Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond
Favorites Post #29
Originally posted April 26, 2013:
Less than 6 months after Arthur Hammond was hired as an electrician, OD McGaha (pronounced Muh Gay Hay), his foreman, wanted to fire him. Not because he wasn’t a good electrician. Not because he had done something wrong. Not even because he smelled bad, or used bad language. OD (pronounced “Oh Dee”) wanted to fire him because he argued too much.
Art and I started the same day in the electric shop. I remember very well when I first walked in the door the morning that I became an electrician. I talked about that day in an earlier post New Home in the Power Plant Electric Shop. That was the first day I met Arthur Francis Hammond Jr. Oh yes. I remember his full name. Everyone just called him Art. I always called him Arthur.
I had the habit of calling people by their full name…. Sometimes I would even embellish their name some. For instance. I used to call Scott Hubbard “Scotland”. Not because he looked Scottish, but because Scott seemed too short of a name for such a great guy. It would be like calling Jesus “Geez”.
Anyway. Arthur had this one trait that became obvious for anyone that had spent more than 5 minutes with him. He liked to argue. He may have thought of it more of playing the devil’s advocate. So, often when you made a statement about anything, Arthur would say something like, “Nah. That couldn’t be true. Nope. What about this?….”
Well. OD McGaha (OD’s first name was OD. The O and the D didn’t stand for anything other than O and D… OD) didn’t like being told he was wrong by anyone, especially by one of his direct reports. He soon went to Bill Bennett to see about having Arthur fired. Of course, Arthur never really did anything to be fired over, he was just pushing OD’s buttons and OD was falling for it.
So, in less than 6 months after Arthur and I joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett decided it would be best if Arthur Hammond moved to our team to help keep the peace in the shop. I’m not sure, but I think Ben Davis was traded from Howard Chumbley’s crew while Diana Lucas (later Brien) moved from our team over to Howard’s, making the circle complete…. except that now Ben, who was as content as all get out to stay on Howard’s crew (who wouldn’t be?), was stuck on OD’s crew… which is another story in itself that I will not be writing about in a later post (well, I may mention an after effect in passing).
Once Arthur was on my team, we worked together often. One reason was that I was perfectly content arguing with Art Hammond (See… I can call him Art, especially in the same sentence as “arguing”, since Arthur made an art out of arguing). I wish I had a picture of this tall man with tired eyes, yet a happy disposition (once you overlooked the tendency to argue). I do have this picture though:
This is Sgt. Arthur Hammond who earned the Military Medal for his heroic work in the swamps of Flanders as a Newfoundland soldier during World War I. I thought that this Arthur Hammond was related to our Arthur Hammond since they look just like twins. A member of Sgt. Arthur Hammond’s family has assured me that they are not related.
Arthur and I were able to happily work together because he liked to argue and I liked to argue back. You see, I had grown up with an Italian mom. Few people like to argue like Italian mothers, especially mine.
I remember one Thanksgiving sitting with my brother on the couch in the house of my mom’s cousin Larry listening to our Italian relatives arguing in the dining room. We were keeping count on our fingers of how many people were talking at the same time. All of them sounded like they were arguing. Usually it took more than the fingers on one hand.
After a while, we realized that there were several conversations (well…. arguments really) going on at the same time. Yet, there was one person that was in the middle of all the arguments at the same time….. yep….. my mother. She would be taking part in at least three arguments simultaneously. My children grew up thinking that I hated my mother because we were always arguing. It wasn’t until they were older that they realized that we were just trying to decide where to go eat for dinner.
Anyway. When Arthur and I would be working together, all I had to do was say something… anything…. and the argument would start. At least that would be how it would appear to an unsuspecting person walking by listening to us. I knew that what it really meant was nothing more important than my mom and I trying to figure out where we should go out for dinner.
An argument with Arthur would go something like this. Here is one particular one I remember…. I was explaining that what someone had said wasn’t really what they meant. They were just saying that to get a reaction, because they really wanted to see how someone else would react (come to think of it… we were probably talking about Bill Rivers, See the post Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant from last week).
Arthur then proceeded to tell me that lying was never right…. ever. It was never all right to lie. If someone says something, it should be what they mean. I pointed out that people may tell a “white lie”. One that isn’t intended to deceive someone as much as it is to hide something for another purpose. Arthur said that he disagreed. That even a white lie is always wrong….
So, I asked him if he ever told his kids that Santa Claus brought them Christmas presents on Christmas Day, or that the Tooth Fairy put a coin under their pillow at night. He had to admit that he did. He did have to ponder whether it was right or not. So I told him that I thought it was all right to tell his children this. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing something wrong.
I could see that this had really puzzled him, because this was a steadfast dogma of Arthur’s. One thing that really bugged him was when someone lied to him. I have another post that I will write in a few weeks that will give a definite situation where someone was lying to Arthur. It really bugged the heck out of him.
So, I explained to Arthur that even though he told his children that Santa Claus had given them presents, that in some way, maybe Santa Claus really did. Maybe Santa Claus represented the spirit of Christmas, and it was the Spirit of Christmas that prompted Arthur to go out and buy the presents for his children in order to surprise and delight them on Christmas morning. That seemed to satisfy him…..
So, we immediately found something else to argue about, and you know what? The days would fly by when I was working with Arthur. We would go out to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, using regular rubber tape (as this was before we started using the synthetic stuff), and four hours would go by like nothing. Three small arguments and we would be done.
A Boiler Water Circulating Pump Motor like ours, only ours was painted Silver
To get an idea of how big this pump is…. you can easily stand (and dance… um…. if you were inclined to… er…) on the junction box on the lower left corner of this motor.
I actually had a great time working with Arthur Hammond. I was heartbroken the day he told me in 1988 that he had decided to take the money being offered for anyone that wanted to leave before a downsizing was going to occur. He explained the reasons to me. I just wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him “No!” I wanted him to realize that he was making a mistake….. but I didn’t.
