Jim Stevenson fired as part of a bogus “Drug and Theft” ring so that Leroy Godfrey would be their friend…. How bizarre is that? You know… I can put this in writing because it all became public knowledge when it became part of a trial between Jim Stevenson and the Electric Company a year later. The s**t hit the fan on January 23, 1986, when Bill Moler and Eldon Waugh were attending Jack Ballard’s funeral.

Immediately after the graveside services were finished in Ponca City at the Odds Fellows Cemetery, Jim’s lawyer hit them both with a Subpoena to appear in court… The lawyer wanted to make sure the trial took place in Kaw County (Ponca City) outside the area that received electricity from our electric company. A year later, these two individuals and the company settled out of court after news about the snitch was coming out in the trial and the company didn’t want any publicity surrounding this. Both the Plant Manager and the Assistant Plant Manager were “early retired” which opened the door for a new era of Power Plant Management. Jim Stevenson walked away with an undisclosed sum of money that was at least six digits.

Pat? I found out a few years later that my wife had been working with Pat in Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Ponca City. One day, after we had moved to Stillwater, and Kelly was talking to a friend from Ponca City, the subject of Pat Braden came up. When she hung up the phone, I asked her, “Pat Braden who?” When she explained that she had worked with a security guard named Pat Braden in Ponca City, and that he was the nicest guy you would ever meet. He cared about one thing in life and that was his daughter… I knew she was talking about our Pat Braden.

Everyone that ever met this kind soul was touched by him. It was ironic that my wife Kelly had worked with Pat for a couple of years at the hospital and I didn’t even have a clue. I knew that Pat must have known…. After all, I was the only Breazile in the phone book in Ponca City at the time. From what I understand… Pat is still around in Ponca City doing something…… Jim Stevenson still runs “Stevenson Refrigeration Services”. Both of these are honorable men.

Note that the True Power Plant Men mourned their loss for years after this event. A certain amount of “innocence” or “decency” had been whittled away. That is until 1994 rolled around…… But…. That is another story for a much later time….

Comments from the original post:

1. 

   Brittius March 17, 2013

   Old Sicilian saying: “Rats get fat, while Good Men die”.

2. 

   Ron Kilman March 18, 2013:

   I of course heard about “Black Friday” at Sooner, but it was from Eldon’s perspective. It is evil when innocent people are set up to be fired like that.

   We didn’t hire any snitches at Seminole.

3. 

   Jack Curtis April 6, 2013:

   An entertaining study of the use of power in a university and in a power plant…with applications to government available!

   Comments from  a repost:

   

   johnbarleycorn12 March 18, 2015

   We have two snitches in our shop, one is overt and the other covert. Both are very unhappy people with very small minds.

   

   Fashionable Librarian March 18, 2015

   Sigh. I have seen this happen firsthand and to this day I cannot believe that people can be this brutal and reckless with the careers of other persons. Their day will come

   

   Filmbell April 1, 2015

   Confucius said, to paraphrase, “Here is a way to tell great men from small. Great men, when they wish to steal something, which is indeed the way of the world, forthrightly tell you as much and bear the responsibility thereafter. Small men instead make every attempt to BLAME AND DISCREDIT THEIR VICTIMS.”

   Now you might make the Pat Braden movie, we think it’s original.

    

   

   BelleUnruh December 10, 2017

   Things like this have happened where my husband works. It is truly horrible what people will do to people at work. Thank God there are harassment laws here. My husband knows quite a few people who sued the company and won.

   johnbarleycorn12 December 10, 2017

   We have a few snitches in our group. Everybody know who they are and what they do so we feed them disinformation.

   MARY RENSBERRY December 10, 2017

   Enjoyed the post although it was disconcerting to know that so many ugly things happened in the workplace then. I’m sure there’s still the same thing happening today. Ethics is surely needed in our world today. Thanks. Enlightening.

Revised on 1/1/2023

Originally posted on March 9, 2013:

There is one item that all Oklahoma power plant men carry with them almost every day. Whether they are electricians working on a motor, a mechanic pulling a pump, or an operator making his rounds. All of them carry and use this one item. It is so important that, without it, it would be difficult for the maintenance shop to function properly.

This item of course is a rag from the Chief Wiping Cloth Rag Box:

Every Power Plant Man uses Chief Wiping Cloths on a daily basis

As an electrician, I used rags all the time. Whether I was working on a breaker, doing battery inspection, elevator maintenance or just looking for a clean place to sit my back side, I had to have a rag from the box of Chief Wiping Cloths. Chief Wiping Cloths come from the Oklahoma Waste & Wiping Rag Company in Oklahoma City.

When I was on the labor crew, I was dirty all the time. I was doing coal clean-up, digging ditches, pouring concrete, shoveling bottom ash and wading through fly ash. I had little reason to stay clean or to clean things. My life was full of dirt and grime. I was always dirty, so much so that when I went into the electric shop in 1983 and Bill Bennett was talking to Charles Foster about who should repair the Manhole pump motors, Bill told Charles, “Let Kevin do it. He enjoys getting dirty.”

I didn’t argue with Bill, because, well…. what was the point. But as an electrician, I not only had desired to have a cleaner job, but I also wished to fulfill Jerry Mitchell’s prophesy that “When I become as good as him, I will be able to remain clean even in the face of “Coal Dust and Fly Ash” (See the post A Power Plant Man Becomes an Unlikely Saint). The boxes of rags were my opportunity.

So, when I left to go on a job, I would always grab at least a couple of rags from the box and put them in my tool bucket and at least one hanging out of my back pocket. That way, if I needed to plop down on the ground to unwire a motor too low to sit on my bucket, I could sit on a rag on the coal dust covered ground instead. This helped my goal of remaining as clean as possible.

It’s funny that years later I should miss the boxes of rags that I used to use to do my job. There was more to it than just the rags I used to wipe my hands, battery posts, greasy bearings, breaker parts and my nose. You see, these rags were made from recycled clothes. Yes. They were sterilized for our use, but these were from recycled clothes.

Actually, the Oklahoma Waste and Wiping Rag Company, founded in 1940, was one of the largest purchasers of donated clothing in the country. That meant that many of the rags we used in the rag box were actually worn by someone. Sure, a lot of the rags came from defective clothing from factories, but some of the rags had been clothes actually worn by a person.

As odd as it may sound, while I was grabbing rags from the rag box, I was thinking (at times… it wasn’t like it was an obsession with me), that these rags may have been worn by someone for years before ending up covered with bearing grease by my hand and tossed into a proper Fire protection trash can.

Trash cans like this were used because they prevented oily rags from burning down the shop when they would spontaneously “combust”

So, anyway….. Thinking about how these rags were possibly once worn by people throughout the United States, I felt that some of the rags had a specific connection to some unknown person somewhere. So, I would actually go through the rag box looking for pieces of rags that I felt had been worn by someone before. You know (or maybe you don’t), rags that had an aura around them like someone had once had a “personal relationship” with them.

I would take these rags and I would “pseudo-dress up” in them. So, if it was a rag made out of a pair of pants, I would tuck it in my belt and I would carry it that way until I needed it. In a weird way (and I know… you are thinking a “really weird” way), I would feel connected to the person that had worn this piece of clothing in the past. I felt as if I was honoring their piece of cloth just one last time before I stained it with coal dust, fly ash, or snot, just one last time.

And in my even weirder way, I would sort of pray for that person, whoever they may be. I would even, kind of, thank them for the use of their old clothes (I know, I stretched the English Language in those last two sentences to meet my unusual need).

I have a picture in my mind of myself standing on the platform of the 6A Forced Draft Fan at Muskogee in the fall of 1984 (one year after becoming an electrician), dressing myself up in pieces of clothing from the rag box, all giddy because I had found enough pieces to make an entire outfit made of half male and half female clothing.

Ben Davis, who was on overhaul at Muskogee with me from our plant is shaking his head in disbelief that he had to work with such a goof. Not exactly sure who he has been assigned to work with… — I actually felt sorry for Ben. I knew I was a normal person. The trouble was… I was the only person that knew it (For an explanation about where that phrase originated, see the post “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“).

Ben Davis

Levity is healthy. And at times when stress is at its greatest, levity is a way back to sanity. Just today I was invited to a conference call to discuss something that I was working on, and when I was done, I stayed on the line even though I was no longer needed. As I listened, one person on the other end was remarking about how he enjoyed his team so much because they were able to crack up and reduce the stress by being humorous.

A friend of mine, and fellow teammate Don McClure who had invited me to the call was coming up with one “one-liner” after the other. They were “spot-on” and very funny (as he usually is — ok. He’s going to correct me on the “usually” part). But he said one thing that hit home with me. He said that he had been in the Hot-seat so long that he had to put on a pair of Asbestos underwear.

This, of course, made me immediately think of the asbestos gloves we used to wear in the electric shop before Asbestos had been formerly outlawed. We had an old pair of asbestos gloves from Osage Plant ( to find out more about the Osage Plant read about it in the post Pioneers Of Power Plant Fame Finally Find Peace).

Asbestos Gloves worn when putting hot bearings on a motor shaft (for instance)

Along with the rags in the rag box, when I used to put on the asbestos gloves I used to think of Howard Chumbley (who died on August 4, 1998 at the age of 70), at the age of 24 working at the Osage Plant, before his hair turned to gray and then to white, wearing these same gloves while he pulled a bearing off of a heater and slapped it onto a motor shaft.

Here Lies Howard Chumbley

It gave a special meaning to motor repair. Even though Howard retired from plant life in 1985, for years I could put on his old pair of asbestos gloves and feel like I was stepping into his young shoes. I would think… If only I could be a true “Power Plant Man” like Howard…. I love Howard with all my heart, and today, I have never met a better human being than him.

Note that in the picture of Howard’s gravestone it says that he was an EM3 in the Navy. This is an “Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class”. There is no way I was ever going to measure up to Howard. He was a hero to his country and a man of great integrity and humility. If I had saved up all the nice things I had done in my life and done them all on one day, I may have slightly resembled Howard on a regular day. Just like Jim Waller that I had discussed in my last post… Only Men of the greatest integrity measure up to be “True Power Plant Men”.

This made changing the bearings on a motor almost a sacred event to me. I don’t know if the other electricians felt what I felt, but there was something about placing those gloves on my hands that seemed to transform me for a moment into someone noble. I never mentioned it to them (which was odd, because I was usually in the habit of telling them every little crazy thought that entered my head).

I remember at break time one day Margie Belongia (who was a plant janitor at the time) telling me in 1981 when I was a summer help, that she wanted to go to hell because that was where all of her friends would be. I asked her at the time how she was so certain that being in hell guaranteed that she would be able to be with her friends, and she was taken aback by my question.

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I be with my friend?” — I responded, “Suppose in hell you are alone. With no one but yourself.” I think I unnerved her by my response. She said that she had never considered that. She had counted on being with her friends. They had all decided that was the way it was going to be.

At any rate. I kept her thought in my mind. I hope every day that someday I will be able to walk up behind Howard Chumbley (not in hell of course, the other place) and just stand there and listen to him tell stories about when he worked at the old Osage Plant, and how he used to be up to his elbows in oil that contained PCBs and never thought twice about it. Or how he played a harmless joke on someone dear to him, and he would laugh….

Howard was my foreman for only about 5 months before he retired. I remember sitting in the electric shop office for a year and a half during lunch listening to him tell his stories. He would grin like Andy Griffith and laugh in such a genuine way that you knew that his heart was as pure as his manners.