You see, Arthur had been a construction electrician before joining the electric shop. He had traveled from one job to another. He hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple of years. He was already working on 3 1/2 years in the shop…. He wasn’t used to that. He said that he just didn’t like settling down in one job. He had to keep moving.
I know what he really wanted to do. He wanted to go into business for himself. He wanted to start a cleaning business. He had made a business case for it and was trying to get the funding from a fund for American Indian Entrepreneurs. He just needed the down payment. This looked like the opportunity to do this. He wanted to buy a big steam cleaning truck.
A steam cleaning truck
So, I think Arthur’s last day was sometime early June, 1988. I always hate to see my friends walking out the door, not knowing if I will ever see them again. That was the way I felt when Arthur left.
The only shining event that came out of Arthur leaving was that it left an opening in the electric shop that was filled by Scott Hubbard from the Testing team. Scott and I would spend the rest of my years working together along with Charles Foster until the day I left the plant in 2001.
I did see Arthur three months later. He called me at work one day and asked me if I would help him out. His going away package that the company gave him to opt out had run out and he needed some cash. He had 50 shares of company stock left and was wondering if I would buy them from him. He knew that I bought and sold stock and thought I might be interested.
I was glad to help him out, so we arranged to meet at the house he was renting in Stillwater (I was living in Ponca City at the time), on a Saturday. He went to the Morrison, Oklahoma bank and had the bank president sign the stock certificates, and when I arrived, at his home, I handed him a check for $1600.00 and he gave me the stock certificate for 50 shares ($32 per share).
The price of the stock has gone up and down through the years…. I could have made a profit on them I suppose. I have kept them to this day. They split once so then I had 100 shares. Every 3 months I receive a dividend check in the mail for $36.00 from those 100 shares….. I hang onto those shares. Maybe it is because every three months, I am reminded of the day I bought them.
When I arrived at Arthur’s house out in the country, just down the road from where I eventually bought my own home up on the hill, Arthur handed me the certificates and said, “that’s it…. That’s the last of the package I received…. It sure didn’t last long.” I shook his hand, gave him a hug and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever heard from Arthur.
I think today he is living in Tulsa. I am not certain. He would be in his mid 60’s now. I only hope that all is well with him and his family. I hope that he finally found a place to settle down. Some place where he could wake up each day….. go to work, or walk down the street and talk to a friend who enjoys a good argument. I know that if he could do that, then he would be content. Nothing was more enjoyable to Arthur than being able to take part in a good argument.
Personal Power Plant Hero — Charles Foster
Originally posted March 30, 2013:
When you think about it, you probably spend more time with your best friend than you ever did talking to your own father. That is, unless your father is your best friend. Charles Foster was my “Foster Father”. Though I was grateful for his effort to bring me into the Electric Shop at the Coal-Fired Plant, when I had little to no electrical experience, that wasn’t the reason why we became such good friends.
When I moved into the electric shop from the labor crew, Charles Foster was my B Foreman. He was my foreman for only the first year of the 18 years I spent as an electrician. He was my friend from the first day I met him until… well… until the end of eternity.
I found that most of the electricians were more intelligent than others it seemed. The shop had people that were Heroes in their own right. Andy Tubbs, Craig Jones, Terry Blevins, Diana Lucas and Ben Davis were what I thought of as “Delta Force” Electricians. They were sent to tackle the toughest of jobs because everyone knew that they would pour all they had into their work until the job was done.
Sonny Kendrick and Bill Rivers were the electronics buffs. They would work on calibrating, programming and monitoring different plant systems. These are the people that you went to when a piece of electronic equipment was on the fritz, and they would analyze, test and repair it with their endless drawers of all types of electronic parts.
There were some other electricians, such as Art Hammond, Bill Ennis, Jim Stevenson and Mike Rose that had their own special knowledge that made each of them unique (to be sure). The other two foremen were Howard Chumbley and O.D. McGaha (prounounced: Oh Dee Muh Gay Hay).
Charles Foster didn’t fall in the same category as the others. He wasn’t the type of person to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, or run conduit up the side of the boiler. Though he would do these tasks when the A-Team wasn’t around to do it. He liked to work alone, or at least alongside one other person. I felt lucky that Charles enjoyed working with me.
When I first joined the electric shop Charles made two things clear to me; don’t call him Charlie and don’t make fun of his spelling. He was sensitive about those two things. I agreed, and I never did…. call him Charlie or make fun of his spelling.
Charles knew he had a problem with spelling, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. So, I often checked over his work before he sent something. — This was before Personal Computers were available in the office with spell checkers.
During my first electrical year (1984), Charles and I would sit in the Electric Shop Office during lunch and talk about movies we had seen. We took turns relaying entire movies to each other. We would start out by saying, “Have you seen “Karate Kid”? Well you see, there was this boy who was moving to California with his mom from someplace in the east and….”
The Karate Kid
We quickly learned that we liked the same kind of movies and shows, and even more, we liked telling each other about them. It seems that we spent years during lunch talking about one movie (or TV show) after the other. I looked forward to just sitting with Charles and talking during lunch.
I noticed in the years that I worked at the Power Plant that, in general, Power Plant Men have the knack of thinking outside of the box. Charles Foster was very good at doing this, and we would have discussions about all sorts of subjects. From God and the Universe to time travel and gardening. The more we talked, the more I came to realize that this man was brilliant.
Not “Newton” brilliant, but “Einstein” brilliant…. If you know what I mean…. Newton had a great mathematical mind and used that ability to become the father of Physics. Einstein on the other hand used his ability to take an observation and mix it with his idea of reality to come up with something that seemed totally unrelated, but made sense nonetheless. This was Charles.
So, what great plans did Charles come up with? What plot to take over the world (as my current manager at Dell, Clay Worley accuses me of weekly)? He became a good father to his son and daughter and a good husband to his wife Margaret. All the things that are really important for the survival of mankind.
One day while Andy Tubbs and I were driving to the River Pump station to check the transformers during substation checks, we stopped along the roadside and I picked a stalk from a Cattail that was about ready to bloom.