Andy Griffith in this picture reminds me of Howard Chumbley

To this day I know that I have never been richer than I was when I was able to sit in the shop and listen to Howard Chumbley pass on his life experience to us. Even years later when I was able to slip on the pair of Asbestos Gloves worn by him years earlier I could feel that I was following in his footsteps. Just the thought of that would make me proud to be an Electrician in a Power Plant.

I used to imagine that the Chief on the Chief rag boxes knew the history of all the pieces of rags in the box. When I moved to Texas in 2001, I used some sturdy Chief rag boxes when I was packing to leave. They are sturdy boxes. Just this past year, we threw away the last Chief rag box that contained Christmas decorations in exchange for plastic tubs. Even though it seems like a little thing. I miss seeing the Chief on those boxes of rags.

Revised 12/24/2022

Originally posted March 1, 2013:

I thought my days of working with summer help was over when I joined the Electric Shop at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. I had worked as a summer help for four summers while I was going to college to obtain a degree in Psychology. As I stated before, this helped me become a first-rate janitor, as I was able to lean on my broom and listen to the problems of Power Plant Men that needed an ear to bend and to have the reassurance that they really didn’t have a problem. It was someone else’s problem.

When the second summer of my electrical career began, the electric shop was blessed to have Blake Tucker as a summer help. I had worked with Blake before when we were in the garage, and I had found him to be a man of character. I was glad to be working with him again. Not only was Blake a respectable person, but he was also very smart.

Blake was going to the university to become an Engineer. Because of this, he was able to be in a higher class of summer help than I was ever able to achieve. As I mentioned in earlier posts, my first summer I was making all of $3.89 an hour. By the time I left to become a janitor, I had worked my way up to $5.14 an hour. After arriving in the Electric shop, my wages had quickly shot up to a little over $7.50. Blake was able to hire on as an engineer summer help which gave him the same wage that I was making.

Bill Bennett, our A Foreman, said that he had a difficult task that he thought the two of us could handle. We needed to go through the entire plant and inspect every single extension cord, and electric cord attached to every piece of equipment less than 480 volts. This included all drill presses, power drills, drop lights, coffee machines, water fountains, heat guns, electrical impact guns, refrigerators, handheld electric saws, sanders, grinders, and um…… er… it seems like I’m forgetting something. It’ll come to me.

Anyway. Each time we inspected something, we would put a copper ring around the cord with an aluminum tag where we had punched a number that identified the cord. Then we recorded our findings in a binder. We checked the grounding wire to make sure it was properly attached to the equipment. We meggared the cord to make sure that there were no shorts or grounded circuits. We made sure there were no open circuits and repaired any problems we found. Then once we had given it our blessing, we returned it to our customers.

A Hand cranked Megger made by the same company, only newer than the ones we had

We went to every office, and shop in the plant. From the main warehouse to the coal yard heavy equipment garage. Wheeling our improvised inspection cart from place to place, soldering copper rings on each cord we inspected.

One thing I have learned about working next to someone continuously for a long time is that you may not realize the character of someone up front because first impressions get in the way, but after a while, you come to an understanding. The true character of respectable people isn’t always visible right away (this was not true with Blake. I could tell very quickly when I first worked with him as a summer help that he was a good person. Work ethic tells you a lot about a person). Other people on the other hand, that are not so respectable, are usually found out fairly quickly.

Men of honor aren’t the ones that stand up and say, “Look at me! I’m a respectable person.” People that are dishonorable, usually let everyone know right away that they are not to be trusted. This isn’t always the case, but by studying their behavior their true character is usually revealed. I think it usually has to do with how ethical someone is. If they mean to do the right thing, then I am more inclined to put them in the honorable category. — Anyway…

Since Blake was studying Engineering, I took the opportunity during lunch to run some of my mathematical queries by him. Since I had been in High School, I had developed different “Breazile’s Theories”. They were my own mathematical puzzles around different numerical oddities I had run across. Like dealing with Prime number, Imaginary numbers and the Golden Ratio (among other things).

The spirals created by the center of a sunflower create a spiral in the proportion of the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is:1 plus the square root of 5 divided by 2.

So, for part of the summer, we spent time on the white board in the office looking at different equations. There was no one else at the plant at the time that I could talk to about these things. — I mean… others just wouldn’t appreciate the significance of adding 1 to the golden ratio!

Anyway. I titled this post “…Summer Help Stories”, and all I have done so far is talk about how good it was to work with Blake Tucker. Well. A couple of years after Blake was our summer help, we were… well… I wouldn’t use the word “Blessed” this time. We were given a couple of other summer helps for the summer. One of them was a good worker that we enjoyed having around. His name was Chris Nixon. I won’t mention this other guy’s name in order to not embarrass him, but his initials were Jess Nelson.

Right away, you knew that you didn’t want to work with Jess. I worked with him once and I told my foreman Andy Tubbs that I didn’t want to work with him again because I felt that he was not safe. I was afraid he was going to get both of us killed. One reason may have been that I would have been fried in an electric chair for killing him after he did something really stupid.

Luckily Andy was accommodating. He allowed me to steer clear of Jess for the rest of the summer. We just had to watch out for him while he was in the shop. He was messing around most of the time and had absolutely no work ethic. We couldn’t figure out how come he was allowed to stay after a while. Most people in the shop didn’t want to be around him.

I think Bill Bennett finally found a couple of electricians that would take him. He worked with O.D. McGaha and Bill Ennis on freeze protection. Since it was the middle of the summer, I think that was probably the safest place for him. it turned out that Bill Bennett had some pressure put on him to keep him in the electric shop instead of firing him outright because he was in the same fraternity in college that Ben Brandt, the Assistant Plant Manager at the time was in, and he was a “friend of the family.”

Anyway. The majority of the plant knew about Jess before the end of the summer (as I said before. Those people that are less honorable usually like to broadcast this to others). That’s why, when Jess “stepped into a pile” of his own making, all the Power Plant Men just about threw a big party. It seemed to them that Jess’s “Karma” had caught up with him.

Chris Nixon, the more honorable summer help, was from Stillwater, Oklahoma, and had actually gone to High School with my brother. Jess on the other hand lived in a different town in Oklahoma usually but was living in Stillwater while he was working at the plant. I figure he was probably living in his fraternity house on campus though I don’t know that for certain.

Well. One morning the week before the last week of the summer before the summer help headed back to school, Jess came into the shop strutting around like a proud rooster. He was so proud of himself because he had been at a bar on the strip by the Oklahoma State University Campus and had picked up a “hot chick”. He had a tremendously good time, and he wanted everyone to know all about it…. (As less honorable people often do).

After everyone had to hear him crowing about it all morning, Chris Nixon sat down at the lunch bench and asked him about his date from the night before. Jess went into detail describing the person that he had picked up (or had been picked up by). After listening to Jess for a while, Chris came to a dilemma. He knew the person that Jess was talking about. After asking a few follow-up questions, Chris was sure that he knew the person that Jess had his intimate encounter with the night before. He finally decided he had to say something.

Some of you may have already guessed it, and if you are one of the power plant men from the electric shop at the time (that I know read this blog), you are already chuckling if you are not already on the floor. If you are one of those honorable electricians, and you are still in your chair, it’s probably because you are stunned with amazement that I would have ever relayed this story in an actual public post and are still wondering if I am really going to go on.

I said above that Chris Nixon knew this person. I didn’t say that Chris knew this girl, or even “woman”. Yes. That’s right. While Jess thought he was out with a hot blonde all night doing all sorts of sordid things that he had spent the morning bragging about, he was actually not with a woman at all. Oh my gosh! You have never heard the roar of silent laughter as loud as the one that was going through everyone’s mind when they heard about that one!

I guess Jess hadn’t listened to the words of the song “Lola” or he may have been more wary:

For those men that had been thinking that they wished they were young again while listening to Jess in the morning, they suddenly remembered why they had made the decision to keep on the straight and narrow when they were young.

It would have been funnier if it hadn’t been so pitiful. After being sick to his stomach, he became angry. He called up the local Braum’s to find out if a “person” meeting this description worked there as Chris had indicated. He wanted to go down there and kill him. Of course, he decided not to, but he did go home sick that day and didn’t show up the rest of the week.

He did show up the next week, and the female summer help that had been working in the warehouse had written a poem about their summer help experience which they shared to the entire maintenance group at a farewell lunch in which they made mention of Jess’s unfortunate encounter.

Some folks in the electric shop gave Jess their own “going away present” down in the cable spreading room. I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak to it with any accuracy, so I’ll just leave it at that. Luckily it was still kept clean after I had had the Spider Wars a few years earlier. See the post Spider Wars and Bugs In the Basement for more about that.

Well. We thought we had seen the last of this person. We were shocked when next summer rolled around and Jess returned to our shop as the summer help again. He had been a total waste of a helper the year before. The entire electric shop went into an uproar. Everyone refused to work with him because he was too unsafe. We had barely escaped several injuries the year before.

Bill, being the nice guy that he was, had given Jess a good exit review the year before, because he didn’t want him to have a mark on his record. Well, that had come back to bite him.

Both Charles Foster and Andy Tubbs, our two electrical B foremen at the time went to Bill Bennett and told him that he never should have agreed to have Jess come back when he knew that he was not a safe worker. Bill had received some pressure from above to re-hire this person, and Jess had made it clear the year before that he could act any way he wanted because Ben was friends with his family. But with the total uprising, Bill had no choice but to go to Ben Brandt and tell him that he was going to have to let Jess go.

Talk about “awkward”. I’m sure this was a tough task for Bill. He always did his best to keep the peace and he took the “fall” for this. Ben was angry at him for hiring him in the first place (after applying a certain amount of pressure himself) only to have to let him go. Anyway, that was a much safer summer than the year before. That was the last attempt at hiring a summer help for the electric shop.

Comments from the original post:

1. Ron Kilman March 2, 2013
   

   Thanks, Kevin – good post.
   I don’t remember Jess. But I enjoyed working with Ben. He was of fine character and always wanted to do the right thing. Personnel (Corporate Headquarters) made it extremely difficult to terminate anyone. I think they feared “unlawful discharge” lawsuits more than anything. We always preferred getting candid and objective evaluations from our Foremen before hiring rather than after (if possible).

2.  

   Fred March 4, 2013
   

   I was “suspect” early in your story of where you were going. I remember the whole thing and for years looked at every guy working at Braums and wondered. . . . .? ” I hope this guy scooping my ice cream isn’t him.

   1. 
      Plant Electrician March 4, 2013
      

      Yes. I believe the guy’s name was Terry.

3. Ed March 4, 2013
   

   Hi Kevin, I remember when that all happened. I ran into Chris Nixon last summer; he is working for the Payne County Sheriff’s department.

Revised 12/17/2022

Originally Posted February 23, 2013:

I never gave it much thought that when I was on the labor crew at the Coal-fired Power Plant in Oklahoma and we had to go in the boiler to shake the boiler tubes, that next to the portals where you would climb into the boiler there were long metal benches where you could sit just outside while you rested between moments when the dynamiters were getting ready to set off their explosives. (All right… right off the bat…. a run-on sentence the size of a paragraph… I can tell it’s going to be a long night).

To learn more about the dynamiters and shaking boiler tubes you can read the post: Cracking a boiled Egg in the Boiler.

At other times while I was on the labor crew, I had heard these same benches making a tremendous sound that you could hear from a few landings away. It sounded like a large steam leak would sound, and at the same time, you could hear some kind of mechanical gears or something running and maybe a chain clanging.

I didn’t really understand what the purpose these long benches served then, only that it was a good place to put the water jug and the box of fly ash suits to keep them from being stepped on.

It was after I had become an electrician that these long metal benches took on another meaning. I found out that they were called “Retracts”. I was told that they called them retracts because what they do is they run a long metal pipe into the boiler and then Retract it back. Ok. I thought it was rather odd to name something for a seemingly insignificant part of the function. After I understood what they were used for, I thought I could come up with a lot better name than “Retract”.

After all, we had equipment like “Honey Wagon”, “Coffin Houses”, “Clinker Grinder”. All really descriptive names. So, when Charles Foster told me to go with Diane Lucas (later Diane Brien) to work on 7R retract, I was expecting to go find some little lever going back and forth making a sound like “brrrr…oops…..brrr…..oops” as it swung back and forth. I would name something like that a “Retract”.

Actually, I would like to have been able to have kept a couple of Retracts in my pocket so that when I would smart off to Leroy Godfrey our Electrical Supervisor, I could pull one out and press the button and… “swoop”! Retracted!  Do over!

So, what is a Retract? Well. In the story that I linked to above about the cracked egg in the boiler, I explained how when I was on the labor crew we had to go in the boiler and tie ropes to these hanging boiler tubes and then shake them back and forth to clean out the hard ash that had built up on them. Well, The Retract would sort of do that when the boiler was online. They would clean out the tubes in the reheat area of the boiler for the most part.

Diagram of a boiler

What it would do is this. It seemed like 7R retract was about 40 feet long (someone at the plant can correct me if I’m wrong about the length). When it would turn on, it would start rotating a pipe about that long and start pushing it into the boiler. Once the nozzle at the end of the pipe was in the boiler a couple of feet steam would start blasting down the pipe to the nozzle on the end that would shoot the steam out at right angles to the pipe. As the pipe rotated, it would be shooting out steam in a circular motion as the pipe slowly traversed into the boiler.

You see… My dentist told me a long time ago that I should Floss my teeth more if I didn’t want to wear dentures when I was older. By keeping the bits of food out from between my teeth, not only did my breath smell better, but my gums could remain healthy as well. So, I listened to him and started flossing. Retracts are kind of like that.

The Retracts were designed to clean out the areas of the boiler where the ash would build up the most causing the efficiency of the boiler to be degraded. So, at certain times of the day, the Control Room operator will push a button on the side panel (at least that was what they used to do… now they probably click an icon on their computer) and it would start the cycle of the retracts going in and out one at a time cleaning out the boiler.

This is a drawing of a Steam retract for a boiler. I added the Chinese characters in the drawing for my Asian readers… no, not really. Sorry the picture is a little small

Anyway. I finally learned what those long metal benches were for and it fascinated me. I wonder how long it took before someone said what now would seem obvious…. “Hey. Instead of having to bring the boiler offline every week or so, how about if we just create this boiler flossing equipment that cleans the boiler out while it is online?”

It made me wonder about the other equipment around the plant. I’ll bet there was a good use for just about everything. And you know what? I think I was right. Instead of just putting all that equipment all over the place for us to play on like a big jungle gym, everything seemed to have a real good purpose.

After 4 years working as a summer help, and one more year as a janitor and on the labor crew, I thought I had seen just about everything in the plant. When I became an electrician, all of the sudden a whole new world opened up to me. Even that bench I had been sitting on turned into a monster machine that blasted away ash clinkers while the rest of us lay at home in our beds dreaming of chocolate, and dragons, and um… other things people dream about.

So, what about the Wall Blower? Well. These are like the retracts, only they are much smaller. they were placed around the walls of the main boiler at strategic locations to blast clinkers that may be building up along the main wall of the boiler. The area in the boiler diagram up above called the Water Wall.

For some reason (and I’m sure it’s a good one), From what was called floor 6 1/2, though it was actually about the 13th floor, on down was an area called the “Boiler Enclosure”. This meant that when you walked up to the boiler, you first had to go through a door and enter an enclosed area around the boiler. 7th floor and above, the boiler was outside.

I’ve been to plants where the entire boiler was enclosed, and I’ve seen some that didn’t look like any of it was enclosed, so I figure this was a happy median between the two. It meant that if it was raining outside and you needed to work on the boiler, it made a big difference how high up you had to go as to whether you needed your rain suit or not.

I mention this because one day I had to go by myself to work on a wall blower that was on the 6 and 1/2 floor just at the top of the boiler enclosure. The wall blower was naturally situated right next to the boiler. and all the heat generated from the boiler and the piping that came from the bowl mills that blew the coal into the furnace had made the area very hot. The Wall blower had been tripping the breaker and I was supposed to go fix it.

I brought an infrared temperature gun with me and found that the area where the wall blower was mounted was 160 degrees. Maybe it was that high because it was the middle of a hot summer day, and with everything else going on, all the heat trapped right at the top of the boiler enclosure, it had just turned into a huge easy-bake oven.

When I touched the metal door to the control panel on the side of the wall blower, it burned my fingers. I had to use my tee-shirt as a rag to keep from burning myself. I could only stand next to the wall blower for about 30 seconds and then I had to walk back over the doorway and breathe some fresh air and cool off for a minute before going back.

After opening the control panel, I could see what the problem was right away. The insulation on the wires going to the terminal block had the insulation dripping off the wires. The insulation was melting.

I went back to the shop and found some wire that was designed for high temperatures, because obviously someone had used the wrong type of wire when assembling this particular wall blower, given its location on the boiler.

High Temperature Wire

Because of the intense heat where I was standing when trying to rewire the wall blower, I was not able to take very big breaths. I had to breathe very shallow, or not at all. So, I would go up to the blower and work as fast as I could removing a screw or putting a new wire down and then I would go back to the doorway about 60 feet from the wall blower and cool off.

As I mentioned in the post about the Luxuries and Amenities of a Power Plant Labor Crew, when you are in this intense heat, your hardhat becomes soft like a baseball cap. In this case, I wasn’t in the heat long enough for this to happen, though I was sweating like a pig.  And I suppose pigs really like to sweat.

I had been doing this for a while when an operator showed up wondering what I was doing. His name was Jim Waller and he had been watching me from a distance. He said he was trying to figure out what I was up to because he would see me show up at the doorway and stand there for a while not doing anything, then turning around like I had forgotten something only to show up again about 1/2 minute later.

When he couldn’t figure out what I was doing on his own, he decided to take a closer look. I found him standing at the doorway waiting for me to arrive with a puzzled look on his face. I was tempted to just say nothing and just stand there and take a few breathes and then go back to the wall blower and continue my work.

I couldn’t do that however, when Jim asked me what I was doing. Jim was one of the nicest and most normal operators you could run across. I just couldn’t joke with him (as if he was Gene Day). So, I told him I was working on that wall blower over there, but that it was so hot that I had to keep coming to the doorway to cool off.

Jim Waller had come to work for the electric company a month before I began my last summer as summer help in 1982. At the time that I was working on the wall blower in 1984 I was just about to become 24 years old, and a couple of months later, he was going to be 29. Like Gene Day, you instantly knew when you saw Jim that he you liked him. He had a sort of Jim Nabors kind of smile.

Jim Waller reminded me of Jim Nabors when he was younger. He had the same likable demeanor.

Unlike Gene Day, I never felt like playing a joke on Jim. For some reason, Jim just seemed like too nice of a guy. Where Gene had a slight sort of hidden orneriness about him, Jim was just purely a “good guy”.

This past Christmas eve, five days before Jim turned 57 years old, he passed away after a sudden illness. When the guys at the power plant told me about it, I was sad for their loss and for his family. For Jim, on the other hand…. I think he has always had one foot in heaven from the day I met him. I think he finally stepped the rest of the way through the gate.

For someone like me. If I am ever able to make it to heaven, I’m sure there will be a big to-do about it, because someone would have won the pot and I’m sure the odds would have been high against it. However, the day Jim arrived, it was probably more like “business as usual”. — “Oh, Jim’s arrived…. Like no one didn’t see that coming….” If I could say something to Jim now (and being Catholic, I’m allowed to do that), I would ask Jim, “Put in a good word for all the Power Plant Men!” Because I know that Jim’s word is as good as gold. Here is a real picture of Jim, a true Power Plant Man:

Jim Waller, a True Power Plant Man!

Comment from the original post:

Revised 12/10/2022

Originally Posted on February 15, 2013:

My first job, where I wasn’t working for myself, was when I was 14 years old, and I became a dishwasher in a German Restaurant called Rhinelander’s in Columbia Missouri. It felt good feeding dishes through the dishwasher and scrubbing pots and pans because I knew that in the scheme of things, I was helping to feed the customers the best German food in a 60-mile radius.

Later when I went to work for the Hilton Inn as a night janitor and later as a dishwasher, I was serving a lot more people as they would host banquets with 100’s of people at one time. After that I went to work for Sirloin Stockade as a dishwasher, busboy and finally a cook. The number of people that would go through that restaurant in one day dwarfed the number of people we would serve at the Hilton Inn.

The Hilton Inn had a large, automated dishwasher to handle the banquet crowd

Nothing prepared me for the massive amount of people whose lives are touched each day by a Power Plant Electrician! Or any Power Plant employee for that matter. Our plant alone could turn the lights on for over one million people in their homes, offices and factories. As a summer help mowing grass and cleaning up the park each week removing dirty diapers and rotting fish innards it never really had the impact that becoming an electrician did.

Part of the routine as an electrician was to do preventative maintenance on equipment to keep things in good working order. We performed substation inspections, emergency backup battery checks. We changed brushes on the generator exciter, performed elevator inspections and checked cathodic protection to make sure it was operational.

At certain times of the year, we would check out the plant freeze protection to make sure the pipes weren’t going to freeze come winter. I also worked on maintaining the precipitator equipment. All of these things were needed to keep the plant running smoothly, but, though they were each fun in their own way, they didn’t have the impact on me that fixing something that was broken did.

I used to love getting a Maintenance Order that said that something was broken, and we needed to go fix it. It may have been a motor that had a bad bearing, or a cooling system that had shutdown, or the Dumper that dumped the coal trains had quit working. One of my “speci-alities” (I know. I misspelled that on purpose), was working on elevators. — I will save my elevator stories for later.

When I was working on something that was broken, I could see more clearly how my job was related to keeping the lights on throughout the area of Oklahoma where our company served the public. Depending on what you were working on, one wrong slip of the screwdriver and “pow”, I could make the lights blink for 3 million people. I will talk more about certain events that happened throughout the years that I worked at the plant where things that happened at the plant were felt throughout our electric grid.  Sometimes even as far away as Chicago and Tennessee.

There was a “club” for people that shut a unit down. It was called the “500 Club”. It meant that you tripped the unit when it was generating 500 or more Megawatts of power. I can say that “luckily”, I never was a member of that club.

Ok, so a broken elevator doesn’t directly impact the operation of the plant, but it was, during more than one occasion, a life threatening situation considering that a few times the elevator would pick the most opportune time to stall between 200 and 225 feet up the elevator shaft full of elderly visitors that were touring our flagship Power Plant on their way back down from experiencing the great view of the lake from the top of the boiler. (I know. My college English Professor would have a heyday with that run-on sentence). — actually, that sentence was so long, I think I’ll make it the only sentence in the entire paragraph, — well, except for my comments about it….

Charles Foster, my foreman and best friend, took me up to the top of the boiler soon after I became an electrician and showed me the “Elevator Penthouse”. I know. “Elevator Penthouse”… Sounds like a nice place…. Well. It wasn’t bad after you swept out the dead moths, beetles and crickets that had accumulated since the last Elevator Inspection. It was a noisy room on the top of the elevator shaft where the elevator motor buzzed as it pulled the elevator up and let it down. Stopping on floors where someone had pushed a button.