A Power Plant Cattail
The plan was to put it in Charles’ top right hand desk drawer. The reason is that when handled just right, this brown furry “flower” (if you want to call it that) will literally explode into tens of thousands of tiny floating bits of fur. Sort of like a dandelion does when it turns white, only more furry and much more numerous. A thousand times more numerous.
When we arrived back in the shop, I walked into the office and told Charles that I had a present for him. Holding the stalk in my hand I opened his drawer. As Charles leaped out of his chair to stop me, I dropped the cattail into his drawer full of tools and odds and end parts, and it exploded into a huge ball of fur. Cattail fur went flying around the room.
Charles was genuinely upset. You see… It wasn’t bad enough that our clothes and hair and nose were being speckled with fur… Charles had allergies and this fur wasn’t helping. So Charles hurried into the shop and wheeled the Shop Vac over to the door and unraveled the hose and plugged it in to vacuum out his drawer.
A Shop-Vac like this
Charles was trying to vacuum up the mess in his drawer before the office became flooded with the fur. He turned the vacuum on and turned around to put the end of the hose in the drawer. As he turned, Andy quickly disconnected the hose from the intake and attached it to the outtake. Notice the two holes on the front of the Shop-Vac. The bottom one is to vacuum while the top hose connect actually blows out the air.
By the time Charles plunged the end of the hose into the drawer, it was blasting air from the hose which caused just the opposite effect that Charles was hoping for. The entire room became so full of flying fur that any attempt to clean it up became impossible. I couldn’t help it, I was over in the corner laughing at the situation that Charles found himself in….. Of course… I was standing in the middle of what looked like a heavy snowstorm.
After about 5 minutes some of the flying fur had settled on the floor and the entire floor in the office was covered with what seemed like about 2 inches of fur. — Ok. So, I felt guilty about this. I hadn’t thought about Charles’ allergies. For the next 2 months (at least), each morning Charles would remind me that I was still supposed to feel bad about it by opening his drawer when he first came in, and blowing down into the drawer causing fur to stir up and fly around the room. Yeah, it was remarkable that it lasted so long.
During a Major Overhaul, the electricians do alarm checks. During this time, you go down the list of every alarm in the plant and test it to make sure it is still working as designed. There are hundreds of alarms. You take blueprints with you to go to every conceivable alarm on the unit that is down for overhaul. Then while someone is sitting in the control room watching the alarm printout and the alarm monitors, the electrician will place a jumper across the apparatus that brings in the alarm and wait until the person in the control room acknowledges the alarm.
To do this job, you need to read the wire numbers on the print and match them with the wires on the terminal blocks. Then you call the Control room on the radio and ask them if alarm so and so came in. We found out quickly that we didn’t want Charles doing either of these two jobs. Charles had the habit of reading the numbers out of order. Instead of wire number 25496, he might read 24956.
I know that some of you recognize the signs that I have described about Charles. I know that Charles felt a great frustration with his problem spelling and transposing numbers. One night in 1992, I watched a movie on TV called “The Secret” with Kirk Douglas.
I wouldn’t normally have sat and watched a movie like this because it dragged on for a while and didn’t seem to have much of a plot. What kept me glued to the TV was that the man in the movie played by Kirk Douglas was just like Charles except that he couldn’t read at all. He was very smart and was trying to hide the fact that he just couldn’t read.
When his grandson began having the same problem, he realized he had to do something about it. That was when he found out that he had Dyslexia. There are different forms or degrees of Dyslexia, but I recognized right away that this was a story about Charles Foster. I knew that his son Tim who was in High School at the time was having the same difficulty with spelling.
The next morning when I arrived in the Electric Shop Office I had to tell Charles right away (I couldn’t wait until our normal lunch time movie review) that I knew why he had so much trouble spelling and why he always jumbled his numbers around. It was because he had Dyslexia. I explained the movie to him. As I was telling this to Charles I could see that he was beginning to understand…. everything fit.
I watched as Charles soaked in what I had just told him. A lifetime of feeling like he had failed at the most simple of tasks were drying up before his eyes. He had a condition that was not only common, but was also treatable in the sense that you could learn to improve using the correct techniques. Just knowing why was good enough for Charles. He had spent years coping and working around. Now he knew why. I will never forget that moment when I was sitting in the office smiling at Charles smiling back at me.
Charles Foster – A True Power Plant Hero!
I mentioned above that Charles reminded me of Albert Einstein. It is an interesting coincidence (or is it?) that the movie “The Secret” earned the Einstein Award from the National Dyslexia Research Foundation in 1992. It seems that Einstein, Charles Foster and Dyslexia go together.
God Bless you Charles and your wonderful family!
Comment from Previous Post:
Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond
Originally posted April 26, 2013:
Less than 6 months after Arthur Hammond was hired as an electrician, OD McGaha (pronounced Muh Gay Hay), his foreman, wanted to fire him. Not because he wasn’t a good electrician. Not because he had done something wrong. Not even because he smelled bad, or used bad language. OD (pronounced “Oh Dee”) wanted to fire him because he argued too much.
Art and I started the same day in the electric shop. I remember very well when I first walked in the door the morning that I became an electrician. I talked about that day in an earlier post New Home in the Power Plant Electric Shop. That was the first day I met Arthur Francis Hammond Jr. Oh yes. I remember his full name. Everyone just called him Art. I always called him Arthur.
I had the habit of calling people by their full name…. Sometimes I would even embellish their name some. For instance. I used to call Scott Hubbard “Scotland”. Not because he looked Scottish, but because Scott seemed too short of a name for such a great guy. It would be like calling Jesus “Geez”.
Anyway. Arthur had this one trait that became obvious for anyone that had spent more than 5 minutes with him. He liked to argue. He may have thought of it more of playing the devil’s advocate. So, often when you made a statement about anything, Arthur would say something like, “Nah. That couldn’t be true. Nope. What about this?….”
Well. OD McGaha (OD’s first name was OD. The O and the D didn’t stand for anything other than O and D… OD) didn’t like being told he was wrong by anyone, especially by one of his direct reports. He soon went to Bill Bennett to see about having Arthur fired. Of course, Arthur never really did anything to be fired over, he was just pushing OD’s buttons and OD was falling for it.
So, in less than 6 months after Arthur and I joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett decided it would be best if Arthur Hammond moved to our team to help keep the peace in the shop. I’m not sure, but I think Ben Davis was traded from Howard Chumbley’s crew while Diana Lucas (later Brien) moved from our team over to Howard’s, making the circle complete…. except that now Ben, who was as content as all get out to stay on Howard’s crew (who wouldn’t be?), was stuck on OD’s crew… which is another story in itself that I will not be writing about in a later post (well, I may mention an after effect in passing).
Once Arthur was on my team, we worked together often. One reason was that I was perfectly content arguing with Art Hammond (See… I can call him Art, especially in the same sentence as “arguing”, since Arthur made an art out of arguing). I wish I had a picture of this tall man with tired eyes, yet a happy disposition (once you overlooked the tendency to argue). I do have this picture though:
This is Sgt. Arthur Hammond who earned the Military Medal for his heroic work in the swamps of Flanders as a Newfoundland soldier during World War I. I thought that this Arthur Hammond was related to our Arthur Hammond since they look just like twins. A member of Sgt. Arthur Hammond’s family has assured me that they are not related.
Arthur and I were able to happily work together because he liked to argue and I liked to argue back. You see, I had grown up with an Italian mom. Few people like to argue like Italian mothers, especially mine.
I remember one Thanksgiving sitting with my brother on the couch in the house of my mom’s cousin Larry listening to our Italian relatives arguing in the dining room. We were keeping count on our fingers of how many people were talking at the same time. All of them sounded like they were arguing. Usually it took more than the fingers on one hand.
After a while, we realized that there were several conversations (well…. arguments really) going on at the same time. Yet, there was one person that was in the middle of all the arguments at the same time….. yep….. my mother. She would be taking part in at least three arguments simultaneously. My children grew up thinking that I hated my mother because we were always arguing. It wasn’t until they were older that they realized that we were just trying to decide where to go eat for dinner.
Anyway. When Arthur and I would be working together, all I had to do was say something… anything…. and the argument would start. At least that would be how it would appear to an unsuspecting person walking by listening to us. I knew that what it really meant was nothing more important than my mom and I trying to figure out where we should go out for dinner.
An argument with Arthur would go something like this. Here is one particular one I remember…. I was explaining that what someone had said wasn’t really what they meant. They were just saying that to get a reaction, because they really wanted to see how someone else would react (come to think of it… we were probably talking about Bill Rivers, See the post Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant from last week).
Arthur then proceeded to tell me that lying was never right…. ever. It was never all right to lie. If someone says something, it should be what they mean. I pointed out that people may tell a “white lie”. One that isn’t intended to deceive someone as much as it is to hide something for another purpose. Arthur said that he disagreed. That even a white lie is always wrong….
So, I asked him if he ever told his kids that Santa Claus brought them Christmas Presents on Christmas Day, or that the Tooth Fairy put a coin under their pillow at night. He had to admit that he did. He did have to ponder whether it was right or not. So I told him that I thought it was all right to tell his children this. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing something wrong.
I could see that this had really puzzled him, because this was a steadfast dogma of Arthur’s. One thing that really bugged him was when someone lied to him. I have another post that I will write in a few weeks that will give a definite situation where someone was lying to Arthur. It really bugged the heck out of him.
So, I explained to Arthur that even though he told his children that Santa Claus had given them presents, that in some way, maybe Santa Claus really did. Maybe Santa Claus represented the spirit of Christmas, and it was the Spirit of Christmas that prompted Arthur to go out and buy the presents for his children in order to surprise and delight them on Christmas morning. That seemed to satisfy him…..
So, we immediately found something else to argue about, and you know what? The days would fly by when I was working with Arthur. We would go out to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, using regular rubber tape (as this was before we started using the synthetic stuff), and four hours would go by like nothing. Three small arguments and we would be done.
A Boiler Water Circulating Pump Motor like ours, only ours was painted Silver
To get an idea of how big this pump is…. you can easily stand (and dance… um…. if you were inclined to… er…) on the junction box on the lower left corner of this motor.
I actually had a great time working with Arthur Hammond. I was heartbroken the day he told me in 1988 that he had decided to take the money being offered for anyone that wanted to leave before a downsizing was going to occur. He explained the reasons to me. I just wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him “No!” I wanted him to realize that he was making a mistake….. but I didn’t.
You see, Arthur had been a construction electrician before joining the electric shop. He had traveled from one job to another. He hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple of years. He was already working on 3 1/2 years in the shop…. He wasn’t used to that. He said that he just didn’t like settling down in one job. He had to keep moving.
I know what he really wanted to do. He wanted to go into business for himself. He wanted to start a cleaning business. He had made a business case for it and was trying to get the funding from a fund for American Indian Entrepreneurs. He just needed the down payment. This looked like the opportunity to do this. He wanted to buy a big steam cleaning truck.
A steam cleaning truck
So, I think Arthur’s last day was sometime early June, 1988. I always hate to see my friends walking out the door, not knowing if I will ever see them again. That was the way I felt when Arthur left.
The only shining event that came out of Arthur leaving was that it left an opening in the electric shop that was filled by Scott Hubbard from the Testing team. Scott and I would spend the rest of my years working together along with Charles Foster until the day I left the plant in 2001.
I did see Arthur three months later. He called me at work one day and asked me if I would help him out. His going away package that the company gave him to opt out had run out and he needed some cash. He had 50 shares of company stock left and was wondering if I would buy them from him. He knew that I bought and sold stock and thought I might be interested.
I was glad to help him out, so we arranged to meet at the house he was renting in Stillwater (I was living in Ponca City at the time), on a Saturday. He went to the Morrison, Oklahoma bank and had the bank president sign the stock certificates, and when I arrived, at his home, I handed him a check for $1600.00 and he gave me the stock certificate for 50 shares ($32 per share).