I told you earlier that my elevator stories will be in a later post, so for this story, I’ll just say that Charles set me down on my tool bucket (which doubled as my portable stool and tripled as my portable trash can), in front of a panel of about 100 relays all picking up and dropping out as the elevator made its way up and down. He told me to study the blueprints that hung on the side of the panel and watch the relays until I understood how it all worked.

So, one afternoon, I sat there for about 4 hours doing nothing but watching relays light up and drop out. On the other side of that panel were the main relays. There were relays there we called “Christmas Tree” relays because they looked like a fir tree. I made some notes on a piece of paper about the sequence that the relays would pick up and drop out that I kept in my wallet.

I used those notes years later (in 2000) when I was writing task lists in SAP (our Enterprise Resource Planning computer system) on how to troubleshoot the elevator controls. Anyway, that was how I learned all about how elevator logic works. You know what? It is just like writing a computer program using computer code. It is basically a set of instructions with rules built-in, only it was done with relays.

A Montgomery Elevator Penthouse similar to the boiler elevator penthouses. The Christmas tree relays are halfway down on the right side of the left panel

Well. Back to helping humanity…. So, usually when we were working on something that was broken there was an operator somewhere that was waiting for the equipment to be repaired so that they could go on with their job. Sometimes the Shift Supervisor would be calling us asking us periodically when we were going to be done because they were running low on coal in the silos and were going to have to lower the load on the units if we didn’t hurry up. It was times like that when you fixed the kill switch on the side of the 10 or 11 conveyor that supply the coal to the plant from the coal yard that you really understood just where you stood with your fellow man.

Coal conveyor carrying coal to the coal silos from the coal yard

I am writing about this not because I want to pat myself on the back. Though I often did feel very proud as I returned to the truck with my tool bucket after coming down from a conveyor after fixing something. I would feel like taking a bow, though I was often by myself in situations like that when I wasn’t with my “bucket buddy”.

At least the Shift Supervisor and the control room operators were very grateful when you would fix something critical to keeping the plant operating at full steam (and I mean that literally…. The electricity is made by the steam from the boiler that turned the turbine that spun the generator).

No. I am writing about this because it would hit home to me at times like these how much each of us depend on each other. We all know about how important it is to have a police force keeping order and having fire fighters and paramedics on standby to rush to protect families in time of distress. Heroes in jobs like those are as obvious as the soldiers that protect our nation.

I think the majority of us have a much bigger impact on the rest of society than we realize. I think the Power Plant Men and Women that I worked with never gave it much thought. Like the person washing dishes in a restaurant, they didn’t look at themselves as heroes. But they are (I know… Sentence fragment).

Each day they moved through an environment where a boiler ghost could reach out and grab them. They distinctively know that they are standing next to a dragon that could wake up at any moment and blast them from the face of the earth, but they don’t let it deter them from the immediate job at hand.

When the boilers were being brought online for the first time in 1979 and 1980, when you walked through the boiler area, you carried a household straw broom with you that you waved in front of you like someone knocking spider webs out of the way (I called it searching for the boiler ghost). It was explained to me at the time that this was done to detect if there was steam leaking from the pipes.

If steam was leaking from some of the pipes, you wouldn’t be able to see it, but if you stepped into the flow of the steam, it could cut you in half before you even realized there was something wrong. When the steam hit the broom, it would knock the broom to the side, and you would know the leak was there. Kind of like the canary in the mine.

Boiler Ghost Detector

I remember one day when everyone was told to leave Unit 1 boiler because during an emergency, the entire boiler was at risk of melting to the ground. If not for the quick action of brave Power Plant Men, this was avoided and the lights in the hospitals in Oklahoma City and the rest of Central Oklahoma didn’t blink once. The dragon had awakened but was quickly subdued and put back in its place.

I entitled this post “Serving Mankind Power Plant Style”, but isn’t that what we all do? If we aren’t serving Mankind, then why are we here? Today I have a very different job. I work at Dell Inc., the computer company (well, now at General Motors). Our company creates computers for people around the world. We create and sell a computer about once every 2 seconds.

At the electric company we had about 3,000 people that served 3 million. At Dell, we provide high quality computers for a price that allows even lower income families to enter the computer age. Computers allow families to connect with each other and expand their lives in ways that were not even conceived of a few years ago.

Even though I spend my days serving my internal customers at Dell, I know that in the big scheme of things along with over 100,000 other employees, I am helping to impact the lives of over a billion people worldwide! I wouldn’t be able to do much if down the road the brave men and women at a Power Plant weren’t keeping the lights on. It is kind of like the idea of “Pay it Forward.”

So, the bottom line of this post is… All life is precious. Whatever we do in this life, in one way or other, impacts the rest of us. We go through life thinking that we live in a much smaller bubble than we really do. The real bubble that we live in is this planet and just like every cell in our body is in some way supported by the other cells, it is that way with us. Don’t discount what you do in life. It may seem insignificant, but the smile you give to someone today will be “paid forward” and will impact every one of us.

Comments from the Original Post:

1. NEO February 15, 2013 
   

   Far too few understand this, very well said, my friend.

2. Ron Kilman February 16, 2013 
   

   Amen!

   I remember one time at the Seminole Plant when we had a steam leak on a Unit 2 throttle valve. You could hear it (over the roar of the turbine room) but you couldn’t see it (superheated steam is invisible). Martin Louthan and Ralph McDermott found the leak with a “red rag” on the end of a broomstick.

3. Jack Curtis March 11, 2013 
   

   Life is precious, or it’s just another commodity, right? And that’s right down the center of the Left/Right divide…
   Abortion debates sit astride that divide; healthcare is now crossing it as government undertakes how much to spend on various age groups.
   Another side of it provided the sense of responsibility that led Power Plant Men to sacrifice and risk when those were needed. At one time, those attitudes would have been taken for granted, normal and to be expected… something that comes clear in all the Power Plant stories.

    

   Comments from the Previous Repost:

   Ron  February 20, 2014

   I love this story on serving others. Thanks 🙂
   You’ve probably heard of the Oklahoma City Thunder (NBA) star Kevin Durant? He’s just chosen a nick name for himself – “Servant”. Is that cool or what? I’m proud of him.

Revised 12/3/2022

Originally posted on February 9, 2013:

The phone rang Saturday morning on March 17, 1984. Since we didn’t have caller ID at that time, I had to pick up the phone to tell who was on the other end. It was my foreman, Charles Foster. He said he needed to go out to the plant to do some switching in the substation and he needed someone to help him. I had been an electrician for all of 5 months and this was the first time I had been involved with switching in the substation.

Charles Foster

When I arrived at the plant 30 minutes later, the operators in the control room were busy putting Unit 1 online. Charles Foster had brought along his son Tim Foster. Tim was about 10 years old at the time. The operators didn’t have any certified switchmen available, and so the Shift Supervisor, Jim Padgett gave the go ahead for me to go with Charles and act as the “secondary” switchman even though I wasn’t a certified switchman. That is, I was the one that read and re-read the instructions while Charles would actually crank the switches.

Here is a picture of a typical substation you might run across:

Parts of a Typical Substation

I found this picture on the Department of Labor website. The Main substation at the power plant was much bigger than this one. Half of the substation was the 189,000-volt substation the other half was the 345,000-volt substation. For the particular switching that we were doing that day, we were in the 189 KV end of the substation. This is where Unit 1 fed power to the world.

This was my first experience doing something in the substation other than sub inspections and Transfer Trip and Carrier tests. I was a little surprised when Charles closed one of the air switches and there was a loud crackling sound as an arc of electricity jumped from one switch to the next. Charles told me that was nothing. Just wait until I close the main switch from the transformer on Unit 2 in the 345 KV sub up the hill.

He was right. Later when I first opened that switch, it drew an arc about 3 feet long before it broke the circuit with a loud pop. You could hear the echo of the booming arc as the sound bounced off the nearby hills….um…. if there had been hills… It was pretty flat…. being Oklahoma and all. I suppose it was bouncing off of the Power Plant and maybe some trees off in the distance. Well. Anyway. It did echo for a while.

After my first experience in the substation, I decided that substations were one of the neatest places to be. I later became certified as a switchman (multiple times, as you had to renew your certification every 2 or 3 years). Eventually becoming a Switchman trainer (See the post: “Power Plant Men Learn to Cope with Boring“). Later when I was with my girlfriend, and even after she became my wife, and we would drive by a substation, I had to be careful not to run off the road since I was usually straining my neck to get a closer look at the substation.

This would result in Kelly become agitated (jokingly of course) that I was paying more attention to the substations than her. To this day, when we pass a substation, my wife Kelly will still let out a “hmmph” when I exaggeratedly ogle a passing substation. I mean…. Can you blame me?

Don’t Substations look cool?

Well. Throughout the years, Substation switching became more and more safe. When I first began switching, we would just wear High Voltage rubber gloves and maybe a face shield. Later we had to wear an Arc Flash Protective suit just in case something blew up:

An Arc Flash Protector (that’s a pretty creepy looking guy in there)

One time one of the switches broke and exploded in the 345 KV substation and we found a large piece of insulator 200 yards away. This suit wasn’t going to protect you from that. It was only going to keep you from being burned if there was a flash explosion.

In the early 1990’s there was what was known as the “EMF Scare”. That was the belief that the high voltage electric lines caused Leukemia. It was true that children in cities that lived near high voltage electric lines had a higher risk of having Leukemia than the general population. It also happened that these High Voltage lines ran right down major roadways, so that these same children were breathing a lot more exhaust from the cars and trucks on the road than your average person also.

Anyway. When we worked in the substation, we all knew that we were being bathed in electricity. If I took my voltmeter and dropped one end to the ground and held the other end up by my head, it would peg my meter out at 1000 volts. One day in the evening when it was time to go home, Scott Hubbard and I were delayed because a fuse block had burned up in a breaker panel in the 345 KV substation.

Scott Hubbard

It was drizzling at the time, so you could hear the electricity about 30 feet above our heads crackling and popping. Scott and I were standing behind the pickup truck Parked under the 345KV bus looking for spare parts in my tool bucket and I had poured out some nuts, bolts and screws onto the bed of the truck. As we were sifting through them looking for the parts we needed, both of us were thinking that I must have had some metal shavings mixed in with the nuts and bolts. When we would move them around, we kept feeling like we were being stabbed by metal shavings…. It turned out that it was just sparks jumping from the truck to our fingers.

10 years after my first encounter in a substation, while I was on the Confined Space Rescue team, we had to be out at the plant at night because some people were working in the condenser and the Confined Space Rescue team had to be on site. So, while we were there, we were doing things like cleaning up shop and stuff. Ray Eberle was working with me, and he asked me if I had ever heard about holding up a fluorescent light in a substation and having it glow.

I told him that I had, and it does glow. We went to the electric shop where I retrieved a couple of new 4-foot fluorescent lamps and we headed to the 345 KV substation around midnight.

When we arrived, we climbed out of the truck, and I demonstrated how just by holding the fluorescent tube upright, it would light up:

Holding up Flourescent tubes under high voltage lines

Ray was fascinated by this and was noticing how the tube would light up from the point where you were holding the tube on up. As he was experimenting with this newfound knowledge, there was an odd popping sound that would occur about every 5 seconds. I was standing there watching Ray in the dark. Ray finally asked me…. “Where is that popping sound coming from?” I pointed down to his shoes and said, “There are sparks jumping from your shoe down to the ground.”

Looking down at his shoe in the dark, Ray could see about an inch long spark jumping from his shoe down into the large gravel we were standing on. He was startled by this and decided that he had enough scientific lessons for one night. So, we climbed back in the truck and headed back to the plant.