The price of the stock has gone up and down through the years…. I could have made a profit on them I suppose. I have kept them to this day. They split once so then I had 100 shares. Every 3 months I receive a dividend check in the mail for $36.00 from those 100 shares….. I hang onto those shares. Maybe it is because ever three months, I am reminded of the day I bought them.
When I arrived at Arthur’s house out in the country, just down the road from where I eventually bought my own home up on the hill, Arthur handed me the certificates and said, “that’s it…. That’s the last of the package I received…. It sure didn’t last long.” I shook his hand, gave him a hug and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever heard from Arthur.
I think today he is living in Tulsa. I am not certain. He would be in his mid 60’s now. I only hope that all is well with him and his family. I hope that he finally found a place to settle down. Some place where he could wake up each day….. go to work, or walk down the street and talk to a friend who enjoys a good argument. I know that if he could do that, then he would be content. Nothing was more enjoyable to Arthur than being able to take part in a good argument.
Personal Power Plant Hero — Charles Foster
Originally posted March 30, 2013:
When you think about it, you probably spend more time with your best friend than you ever did talking to your own father. That is, unless your father is your best friend. Charles Foster was my “Foster Father”. Though I was grateful for his effort to bring me into the Electric Shop at the Coal-Fired Plant, when I had little to no electrical experience, that wasn’t the reason why we became such good friends.
When I moved into the electric shop from the labor crew, Charles Foster was my B Foreman. He was my foreman for only the first year of the 18 years I spent as an electrician. He was my friend from the first day I met him until… well… until the end of eternity.
I found that most of the electricians were more intelligent than others it seemed. The shop had people that were Heroes in their own right. Andy Tubbs, Craig Jones, Terry Blevins, Diana Lucas and Ben Davis were what I thought of as “Delta Force” Electricians. They were sent to tackle the toughest of jobs because everyone knew that they would pour all they had into their work until the job was done.
Sonny Kendrick and Bill Rivers were the electronics buffs. They would work on calibrating, programming and monitoring different plant systems. These are the people that you went to when a piece of electronic equipment was on the fritz, and they would analyze, test and repair it with their endless drawers of all types of electronic parts.
There were some other electricians, such as Art Hammond, Bill Ennis, Jim Stevenson and Mike Rose that had their own special knowledge that made each of them unique (to be sure). The other two foremen were Howard Chumbley and O.D. McGaha (prounounced: Oh Dee Muh Gay Hay).
Charles Foster didn’t fall in the same category as the others. He wasn’t the type of person to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, or run conduit up the side of the boiler. Though he would do these tasks when the A-Team wasn’t around to do it. He liked to work alone, or at least alongside one other person. I felt lucky that Charles enjoyed working with me.
When I first joined the electric shop Charles made two things clear to me; don’t call him Charlie and don’t make fun of his spelling. He was sensitive about those two things. I agreed, and I never did…. call him Charlie or make fun of his spelling.
Charles knew he had a problem with spelling, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. So, I often checked over his work before he sent something. — This was before Personal Computers were available in the office with spell checkers.
During my first electrical year (1984), Charles and I would sit in the Electric Shop Office during lunch and talk about movies we had seen. We took turns relaying entire movies to each other. We would start out by saying, “Have you seen “Karate Kid”? Well you see, there was this boy who was moving to California with his mom from someplace in the east and….”
The Karate Kid
We quickly learned that we liked the same kind of movies and shows, and even more, we liked telling each other about them. It seems that we spent years during lunch talking about one movie (or TV show) after the other. I looked forward to just sitting with Charles and talking during lunch.
I noticed in the years that I worked at the Power Plant that, in general, Power Plant Men have the knack of thinking outside of the box. Charles Foster was very good at doing this, and we would have discussions about all sorts of subjects. From God and the Universe to time travel and gardening. The more we talked, the more I came to realize that this man was brilliant.
Not “Newton” brilliant, but “Einstein” brilliant…. If you know what I mean…. Newton had a great mathematical mind and used that ability to become the father of Physics. Einstein on the other hand used his ability to take an observation and mix it with his idea of reality to come up with something that seemed totally unrelated, but made sense nonetheless. This was Charles.
So, what great plans did Charles come up with? What plot to take over the world (as my current manager at Dell, Clay Worley accuses me of weekly)? He became a good father to his son and daughter and a good husband to his wife Margaret. All the things that are really important for the survival of mankind.
One day while Andy Tubbs and I were driving to the River Pump station to check the transformers during substation checks, we stopped along the roadside and I picked a stalk from a Cattail that was about ready to bloom.
A Power Plant Cattail
The plan was to put it in Charles’ top right hand desk drawer. The reason is that when handled just right, this brown furry “flower” (if you want to call it that) will literally explode into tens of thousands of tiny floating bits of fur. Sort of like a dandelion does when it turns white, only more furry and much more numerous. A thousand times more numerous.
When we arrived back in the shop, I walked into the office and told Charles that I had a present for him. Holding the stalk in my hand I opened his drawer. As Charles leaped out of his chair to stop me, I dropped the cattail into his drawer full of tools and odds and end parts, and it exploded into a huge ball of fur. Cattail fur went flying around the room.
Charles was genuinely upset. You see… It wasn’t bad enough that our clothes and hair and nose were being speckled with fur… Charles had allergies and this fur wasn’t helping. So Charles hurried into the shop and wheeled the Shop Vac over to the door and unraveled the hose and plugged it in to vacuum out his drawer.
A Shop-Vac like this
Charles was trying to vacuum up the mess in his drawer before the office became flooded with the fur. He turned the vacuum on and turned around to put the end of the hose in the drawer. As he turned, Andy quickly disconnected the hose from the intake and attached it to the outtake. Notice the two holes on the front of the Shop-Vac. The bottom one is to vacuum while the top hose connect actually blows out the air.
By the time Charles plunged the end of the hose into the drawer, it was blasting air from the hose which caused just the opposite effect that Charles was hoping for. The entire room became so full of flying fur that any attempt to clean it up became impossible. I couldn’t help it, I was over in the corner laughing at the situation that Charles found himself in….. Of course… I was standing in the middle of what looked like a heavy snowstorm.
After about 5 minutes some of the flying fur had settled on the floor and the entire floor in the office was covered with what seemed like about 2 inches of fur. — Ok. So, I felt guilty about this. I hadn’t thought about Charles’ allergies. For the next 2 months (at least), each morning Charles would remind me that I was still supposed to feel bad about it by opening his drawer when he first came in, and blowing down into the drawer causing fur to stir up and fly around the room. Yeah, it was remarkable that it lasted so long.
During a Major Overhaul, the electricians do alarm checks. During this time, you go down the list of every alarm in the plant and test it to make sure it is still working as designed. There are hundreds of alarms. You take blueprints with you to go to every conceivable alarm on the unit that is down for overhaul. Then while someone is sitting in the control room watching the alarm printout and the alarm monitors, the electrician will place a jumper across the apparatus that brings in the alarm and wait until the person in the control room acknowledges the alarm.
To do this job, you need to read the wire numbers on the print and match them with the wires on the terminal blocks. Then you call the Control room on the radio and ask them if alarm so and so came in. We found out quickly that we didn’t want Charles doing either of these two jobs. Charles had the habit of reading the numbers out of order. Instead of wire number 25496, he might read 24956.
I know that some of you recognize the signs that I have described about Charles. I know that Charles felt a great frustration with his problem spelling and transposing numbers. One night in 1992, I watched a movie on TV called “The Secret” with Kirk Douglas.
I wouldn’t normally have sat and watched a movie like this because it dragged on for a while and didn’t seem to have much of a plot. What kept me glued to the TV was that the man in the movie played by Kirk Douglas was just like Charles except that he couldn’t read at all. He was very smart and was trying to hide the fact that he just couldn’t read.
When his grandson began having the same problem, he realized he had to do something about it. That was when he found out that he had Dyslexia. There are different forms or degrees of Dyslexia, but I recognized right away that this was a story about Charles Foster. I knew that his son Tim who was in High School at the time was having the same difficulty with spelling.
The next morning when I arrived in the Electric Shop Office I had to tell Charles right away (I couldn’t wait until our normal lunch time movie review) that I knew why he had so much trouble spelling and why he always jumbled his numbers around. It was because he had Dyslexia. I explained the movie to him. As I was telling this to Charles I could see that he was beginning to understand…. everything fit.
I watched as Charles soaked in what I had just told him. A lifetime of feeling like he had failed at the most simple of tasks were drying up before his eyes. He had a condition that was not only common, but was also treatable in the sense that you could learn to improve using the correct techniques. Just knowing why was good enough for Charles. He had spent years coping and working around. Now he knew why. I will never forget that moment when I was sitting in the office smiling at Charles smiling back at me.
Charles Foster – A True Power Plant Hero!
I mentioned above that Charles reminded me of Albert Einstein. It is an interesting coincidence (or is it?) that the movie “The Secret” earned the Einstein Award from the National Dyslexia Research Foundation in 1992. It seems that Einstein, Charles Foster and Dyslexia go together.
God Bless you Charles and your wonderful family!
Comment from Previous Post:
-
This was an awesome piece of writing! I liked that you described your ordinary man turned into a hero in your life. I like that using his last name Foster, you made him into your Foster father or friend. It is a great tribute to YOU, though, that this quiet solitary man took you under his wing. Thanks for all the ‘likes’ you push on my posts. I am belated at getting back. Have you ever seen in my comments, that I work at a warehouse so get only about an hour a day at the library and then, scurry on the weekend, visiting grandkids, reading blogs at the library and trying to be able to stay connected? Not an ‘excuse’ more of an “I’m Sorry to you!” Take care, robin
Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond
Originally posted April 26, 2013:
Less than 6 months after Arthur Hammond was hired as an electrician, OD McGaha (proununced Muh Gay Hay), his foreman, wanted to fire him. Not because he wasn’t a good electrician. Not because he had done something wrong. Not even because he smelled bad, or used bad language. OD (prounounced “Oh Dee”) wanted to fire him because he argued too much.
Art and I started the same day in the electric shop. I remember very well when I first walked in the door the morning that I became an electrician. I talked about that day in an earlier post New Home in the Power Plant Electric Shop. That was the first day I met Arthur Francis Hammond Jr. Oh yes. I remember his full name. Everyone just called him Art. I always called him Arthur.
I had the habit of calling people by their full name…. Sometimes I would even embellish their name some. For instance. I used to call Scott Hubbard “Scotland”. Not because he looked Scottish, but because Scott seemed too short of a name for such a great guy. It would be like calling Jesus “Geez”.
Anyway. Arthur had this one trait that became obvious for anyone that had spent more than 5 minutes with him. He liked to argue. He may have thought of it more of playing the devil’s advocate. So, often when you made a statement about anything, Arthur would say something like, “Nah. That couldn’t be true. Nope. What about this?….”
Well. OD McGaha (OD’s first name was OD. The O and the D didn’t stand for anything other than O and D… OD) didn’t like being told he was wrong by anyone, especially by one of his direct reports. He soon went to Bill Bennett to see about having Arthur fired. Of course, Arthur never really did anything to be fired over, he was just pushing OD’s buttons and OD was falling for it.
So, in less than 6 months after Arthur and I joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett decided it would be best if Arthur Hammond moved to our team to help keep the peace in the shop. I’m not sure, but I think Ben Davis was traded from Howard Chumbley’s crew while Diana Lucas (later Brien) moved from our team over to Howard’s, making the circle complete…. except that now Ben, who was as content as all get out to stay on Howard’s crew (who wouldn’t be?), was stuck on OD’s crew… which is another story in itself that I will not be writing about in a later post (well, I may mention an after effect in passing).
Once Arthur was on my team, we worked together often. One reason was that I was perfectly content arguing with Art Hammond (See… I can call him Art, especially in the same sentence as “arguing”, since Arthur made an art out of arguing). I wish I had a picture of this tall man with tired eyes, yet a happy disposition (once you overlooked the tendency to argue). I do have this picture though:
This is Sgt. Arthur Hammond who earned the Military Medal for his heroic work in the swamps of Flanders as a Newfoundland soldier during World War I. I thought that this Arthur Hammond was related to our Arthur Hammond since they look just like twins. A member of Sgt. Arthur Hammond’s family has assured me that they are not related.