Anyway. During the time that we were having this EMF scare (EMF by the way stands for ElectroMotive Force), there had been some movie or a 60 Minute episode on TV about it and it was causing a stir. So, people from Corporate Headquarters were going around trying to educate us about it. One way they did this was to show us how low the levels of EMFs were in the plant.

Well. You can’t convince an electrician that we aren’t constantly being bathed in electricity when we are out in the substation, because we all knew better. This guy came around with a special EMF gun just to show us how the plant was safe… We had a meeting where the engineers agreed that we hardly had any EMFs in the plant. The highest EMFs were found in a drill that mounted horizontally using an electromagnet.

When I heard this, I became skeptical of these findings. And the horizontal drill made me even more suspicious. Not that I minded the EMFs. I found them rather refreshing. They seemed to line up all my thought bubbles in my brain so that I could think better. Kind of like “magnet therapy”.

Then a couple of weeks later my suspicions were verified. Doug Link came down to the electric shop with a guy from Oklahoma City that was going to go with me out to the Substation to measure the EMF levels. — OK. I thought…. Let’s see what happens now… Because I already knew the EMF levels in the Substation just by my licking my finger and sticking it in the air…

Doug Link

The guy from Corporate Headquarters took out a roller with a handle much like you would have to measure long distances by rolling along. Only this had a couple of probes sticking out from either side horizontally. — Now…. Horizontally is the key, and that’s why when they said the Horizontal drill had the most EMFs in the plant, I became suspicious in the first place.

You see…. EMFs have direction. The two probes on the instrument that the man was wheeling around the substation were parallel with the high voltage lines. Therefore, you wouldn’t measure EMFs between the two probes. If the probes had been turned vertically (up and down), I am sure that the voltage (and the EMFs) would have blown the circuitry in the instrument. I say that because the guy that was wheeling this thing around the substation was being very careful not to tilt it one way or the other.

My suspicions were further confirmed when we were in the relay house looking at the results from when he circled the large transformer between the 189 KV and the 345 KV subs, and there was a large spike in EMFs at one spot. When we went to look at that spot, it was at the point where the high voltage bus turned down to go into the transformer…. Just like the Horizontal drill…. The direction was across the probes. You see…. EMFs are perpendicular to the flow of electricity. Or straight down from an overhead line. I mean… duh. You had to hold the fluorescent light upright to make it glow….

Well. I thought…. What do I do? Here is a guy trying to pull the wool over our eyes to make us believe that there aren’t any EMFs out there. I felt insulted. On the other hand, I didn’t care about the EMFs. I liked the EMFs. So, after looking at Doug Link straight in the eyes with an astonished look of disbelief that this guy thought we were so gullible to believe this magic act, I decided to let it go.

Let him think he relieved our worry that didn’t exist in the first place. Why ruin his day. He had to drive 70 miles back to Corporate Headquarters. Why should he go all that way back thinking that he failed in his mission? So, all I could do was smile.

Anyway. Tim Foster, the 10-year-old boy that was with his father, Charles Foster the first time I went to the substation to go switching, later grew up and became an electrician himself. Not only did he become an electrician, but he became an electrician in the same electric shop where his father had worked for 30 years. He works there to this day, and I’m sure that Tim now has an occasion to go switching in the same substation where I first met him. Bathing in the same EMFs. Feeling the same thrill when you open a 345 KV air switch with a loud Pop!

Replies from Previous Post

Revised 11/26/2022

Originally posted February 1, 2013:

It is vitally important that a manhole cover be round. By just being square or even oval, it could mean death to some unsuspecting electrician. You see, only a perfectly round manhole cover will never be able to fall down into a manhole. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t fit a bigger circle through a smaller circle. An oval or square cover could fall through the hole when turned just right but not a round one. A typical cast iron manhole can weigh up to 500 pounds.

Here is a manhole cover turned upside down. Because of the way it is shaped, when you push the cover over the hole, it falls right into place.

Not long after becoming an electrician, and shortly after the Rivers and the Rose story that I mentioned last week (see the Post “Rivers and Rose in the Power Plant Palace“), we had a cable actually go to ground between the main plant and the coal yard. The cable that went to ground was called a 500 MCM cable. What this means is that 500,000 circles of 1 mil (or one milli-inch) in diameter can be put in a circle that is 500 MCM in diameter. A typical 500 MCM cable is good for a 400-amp load at 6900 volts.

500 MCM cable. Over 2 inches in diameter.

For large industrial circuits, 3 phases of electricity are used instead of just one like you have in your house. With three phases of electricity, you have a constant amount of power being applied to the entire circuit at all times. With a one phase circuit, you have zero power 120 times every second. So, with any “decent” power circuit, you have 3 phases of electricity.

When you add up the difference between voltages of all three phases at one time, you always equal zero because you have the same amount of positive volts with negative volts at any given time. So, you will find that you always have a constant voltage between all three phases at any time.

The cable that went to ground was the coal yard station power cable. Not only were there three phases of power, but for each phase there were two 500 MCM cables. That means that this circuit was good for 800 amps of power at 6,900 volts. Giving you a capacity of 5.5 Megawatts (or 5 million, 500 thousand watts) of power. These cables were so big that a typical industrial Wire cable chart doesn’t even go this high:

500 MCM cable is also known as 5/0 cable (pronounced 5 aught). The 445 amps for the 4/0 cable are for only 50 volts. We had 6900 volts.

In a Coal-fired power plant, you have a redundant system for everything. So, the coal yard wasn’t completely in the dark. It had just swapped over to the redundant circuit. — This always amused me. In my English and Poetry classes in College I would have points taken off for being “redundant”, but in the power plant this was necessary to keep the plant running at all times.

As I said many times (redundantly) 15 years later, when I was training operators and electricians to be certified substation switchmen, “I know this is boring, but you have to learn it…” (but that is another story. See the post “Power Plant Men Learn to Cope with Boring“).

So, to make a rather boring lecture shorter, I will skip the part about how we had a hypot from the T&D (Transmission and Distribution) department brought in so big that it had to come in a van. They attached it to the cables to find where the short to ground was located.

I’ll skip the part about how it was decided to replace the faulty cables going to the coal yard 1/2 mile away. I’ll also skip the part about how Charles Foster was able to finagle the use of Stanley Elmore’s precious blue Mitsubishi mini tractor to try to pull the cables from one manhole to the next (the first time anyone outside the garage was able to operate his most beloved tractor….).

A tractor just like this

Oh, and I’ll skip the part about how 1000 feet of this cable cost about $10,000 and we had six cables to replace for a cost of about $320,000 just for the cable… I’ll also skip the part about how this little tractor was too small to pull the cables through the manholes from manhole to manhole up to the coal yard, so we sent in for the big guns from the T&D department to use their equipment that pulled the cables through the manholes as easy as pulling the wool over Gene Day’s eyes while playing a joke on him. Don’t get me wrong…. I know in his heart; Gene Day really appreciated a good joke.

Gene Day is one of the best men I have ever been able to call “Friend” — which I would do shortly after playing a joke on him, after I returned to consciousness. See the post Power Plant Humor and Joking with Gene Day.

Anyway, after this episode was all over it was decided that something needed to be done about how all the manholes from the plant to the coal yard were always full of water. You see, the manholes were easily deeper than the lake level, so water naturally leaked into them. Each of them had a pump in them that was supposed to keep them dry, but somewhere along the line, in the 5 years the plant had been in operation, each manhole pump had failed at one time or other.

When pumping out the first manhole, it took days, because as you pumped out that first manhole, water would run from one manhole to the other as you actually ended up pumping out all the manholes down to the point where the cables went from one manhole to the other.

So, none other than the “newbie” was appointed as the keeper of the Manhole pumps. Yep. That would be me. So, for the next few months I spent almost all my time pumping out manholes and repairing all the pumps that had been submerged in water for years. This was my first real job.

This was my real introduction to becoming a real plant electrician (You can see how I really like using the word “real”). The most common job of an electrician was to take a motor that had failed or was scheduled to be overhauled and repair it and put it back in place to continue on it’s “tour of duty”.

It’s amazing how you can take a motor that has failed, and you can “rebuild” it and put it back in operation. — This has come in handy at home as the cooling fan motor on the air conditioner unit on your house goes out every few years. I have yet to call an air conditioner man to my current house where I have lived for 11 1/2 years (now 19 years).

I remember that Charles Foster had told me that “paperwork” was very important when it came to motors. A history had to be kept. Certain steps had to be performed before, during and after repairing a motor. It had to be meggared properly (see the post from last week to learn more about meggars: Rivers and a Rose of the Power Plant Palace).

So, I asked Ben Davis if he could show me what I needed to do to fix a motor. His immediate indignant response was, “What? You don’t know how to fix a motor?” My response was, “No, I don’t know. Would you show me?” Ben, who up to that point had presented himself with displeasure at my presence in the shop, suddenly smiled and said, “Sure! Let me show you what you need to do!”

Ben showed me all the steps you go through to repair and “document” a motor repair in great detail. I was glad that I had found that Ben was just putting on a front of disgust at my presence in the Electric shop only to show me at the “proper” time that I had been “misjudging” him as being a grumpy person when he wasn’t really.  There is a certain art to this which I describe in detail in this post:  “Power Plant Art of Making a Bad First Impression“.

I had figured, before this time, that Ben really had a kind heart because I figured that if Diane Lucas and Andy Tubbs, who I both admired greatly considered Ben as a good friend, then he must really be a good guy underneath, even though he was keeping this hidden from me.

I knew the moment he smiled at my response when I told him I really didn’t know anything, that Ben had a kind heart. He couldn’t hide it any longer. If I had asked the same thing to OD McGaha, one of the other B Foremen in the shop, for instance, he would have told me to go to hell. But not Ben.

I have more to tell you about Ben, but I’ll save that for a later post. For now, I’ll just say that though Ben may not have known it during the time I spent as an electrician, he has always been close to my heart. I have always had Ben and his family in my daily prayers from the day that he smiled at me and explained to me how to repair a motor.

So, how does a lone newbie electrician pull a 500-pound lid off of a manhole by himself? Well. He uses a Manhole cover puller of course.

A Manhole cover puller

Ok. Our manhole cover puller wasn’t blue like this, but it had a similar shape. With a simple tool like this a 500-pound manhole cover could be popped out of the hole and dragged away. So, I used this tool as my one-man crew (myself) went from manhole to manhole, where I pumped each out and lowered a ladder into each hole and disconnecting the drenched motor and brought it back to the shop where I dried it out (using the hot box in the shop that doubled as a heater for lunches) and repaired it and re-installed it.

We had all the manholes in the plant identified. I painted the numbers on each lid with orange paint. It was while I was working in the manholes 15 feet below ground that I appreciated the round manhole. I knew that as long as that manhole cover was round, it couldn’t accidentally be knocked into the hole only to crush me to death below.

Other things were of concern in the manholes where I worked… For instance, many of these holes had been underwater for at least a couple of years, and the entire manhole was covered with a kind of slime. there were also high voltage cables that had splices in some of the manholes, and I remember Gene Roget telling me that he had seen sparks flying off of some of them when they were hypoting the cables looking for the ground. The dank smell of the manholes made you think that there were probably some kinds of “swamp gases” in there.

Nevertheless, when I grew weary of dragging the heavy shellacked wooden ladder from hole to hole, I devised a way to climb down into the manholes using the drainpipe from the motor. This was before OSHA had implemented all the confined space rules in 1994 that would have prevented me from entering a manhole alone. I was improvising and taking a risk of falling and hurting myself each time I entered a manhole.

I ran into one of the reasons for not leaving a person in a manhole alone one time when I was working in a manhole near the intake house and another crew drove up and parked their truck near the manhole I was in. I remember that while I was working there, I suddenly became nauseous. Not sure why, I climbed out of the hole.

The truck that had been left idling nearby had been emitting toxic fumes that had looked for the lowest place they could settle, and that happened to be in the manhole where I was working. After that, I always kept an ear out for any motor vehicles nearby when I was in a manhole.

Ten years later, in 1994, OHSA added some new laws to the books that made it mandatory to have a “hole watch” stand outside a hole watching you while you worked in a manhole. You even had to have a safety harness tied to a safety hoist so that if you passed out while in a manhole the hole watch could pull you out without having to enter the hole.

This is a special hoist designed to lift a person out of a confined space without seriously injuring someone that is caught on obstacles.

Needless to say. I got my feet wet as an electrician popping in and out of manholes like the gopher in the arcade that you try to bop on the head.

One interesting story that happened during this time happened when Blake Tucker, who had been a summer help with me in the garage, and then later became a summer help in the electric shop, was sitting with me while we were going to fix a pump in manhole 215 (I believe this is the number of the manhole next to the intake where the fly ash pipes go over the intake).

The hole was full of water, and the pump had naturally tripped the breaker…. For some reason I decided to go into the intake switchgear and reset the 120-volt breaker to the pump in the Distribution Panel. When I did. I returned to the hole where Blake was waiting for me. I reached down into the hole with my foot, and I kicked the drainpipe that rose from the pump and made a 90 degree turn up close to the entrance.

When I kicked the pipe, the motor actually began running. We could see it 15 feet below us in the clear water running. It was an open face motor, meaning that it wasn’t sealed and made to be a submersible pump, yet it was running under water. A year later we decided that it made more sense to replace all the open motors with submersible pumps.

vertical pump with an open motor on top

A submersible pump designed to run underwater

Blake Tucker and I watched for 1/2 hour as the pump sucked out the water from the manhole. When the level of the water reached the top of the motor, the outboard fan that had been slowly rotating all of the sudden kicked into high gear and we could see that the pump had been running at full speed all along.

This fascinated me. I figured the water must have been pure enough not to be too conductive (pure water is a natural insulator…. oddly enough). We could easily see this pump through 15 feet of water, so it must have been pretty clean. That was the only time I have ever seen an open motor happily running submersed in water… It is not something you see every day…. for instance…. It is not every day that you see a janitor with a Psychology degree acting like an electrician sitting beside a manhole staring down into the darkness in a power plant either. But there you are…

Revised 11/19/2022

Originally posted January 25, 2013:

When is the appropriate time to call 911? Calling 911 in the Power Plant is when you call the Shift Supervisor to report something important. As Randy Dailey, our Safety Trainer extraordinaire, always taught us, first tap the person on the shoulder and say, “Are you all right?” Then you point your finger at someone and say, “Call 911!” That’s called “Activating the EMS” (Emergency Medical System). Besides medical emergencies, there are other reasons to call the Shift Supervisor.

Randy Dailey, known as Mr. Safety to Real Power Plant Men

I learned early on to ‘fess up’ when you have done something wrong.  People appreciate it when you tell them up front that you goofed. That way the problem can be dealt with directly. Dee Ball was that way. Any time he wrecked a truck, he didn’t hesitate to tell his boss. So, even as a summer help I had developed this philosophy. Never be afraid to expose your blunders. It works out better in the long run.

One example of someone not following this philosophy was Curtis Love. As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Spider Wars and Bugs in the Basement, Curtis didn’t want to tell anyone that he had been bitten by a brown recluse for the third time because he was afraid of losing his job.

The Oklahoma house spider — The Brown Recluse

His philosophy came back to bite him a year and a half later when he was on the labor crew when he was the designated truck driver. I had moved on to the electric shop by this time.

A red crew cab like this only the bed of the truck was longer

He was backing up the crew cab around a corner under the Fly Ash hoppers up at the coal yard when the side of the crew cab came into contact with one of those yellow poles designed to protect the structure from rogue vehicles driven by people like Curtis Love. Unfortunately. This created a dent in the side of the truck.

An example of yellow poles protecting an area

Curtis, already on probation. worried that he would be fired if he told anyone about this mishap, failed to tell Larry Riley about this incident. Larry, on the other hand, was standing in front of the Coal yard Maintenance shop (the labor crew home) and saw the entire incident.

At that moment, he turned to one of the labor crew hands and said, “I hope Curtis comes over here and tells me about that.” Unfortunately, Curtis decided to act as if nothing had happened. This resulted in his termination. As much as I cared about Curtis, I must admit that the Power Plant scene was probably not the best location for his vocation.

I had seen Dee Ball do the same thing over and over again, and he always reported his accidents immediately. He was never punished for an accident, though, for a number of years, he was banned from driving a truck. You can read more about this in the post: Experiencing Maggots, Mud and Motor Vehicles with Dee Ball.

One day during the summer of 1984 just after lunch, 1A PA fan tripped (PA stands for Primary Air). When this happened, number one unit had to lower its output from over 500 Megawatts down to around 200. The trip indicator on the 6900-volt breaker said that it had been grounded. Being grounded means that one of the three phases of the motor or cable had made a circuit with the ground (or something that was grounded). The trip circuits shut the fan down so fast that it prevents an explosion and saves the fan from being destroyed.

Diana Lucas (later Diana Brien), Andy Tubbs and I were given the task of finding the ground and seeing what we could do to fix it. We unwired the motor, which was no easy task, because the motor is about the size of a large van, and about 10 times heavier.

This is about 1/2 the size of the PA fan motor which is 1000 horsepower

So, we spent the rest of the day sitting under plastic because it was raining, unwiring the motor and unwiring the cable to the motor from the breaker in the main switchgear and testing both the motor and the cable with various instruments looking for the grounded wire or coil that caused the motor to trip. We used a large “Megger” on the motor. It’s called a Megger because it measures Mega-Ohms. So, it’s technically called a Mega-Ohm meter. Ohms is a measurement of resistance in an electrical circuit. We usually use a small hand cranked megger, that is similar to an old hand crank telephone that generates a high voltage (good for shocking fish in a lake to make them rise to the surface). In the case of the hand cranked Megger, it would generate 1,000 volts.

A Hand cranked Megger made by the same company, only newer than the ones we had

The Megger this size would have been useless with this large motor. Instead, we used one that was electric, and you ran the voltage up over 10,000 volts and watched the mega-ohms over a period of 1/2 hour or so.

For the cables, we hooked up a Hypot (or Hipot). This stands for High Potential. Potential in this case is another word for “Voltage”. It would charge up and then you pressed a button, and it would send a high voltage pulse down the cable, and if there is a weak spot in the insulation, The Hypot will find it. So, we hooked a Hypot up to the cable and tried to find the grounded wire. No luck.

After spending 4 hours looking for the grounded cable or motor, we found nothing. We spent another hour and a half putting the motor and the breaker back in service. The Fan was put back into operation and we went home. As I was walking out to the car with Bill Rivers, he told me, “I knew they weren’t going to find anything wrong with that fan.” He had a big grin on his face.

At first, I thought he was just making an educated guess as Rivers was apt to do on many occasions (daily). It was raining and I could see where water may have been sucked into the motor or something and had momentarily grounded the motor. Just because we didn’t find anything didn’t mean that the breaker didn’t trip for no reason.

When we were in the car and on our way to Stillwater, Oklahoma with Yvonne Taylor and Rich Litzer, Bill explained that he knew why the motor tripped. He had been walking through the main switchgear with Mike Rose, and Mike, for no apparent reason other than curiosity, had opened up the bottom door to the breaker for 1A PA fan. He looked at it for a moment and then slammed the door shut. When he did this, the breaker tripped.

So, the ground relay happened to be the one that tripped. It might as well have been an over-current or a low voltage trip. It just happened to trip the ground trip. Bill said that he told Mike that he should call the Shift Supervisor and let him know so they could restart the motor. Mike on the other hand told Bill that he was already on probation and was afraid of losing his job if he reported that he had slammed the door on the breaker and tripped the fan.

If there was ever a reason to call 911, it was then. All he had to do was tell them, “I accidentally tripped the PA fan when I bumped the breaker cabinet.” They would have told him to reset the flag, and they would have started the fan right back up. No questions asked… I’m sure of it. And they wouldn’t have lost their generating capacity for the remainder of the afternoon, and we wouldn’t have spent 4 hours unwiring, testing and rewiring the motor in the rain with a plastic umbrella over our head.

Bill wasn’t about to tell on Mike. If Mike didn’t want to report it, Bill wasn’t going to say anything, and I understand that. I probably would have kept it to myself at the time if I was in Bill’s shoes (I’m just glad I wasn’t because I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep soundly for the next year). But 30 years later, I might write about it in a Blog. Even though I wouldn’t have looked to Mike to teach me much about being an electrician (he was more of an Air Condition man anyway), I still loved the guy.

Mike died almost two years ago on May 29, 2011. He was from England and had lived in Canada for a time. He used to work on trains. Trains, even though they are diesel, are really electric. The Diesel engine really runs a generator that generates electricity that runs the train. I know that Mike was a good man at heart. He loved his family with all his heart. Here is a picture of the Limey:

Mike Rose. A fair plant electrician, but a great family man!

Ok. So, I know what you are thinking…. There must be a story about myself in here somewhere. Well, you would be right. First of all. I always ‘fessed up’ to my mistakes, as my current manager at Dell knows well (yes. I still mess up after all these years). I told my current manager the other day that CLM was my middle name. (CLM means “Career Limiting Move”). So here is my power plant “mess up” story (well one of them):

In January 1986, I returned from my Honeymoon with my new wife Kelly when I found that we had hired a new electrician. Gary Wehunt was replacing Jim Stephenson who had left the plant on February 15, 1985, which is a story all its own (you can read about that here:  Power Plant Snitch). We had just started an overhaul on Unit 1.

I remember the first Monday I spent with Gary. It was January 13, 1986, and we were working on cleaning out the exciter house on the end of the main power generator with Diana Brien (formerly Diana Lucas). We were discussing salaries and Gary was surprised to find out that I was making more money than he was. Well… I had been an electrician for over 2 years and had been promoted regularly…. so, I didn’t think there was anything strange about it, except that I still looked like I was only about 18 years old (even though I was 25) and Gary was about 34 (and acted like he was 18 or 15). I had already been promoted 4 times and my salary had gone from $7.15 to over $12 an hour.

Anyway, when that first Wednesday rolled around, Since Gary and I were assigned to Substation Inspection that week, (Some later time I may go into the details of what “Substation Inspection” entails), but for now, let’s just stick with my “911 call.”

It is enough to say that we were in the main plant substation relay house on Wednesday January 8, 1986, at 9:00 am. One of our jobs was to call other substations and perform a test called a “Transfer Trip and Carrier Test”. We had called Woodring Substation.  Woodring is a town in Oklahoma, and we had a 345 KV (that’s 345,000 volts) line going there.  I was talking to the man in the substation on the other end of the phone line.

I was showing Gary just how experienced I was at being an electrician. People had told me that you had to be a plant electrician for 5 years before you really became a “first class” electrician. Well. Here I was at 2 years, and I thought I was so good that I could do anything by now…. — Yeah… right.

I told the guy on the other end of the line as I turned a switch…. Amber light… Back to Blue…. and I wrote down the value on the meter (paperwork… oh yes…. it’s that important. Like A-1 sauce).

Then I reached for the second switch. I said, “Carrier test”, then turned the switch. The lights in the relay house went out and we were in the dark. I told the guy on the other end of the line…. “Well. That’s not supposed to happen.” Then as I let go of the switch and it returned to its normal position, the lights turned back on. Okay……

I wrote the numbers down from the meter and said goodbye to the other faceless substation man on the other end of the line that I talked to over 100 times, but never met in person. He sounded like a nice guy. Then I headed for the gray phone. I heard the Shift Supervisor paging Leroy Godfrey (The Electrical Supervisor) on line 2 (we had 5 Gray phone lines. The Gray Phone was our PA system).

When I picked up the line, I heard Leroy pick up the phone and the Shift Supervisor tell Leroy that we just lost station power in the main substation, and it had switched over to Auxiliary power.

I immediately jumped in and said, “Jim (for Jim Padgett, the Shift Supervisor), I did that. I was performing a Carrier test with Woodring and the moment I performed the carrier test the lights went out.” Leroy chimed in by saying, “That wouldn’t cause you to lose station power.”

Well, in my ‘inexperienced’ plant electrician way, I responded, “Well. All I know is that when I turned the switch to perform the carrier test, the lights went out, and when I let go of the switch, the lights came back on.” Leroy reiterated, “That wouldn’t cause you to lose station power.”

I replied with, “I’m just saying….” and left it at that. I had done my job. They knew I was out here. They knew I had called 911 right away. I explained what I was doing…. they could take it from there.

I had hoped that I had showed Gary upfront that it doesn’t hurt to report your mistakes (even though I hadn’t made one as far as I could tell), but I was 100% sure I had done something to cause the relay house to lose power. Though, I couldn’t figure out why.

After lunch, Bill Bennett, our A foreman came down to the shop to tell me that they figured out how the substation lost station power. He said that a road grader had been grating the road down by the Otoe-Missouri reservation (which is actually called “Windmill Road” I guess because there is a windmill down that road somewhere) and had hit an electric pole and knocked it over and had killed the power to the substation.

Substation Power Interrupting Road Grader

It turned out that the substation relay house was fed by a substation down that road where we have a radio tower. So, think about this. The exact time that I turned that switch in the substation, a road grater 2 1/2 miles away hits a telephone pole accidentally and knocks it to the ground and kills the power to the substation at the exact same time that I am performing a transfer-trip and Carrier test with Woodring Substation, and the time it takes to switch to auxiliary power is the exact time it took me to let go of the switch.

Don’t tell me that was by accident. I will never believe it. I think it was for the soul purpose of teaching me a useful lesson or two. First…. don’t be afraid to tell someone when you do something wrong. Second…. If you think you have control over the things that happen to you in your life… well, think again…… Third…. God watches you every moment, and if you let him, he will guide you to do the right thing when the time comes.  Oh, and Fourth:  “Doesn’t God have a great sense of humor?”

God bless you all.

COMMENTS FROM THE ORIGINAL POST:

1. Monty Hansen January 26, 2013

   I had a similar thing happen to me; I was upgrading to shift foreman & system called to remove a tag in the switchyard & put the switch back to auto. The tag on the pistol grip was attached with a plastic zip tie & the previous operator had put it on real tight, as I was wrestling it off with my Leatherman, the pliers slipped & I banged my elbow into the control panel, at that very instant there was a loud BANG as several 345 KV breakers opened simultaneously in the switchyard, I had the phone pinched between my shoulder & ear as I was wrestling with this switch & talking to the system control operator, he said a few bad words – gotta go – & hung up. The power plant lost all power & went in the black, I, of course was just sick in the pit of my stomach, after we got power restored, the plant back on etc. I called system back to see if they found the cause & fess up to causing the trip (I figured I must have caused a trip relay to close when I hit the panel) – anyway a crane at a plant down the road had got its boom tangled in the power line & went to ground – AT PRECISELY THE INSTANT MY ELBOW SLIPPED & HIT THE PANEL!!

   1. Plant Electrician January 26, 2013

      That’s a Great Story Monty!

2. Ron Kilman January 26, 2013

   Some great illustrations of the truth in Proverbs 28:13 “He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion”.

3. justturnright January 28, 2013

   CLM: I can relate.

   My first boss 30 years ago once told me he was going to officially nickname me “I’m sorry” (and make me wear it for a name badge) if I said it one more time.

   Hey, there’s worse things.

4. Roomy January 29, 2013

   I had not thought about Mike Rose in years. He was a good guy to work with, now Rivers was a different story!!!
   Sub checks, I used to love to do sub checks. I performed pilot wire & transfer trip checks for years. I hated it when they went to being done by automation.
   Thanks for bringing back old memories.

Revised 11/12/2022

Originally posted January 18, 2013:

The day I became an electrician at the coal-fired power plant, I suddenly became an expert in electricity. I think it was on Tuesday, just one day after joining the electric shop that I was walking through the welding shop when someone stopped me and asked me how they would wire their living room with different light switches at different corners and make it work correctly. As if I had been an electrician for years.

Luckily, I was just finishing a house wiring course at the Indian Meridian Vo-Tech in Stillwater, Oklahoma and they had us figure out problems just like those.

Within the first week, George Alley brought a ceiling fan to the shop that he had picked up somewhere and was wondering if we could get it to work. My foreman Charles Foster thought it would be a good small project for me to work on to help me learn about electrical circuits.

After all, this ceiling fan could go slow, medium and fast, and it could go forward or reverse. Only at the moment, all it would do was sit there and hum when you hooked up the power. — So that was my first “unofficial” project, since the main goal was to make George happy so that he would help us out when we needed something special from the mechanics.

When I was a janitor, I had observed the electricians preparing to go to work in the morning, and often, one of them would go to the print cabinets at one end of the shop and pull out a blueprint and lay it across the worktable and study it for a while. Then they would either put it back or fold it and put it in their tool bucket and head out the door to go do a job. Now, it was my turn.

Andy Tubbs was one of the two people that played the best jokes on me when I was a janitor. Larry Burns was the other person, and he was the person I was replacing as he had moved to another plant.

Andy was the one that had taken the handle off of my push broom the moment I had my back turned so that when I turned around to grab my broom, only the broom head was on the floor, while the broom handle was across the counter by the lab, and Andy was across the other side of the room trying to act like he wasn’t paying attention, but with an expression like he had just played a darn good joke. — I actually had to go back into the bathroom I was cleaning so that I could laugh out loud. I was really impressed by Andy’s ability to play a good joke.

Andy Tubbs – True Power Plant Electrician

While I’m on the subject, shortly after I became an electrician, I was sitting in the electric shop office talking to Charles when he stopped and said, “Wait…. Listen….” We paused, waiting for something…. A few seconds later, the sound of a hoot owl came over the PA system (what we called the “Gray Phone”). Charles said, it’s an interesting coincidence that the only time the perfect sound of a hoot owl comes over the Gray Phone is when Andy Tubbs is riding in an elevator by himself or with a close friend.

Gaitronics Gray Phone

I had been sent with Andy Tubbs and Diana Lucas (later Diana Brien), to go to the coal yard and figure out why some circuit for the train gate was not working. Andy had pulled out the blueprints and was studying them. I came up alongside him and looked at all the blue lines running here and there with circles with letters and numbers, and what I recognized as open and closed switches….

Here is a simple electric circuit drawn in the style of many of the electric blueprint drawings

Andy stopped and gave me a momentary lecture on the nature of electricity. It was so perfectly summed up, that for years whenever I thought about the nature of electricity, I always began with remembering what Andy told me. He said this:

“Think of electricity like water in a hose. Voltage is the water pressure. Amperage is the amount of water going through the hose. You can have the nozzle on the end of the hose shut off so that no water is coming out and then you have no amperage, but you will still have the pressure as long as it is turned on at the source so you will still have voltage.”

“In these diagrams, you just have to figure out how the water is going to get from one side to the other. These circles are things like relays or lights or motors. When the electricity makes it through them, they turn on as long as the electricity can make it all the way to the other side.”

That was it! That was my lesson in ‘lectricity. All I needed to know. The blueprints were big puzzles. I loved working puzzles. You just had to figure out how you were going to get something to run, and that meant that certain relays had to pick up to close switches that might pick up other relays to close other switches. I found that most of the electricians in the shop were good at working all sorts of puzzles.

Andy went to the cabinet and grabbed one of the Simpson multimeters and a handset for a telephone that had red and black wires wrapped around it.

A telephone handset that looked like this, only it had a battery taped to it, and two leads coming out the bottom

I was puzzled by this at first. I thought I would just wait to see what we did with it instead of asking what it was for. We grabbed our tool buckets (which also doubled as a stool and tripled as a trash can as needed) and put them in the substation truck. The other truck was being manned by the designated electrician truck driver for that week. We needed a truck that we could drive around in without having to hold up the truck driver.

We drove to the coal yard and went into the dumper switchgear. Andy and Diane opened up a large junction box that was full of terminal blocks with wires going every which way in an orderly fashion. They located a couple of wires, and Andy unwrapped the wires from the handset while Diane removed the screws holding the wires to the terminal block. Then Andy clipped one wire from the telephone handset to each of the two wires and handed me the phone.

My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien

Diane told me that they were going to drive down toward the train gate where the railroad tracks come into the plant and try to find these wires on the other end. So, what they needed me to do was to talk on the phone so when they find my voice, they will know that they have the right wires. Diane said, “Just say anything.” Then they left the switchgear, and I could hear them drive away in the truck.

Well. This was my opportunity to just talk to no one for a while without interruption. How many times do you get to do that in one day? Probably only when you are on the way to work and back again if you aren’t carpooling with anyone. Or you’re sittin’ on your “thinkin’ chair” in a single occupant restroom. So, I just kicked into Ramblin’ Ann mode and let myself go. I believe my monologue went something like this: (for more explanation about Ramblin Ann, see the post “Ed Shiever trapped in a Confined Space with a Disciple of Ramblin’ Ann“).

“The other day I was walking through a field, and who should I run across, but my old friend Fred. I said, ‘Well, Hi Fred, how is it going?’ and Fred told me that he was doing just fine, but that he had lost his cow and was wondering if I could help him look for it. I told him I couldn’t right now because I was helping some people find a wire at the moment, and if I became distracted, we might not only lose the cow, but we might lose the wires as well, so I better just keep on talking so that my friends on the other end can find the wires they are looking for. After that I went to the store, and I picked up three cans of peas. I thought about getting four cans of peas but settled on three and brought them to the checkout counter, and while I was waiting in line I noticed that the little boy in front of me with his mom was looking at me as if he wanted to have one of my cans of peas, so I quickly made it clear to him that I was buying these cans of peas for myself by sliding them further away from him and glaring at him. Luckily the boy wasn’t persistent otherwise I would have broken down and given him a can of peas because he was looking sort of hungry and I was feeling sorry for him, though, I didn’t want him to know how I was feeling, so I put on a grim expression….”

Needless to say, my monologue went on for another 15 minutes. Yes… .15 minutes. I had expected Andy and Diane to have returned earlier, but I didn’t know how hard it was going to be to find the other end of the wires, so I just kept on ramblin’ to the best of my ability. It’s like what it says in the Bible. If we wrote down everything I said, it would have filled many volumes. Being a Disciple of Ramblin’ Ann came in handy that day.

When Andy and Diane returned, they said that they had found the wires right away, but that they had sat there for a while just listening to me ramble. They said I was cracking them up. They also mentioned that they thought I was completely crazy. Well. I was glad that they found the wires and that my rambling abilities had come in handy.

Five months after I had joined the electric shop, Andy and I were sent to Oklahoma City to learn about a new kind of electric troubleshooting. It was called “Digital Electronics”. I had just finished my electronics class at the Vo-Tech, and so I was eager to put it into practice. Andy and I went to a two-day seminar where we learned to troubleshoot what was basically a PC motherboard of 1984. We used a special tool called a digital probe and learned how the processor worked with the memory chips and the bios. It wasn’t like a motherboard is today. It was simple.

A simple Motherboard like this

It was just designed for the class so that we could use the digital probe to follow the different leads from the chips as the electric pulses turned on and off.

We were using digital probes similar to this

At the time I was thinking that this was a waste of time. I had been learning all about troubleshooting electronic circuits from Bill Rivers and Sonny Kendrick. I couldn’t see how this was going to be useful. I didn’t know that within a couple of years, most of our electronic circuits in the precipitator controls were all going to be replaced with digital controls, and this was exactly what I was going to need to know.

So, Andy and I spent two days learning all the basics of how new computers were going to be working. This was the same year that Michael Dell was beginning his new computer company further down I-35 in Austin Texas. Who would have thought that 18 years later I would be working for Dell. But that’s another lifetime away…

1.  

   Plant Electrician January 19, 2013:
   

   We used hand lotion in the electric shop for the gray phone trick. I remember Andy catching an unsuspecting operator in the main switchgear more than once.

   1. Ron Kilman January 20, 2013:
      

      Hand lotion is much nicer than silicone caulk!

Revised 11/05/2022

Originally posted January 11, 2013:

Today I sit quietly in a cubicle with a group of other people on my team. We each type away throughout the day, or we are on calls in our own meetings listening to conversations where we offer input where it is necessary. I may listen to music on my computer to help me get into the rhythm of my work as I type away creating documents or sending IMs to other employees as they ask me questions throughout the day.

That was not how it was before the PC made inroads into our lives. We used to sit around and talk to each other. We did things to pass the time while we worked on tedious jobs. We talked about our families. We talked about movies and shows we had seen. We asked each other how their family was doing. Sometimes, we even sang.

I was sitting on the Precipitator Roof installing a new Rapper circuit board in the Rapper Vibrator cabinet while one of my Precipitator Mentors sat behind me making sure that I was learning the fine art of Precipitator Maintenance on one of the first actual jobs I worked on when I became an Electrician.

The day was growing long, and Sonny had taken over for me and was installing the second circuit board while I was sitting on a Tension house box where Sonny had previously been sitting. Suddenly I felt this sudden urge to burst out in song. It was not known before this moment that I was sort of a professional singer. Actually. I had grown up with a family of singers.  Like the “Von Breazile Family Singers”.

My mother and my sister used to break out into song at random times throughout my childhood when a song would come over the radio on the easy listening station that was constantly on. So naturally, it would be natural for me to want to break out into song when the moment was right.

So, I just let loose singing one of my favorite songs. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t an accompaniment. I didn’t need the orchestra behind me on the radio to help me keep time. I had the orchestra playing in my mind….

I didn’t need the tuning fork that Sister Maureen used to use at Catholic School when I was a kid as she would bang it on the desk and then hum with a wavering hum until she came in tune with her tuning fork. No. The tuning fork came from years of listening to my favorite songs.

Yes. Even before the iPod was invented and the VCR had come around, there were two places where a person could hear a song over and over and over again. One place was the radio. Back in the 70’s when your favorite song was in the top 20’s you could hear it play over and over again every two hours on the radio.

So, I burst out with one of my favorite songs and started to serenade my newfound friend, Sonny Kendrick. I began quietly and worked my way up to a crescendo. The song I sang began thus: “Here’s the story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls….”

I continued with great confidence in my singing ability, knowing that I was impressing my fellow electrician with my fantastic singing ability: “all of them had hair of gold, like their mother…. the youngest one in curls!” Even louder I bellowed out: “Here’s the story of a man named Brady who was living with three boys of his own. They were four men living all together, yet they were all alone!”

Now I was in full form with my hand on my chest, standing at attention with all the full emotion I could draw out as I sang the final verse: “Till the one day when the lady met this fellow. And they knew that it was much more than a hunch, that this group must somehow form a family, That’s the way we all became the Brady bunch!”

Then as if I was playing an air guitar on stage, I was able to dramatically complete my short opera with the shaking of my head as I sang the final words: “The Brady bunch, the Brady bunch. That’s the way we became the Brady bunch bunch bunch…..” (now you know the second place where you could hear a song over and over).

Acting rather proud of my accomplishment I relieved Sonny as I was going to install the third of the four Rapper cards in the cabinet…. I began connecting the wires to the circuit board one at a time when all of the sudden I was struck with some strange form of electricity!

Had we forgotten to turn off the electrical disconnect to the 480 Volts to the cabinet? My fingers were shaking from the sudden impulse of electricity. My knees were buckling so that I stumbled back and sat against rappers behind me. I was completely stunned. I couldn’t tell if my ears were actually picking up sound or I had suddenly died and was on my way to heaven because I had just electrocuted myself in the cabinet.

My head was spinning. Thoughts entered my head like, “Great. I have just been electrocuted! I have only been an electrician for less than a month and already I have killed myself. I hope my parents and my girlfriend don’t think I suffered when I died.”

Gradually, I realized that the sounds of harps and the humming of angels were all just an accompaniment that were being added by heaven itself to the song that was emanating from Sonny Kendrick! Sonny Kendrick, while he was taking his repose while I had proceeded to install my circuit board had suddenly had a similar urge to break out into song.

Only, unlike my feeble attempt at doing justice to the Brady Bunch Song, Sonny Kendrick was singing as if God himself had come down and suddenly transformed him into an Opera Singer. I couldn’t tell if he was singing something from Wagner’s immortal Opera “The Ring” or if he was singing La Boheme by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.

It didn’t matter to me. All I could do was sit there on a tension house in stunned amazement. Tears were rolling down my face. Here was a guy that people referred to as Baby Huey because of his build (I guess):

This is Baby Huey. I didn’t really get the connection.

Suddenly his lower build had moved up to the chest area and Sonny Kendrick had transformed into Franklin Floyd Kendrick! The magnificent opera singer!

When my friend and sudden Opera singing hero had finished, he stepped over the conduits and went to work to add the last rapper circuit board on the rack with the other three.

Still sitting on the tension house coming to my senses. Realizing that my transformation to heaven was only a temporary visit. I asked Sonny…. “What was that?” — That was all I could think of saying. What else could I say? “Can I have your Autograph?” I suppose I could have said that. No. All I could say was, “What was that?”

Sonny as he is today

Here is a picture of Sonny. He didn’t have a beard then, but he has the exact same smile today that he had that day! He gave me this exact same smile when I asked him “What was that?” Exactly!

I said, “Sonny. What are you doing here? Why are you an electrician when you have a voice like that?” He replied by telling me that he had a family and he had to provide for them, and he couldn’t do it by being a singer. So, I asked him how he became an electrician.

You see. At the time, Sonny had the distinction of being the Electrical Specialist. He was the only one. He had gone to Oklahoma State Tech in Okmulgee and received a technical degree there in electronics. This gave him the ability to become the electrical specialist at the plant.

His real dream was to become an Opera Singer. Being an electrician was something to pay the bills. His heart was in his song. Sonny has a tremendous heart. I know. I have seen and heard it beating.

There is a part of Sonny’s story that is a tragedy. Isn’t that usually true with great artists? I suppose that is where their passion for their creativity comes from. This was true with Sonny, and in the next few months, I learned more and more about the burden that had been put on Sonny’s shoulders.

Where Vincent Van Gogh had his ear. Sonny had Leroy Godfrey.

You see. One day. Sonny had said something to Leroy Godfrey to the effect that Sonny was an electrical specialist. He should be doing something more than spending all his time working on the precipitator. What his exact words were doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Leroy Godfrey had decided that day that Sonny Kendrick was to be banished to the precipitator. Never to work on anything but the precipitator.

In order to understand what this means… you have to understand the conditions someone has to work in when they work on the precipitator… First of all. No one wants to work with you, because it means working in the midst of pigeon dung, insulation, fly ash, and dust. Along with that, when the unit is online, the roof of the precipitator is one of the loudest places at the plant. Rappers and Vibrators going off constantly. Buzzing and Banging! Very hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.

As time went by, and Bill Rivers and Sonny filled in the blanks I came to understand just how burned-out Sonny Kendrick was with working on the precipitator. I could see how he literally had to drag himself to the precipitator roof to work on the cabinets or fix a transformer knife switch. He would rather be doing anything else.  The precipitator had become like Van Gogh’s ear.  He just wanted to cut it off.

It had occurred to me at the time that the two units had only been online for about 3 and 4 years and Sonny was already completely burned out on this job. It made perfect sense to me when I understood that this was a punishment for trying to explain something to an Old School Power Plant Supervisor. In order to understand Leroy Godfrey read the post:

The Death of an Old School Power Plant Man — Leroy Godfrey

A little less than two years later, Sonny Kendrick sang at my wedding. He was up in the balcony singing a list of songs that had been given to him by my mom. Bill Moler, the Evil Assistant Plant Manager who was serving as a Deacon at my wedding came in the front door dressed in his robes and ready to go into the church. I was standing there greeting people as they came in.

Bill suddenly stopped and stood still for a moment. He acted as he had just been electrocuted.  Then he said, “Who is that singing? Where did you find someone with such a wonderful voice?” I proudly told him, “That’s Sonny.” Bill leaned forward and said, “Our Sonny?” I replied, “Yep. Sonny Kendrick. Our Sonny Kendrick.”

I had decided early on that I was going to do whatever I could to pull Sonny off of that Precipitator so that he could use his talents as they were meant to be used. So, every time I was asked to help out on the precipitator, I was glad to help Sonny.

Years later, when Sonny was finally able to be free of the precipitator, he went kicking and screaming, because I had turned precipitator maintenance on its head, and it was hard for Sonny to see his work all turned Topsy-turvy. I knew that like myself, Sonny had a personal relationship with his work and that when someone else was tinkering with it, it was a kind of “insult”.

I knew for Sonny it was best. It didn’t take him long to step out into the open air and take a deep breath. Once he realized it was no longer his worry, he was a much happier man. I am pleased to see that Sonny Kendrick today wears the same smile that he did that day when he had broken out in song and serenaded me on top of the Precipitator.

It means that he still has the peace that he is due. I can’t help it. I have to end this post by posting his picture again. Just look into his eyes and see his joy. I’ll bet this picture was taken just after he had finished an aria of La Traviata by Guiseppe Verdi:

Sonny after gracing the world with an Aria

In a way. Sonny’s life has been an Aria. I have been blessed to have been able to call him “Friend”.

COMMENTS FROM THE ORIGINAL POST:

1. 
   Plant Electrician January 12, 2013
   

   Ron,

   It’s funny how cultures change over time. You described the old power plant culture perfectly.

   Today in my profession, it is perfectly sensible to manage employees that have more knowledge about their work than you have. The trick is knowing that. I currently have a terrific manager that would hardly know how to do what I do. That really isn’t his job though. He relies on his people to know what they are doing. It is being a good leader that makes one a good supervisor. Not trying to find or pretend to know all the answers yourself. Somehow that was lost on the Old Power Plant Man culture.

   I think that was why we were so stunned when you arrived at the plant, and you had a personality beyond “slave driver”. I know I’ll write more about this in the future, but there were a number of times where I was pleasantly surprised to find that you listened to me and even asked for my advice.

   Kev