Arthur and I were able to happily work together because he liked to argue and I liked to argue back. You see, I had grown up with an Italian mom. Few people like to argue like Italian mothers, especially mine.
I remember one Thanksgiving sitting with my brother on the couch in the house of my mom’s cousin Larry listening to our Italian relatives arguing in the dining room. We were keeping count on our fingers of how many people were talking at the same time. All of them sounded like they were arguing. Usually it took more than the fingers on one hand.
After a while, we realized that there were several conversations (well…. arguments really) going on at the same time. Yet, there was one person that was in the middle of all the arguments at the same time….. yep….. my mother. She would be taking part in at least three arguments simultaneously. My children grew up thinking that I hated my mother because we were always arguing. It wasn’t until they were older that they realized that we were just trying to decide where to go eat for dinner.
Anyway. When Arthur and I would be working together, all I had to do was say something… anything…. and the argument would start. At least that would be how it would appear to an unsuspecting person walking by listening to us. I knew that what it really meant was nothing more important than my mom and I trying to figure out where we should go out for dinner.
An argument with Arthur would go something like this. Here is one particular one I remember…. I was explaining that what someone had said wasn’t really what they meant. They were just saying that to get a reaction, because they really wanted to see how someone else would react (come to think of it… we were probably talking about Bill Rivers, See the post Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant from last week).
Arthur then proceeded to tell me that lying was never right…. ever. It was never all right to lie. If someone says something, it should be what they mean. I pointed out that people may tell a “white lie”. One that isn’t intended to deceive someone as much as it is to hide something for another purpose. Arthur said that he disagreed. That even a white lie is always wrong….
So, I asked him if he ever told his kids that Santa Claus brought them Christmas Presents on Christmas Day, or that the Tooth Fairy put a coin under their pillow at night. He had to admit that he did. He did have to ponder whether it was right or not. So I told him that I thought it was all right to tell his children this. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing something wrong.
I could see that this had really puzzled him, because this was a steadfast dogma of Arthur’s. One thing that really bugged him was when someone lied to him. I have another post that I will write in a few weeks that will give a definite situation where someone was lying to Arthur. It really bugged the heck out of him.
So, I explained to Arthur that even though he told his children that Santa Claus had given them presents, that in some way, maybe Santa Claus really did. Maybe Santa Claus represented the spirit of Christmas, and it was the Spirit of Christmas that prompted Arthur to go out and buy the presents for his children in order to surprise and delight them on Christmas morning. That seemed to satisfy him…..
So, we immediately found something else to argue about, and you know what? The days would fly by when I was working with Arthur. We would go out to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, using regular rubber tape (as this was before we started using the synthetic stuff), and four hours would go by like nothing. Three small arguments and we would be done.
A Boiler Water Circulating Pump Motor like ours, only ours was painted Silver
To get an idea of how big this pump is…. you can easily stand (and dance… um…. if you were inclined to… er…) on the junction box on the lower left corner of this motor.
I actually had a great time working with Arthur Hammond. I was heartbroken the day he told me in 1988 that he had decided to take the money being offered for anyone that wanted to leave before a downsizing was going to occur. He explained the reasons to me. I just wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him “No!” I wanted him to realize that he was making a mistake….. but I didn’t.
You see, Arthur had been a construction electrician before joining the electric shop. He had traveled from one job to another. He hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple of years. He was already working on 3 1/2 years in the shop…. He wasn’t used to that. He said that he just didn’t like settling down in one job. He had to keep moving.
I know what he really wanted to do. He wanted to go into business for himself. He wanted to start a cleaning business. He had made a business case for it and was trying to get the funding from a fund for American Indian Entrepreneurs. He just needed the down payment. This looked like the opportunity to do this. He wanted to buy a big steam cleaning truck.
A steam cleaning truck
So, I think Arthur’s last day was sometime early June, 1988. I always hate to see my friends walking out the door, not knowing if I will ever see them again. That was the way I felt when Arthur left.
The only shining event that came out of Arthur leaving was that it left an opening in the electric shop that was filled by Scott Hubbard from the Testing team. Scott and I would spend the rest of my years working together along with Charles Foster until the day I left the plant in 2001.
I did see Arthur three months later. He called me at work one day and asked me if I would help him out. His going away package that the company gave him to opt out had run out and he needed some cash. He had 50 shares of company stock left and was wondering if I would buy them from him. He knew that I bought and sold stock and thought I might be interested.
I was glad to help him out, so we arranged to meet at the house he was renting in Stillwater (I was living in Ponca City at the time), on a Saturday. He went to the Morrison, Oklahoma bank and had the bank president sign the stock certificates, and when I arrived, at his home, I handed him a check for $1600.00 and he gave me the stock certificate for 50 shares ($32 per share).
The price of the stock has gone up and down through the years…. I could have made a profit on them I suppose. I have kept them to this day. Every 3 months I receive a dividend check in the mail for $19 from those 50 shares….. I hang onto those shares. Maybe it is because ever three months, I am reminded of the day I bought them.
When I arrived at Arthur’s house out in the country, just down the road from where I eventually bought my own home up on the hill, Arthur handed me the certificates and said, “that’s it…. That’s the last of the package I received…. It sure didn’t last long.” I shook his hand, gave him a hug and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever heard from Arthur.
I think today he is living in Tulsa. I am not certain. He would be in his early 60’s now. I only hope that all is well with him and his family. I hope that he finally found a place to settle down. Some place where he could wake up each day….. go to work, or walk down the street and talk to a friend who enjoys a good argument. I know that if he could do that, then he would be content. Nothing was more enjoyable to Arthur than being able to take part in a good argument.
Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond
Originally posted April 26, 2013:
Less than 6 months after Arthur Hammond was hired as an electrician, OD McGaha (proununced Muh Gay Hay), his foreman, wanted to fire him. Not because he wasn’t a good electrician. Not because he had done something wrong. Not even because he smelled bad, or used bad language. OD (prounounced “Oh Dee”) wanted to fire him because he argued too much.
Art and I started the same day in the electric shop. I remember very well when I first walked in the door the morning that I became an electrician. I talked about that day in an earlier post New Home in the Power Plant Electric Shop. That was the first day I met Arthur Francis Hammond Jr. Oh yes. I remember his full name. Everyone just called him Art. I always called him Arthur.
I had the habit of calling people by their full name…. Sometimes I would even embellish their name some. For instance. I used to call Scott Hubbard “Scotland”. Not because he looked Scottish, but because Scott seemed too short of a name for such a great guy. It would be like calling Jesus “Geez”.
Anyway. Arthur had this one trait that became obvious for anyone that had spent more than 5 minutes with him. He liked to argue. He may have thought of it more of playing the devil’s advocate. So, often when you made a statement about anything, Arthur would say something like, “Nah. That couldn’t be true. Nope. What about this?….”
Well. OD McGaha (OD’s first name was OD. The O and the D didn’t stand for anything other than O and D… OD) didn’t like being told he was wrong by anyone, especially by one of his direct reports. He soon went to Bill Bennett to see about having Arthur fired. Of course, Arthur never really did anything to be fired over, he was just pushing OD’s buttons and OD was falling for it.
So, in less than 6 months after Arthur and I joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett decided it would be best if Arthur Hammond moved to our team to help keep the peace in the shop. I’m not sure, but I think Ben Davis was traded from Howard Chumbley’s crew while Diana Lucas (later Brien) moved from our team over to Howard’s, making the circle complete…. except that now Ben, who was as content as all get out to stay on Howard’s crew (who wouldn’t be?), was stuck on OD’s crew… which is another story in itself that I will not be writing about in a later post (well, I may mention an after effect in passing).
Once Arthur was on my team, we worked together often. One reason was that I was perfectly content arguing with Art Hammond (See… I can call him Art, especially in the same sentence as “arguing”, since Arthur made an art out of arguing). I wish I had a picture of this tall man with tired eyes, yet a happy disposition (once you overlooked the tendency to argue). I do have this picture though:
This is Sgt. Arthur Hammond who earned the Military Medal for his heroic work in the swamps of Flanders as a Newfoundland soldier during World War I. I thought that this Arthur Hammond was related to our Arthur Hammond since they look just like twins. A member of Sgt. Arthur Hammond’s family has assured me that they are not related.
Arthur and I were able to happily work together because he liked to argue and I liked to argue back. You see, I had grown up with an Italian mom. Few people like to argue like Italian mothers, especially mine.
I remember one Thanksgiving sitting with my brother on the couch in the house of my mom’s cousin Larry listening to our Italian relatives arguing in the dining room. We were keeping count on our fingers of how many people were talking at the same time. All of them sounded like they were arguing. Usually it took more than the fingers on one hand.
After a while, we realized that there were several conversations (well…. arguments really) going on at the same time. Yet, there was one person that was in the middle of all the arguments at the same time….. yep….. my mother. She would be taking part in at least three arguments simultaneously. My children grew up thinking that I hated my mother because we were always arguing. It wasn’t until they were older that they realized that we were just trying to decide where to go eat for dinner.
Anyway. When Arthur and I would be working together, all I had to do was say something… anything…. and the argument would start. At least that would be how it would appear to an unsuspecting person walking by listening to us. I knew that what it really meant was nothing more important than my mom and I trying to figure out where we should go out for dinner.
An argument with Arthur would go something like this. Here is one particular one I remember…. I was explaining that what someone had said wasn’t really what they meant. They were just saying that to get a reaction, because they really wanted to see how someone else would react (come to think of it… we were probably talking about Bill Rivers, See the post Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant from last week).
Arthur then proceeded to tell me that lying was never right…. ever. It was never all right to lie. If someone says something, it should be what they mean. I pointed out that people may tell a “white lie”. One that isn’t intended to deceive someone as much as it is to hide something for another purpose. Arthur said that he disagreed. That even a white lie is always wrong….
So, I asked him if he ever told his kids that Santa Claus brought them Christmas Presents on Christmas Day, or that the Tooth Fairy put a coin under their pillow at night. He had to admit that he did. He did have to ponder whether it was right or not. So I told him that I thought it was all right to tell his children this. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing something wrong.
I could see that this had really puzzled him, because this was a steadfast dogma of Arthur’s. One thing that really bugged him was when someone lied to him. I have another post that I will write in a few weeks that will give a definite situation where someone was lying to Arthur. It really bugged the heck out of him.
So, I explained to Arthur that even though he told his children that Santa Claus had given them presents, that in some way, maybe Santa Claus really did. Maybe Santa Claus represented the spirit of Christmas, and it was the Spirit of Christmas that prompted Arthur to go out and buy the presents for his children in order to surprise and delight them on Christmas morning. That seemed to satisfy him…..
So, we immediately found something else to argue about, and you know what? The days would fly by when I was working with Arthur. We would go out to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, using regular rubber tape (as this was before we started using the synthetic stuff), and four hours would go by like nothing. Three small arguments and we would be done.
A Boiler Water Circulating Pump Motor like ours, only ours was painted Silver
To get an idea of how big this pump is…. you can easily stand (and dance… um…. if you were inclined to… er…) on the junction box on the lower left corner of this motor.
I actually had a great time working with Arthur Hammond. I was heartbroken the day he told me in 1988 that he had decided to take the money being offered for anyone that wanted to leave before a downsizing was going to occur. He explained the reasons to me. I just wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him “No!” I wanted him to realize that he was making a mistake….. but I didn’t.
You see, Arthur had been a construction electrician before joining the electric shop. He had traveled from one job to another. He hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple of years. He was already working on 3 1/2 years in the shop…. He wasn’t used to that. He said that he just didn’t like settling down in one job. He had to keep moving.
I know what he really wanted to do. He wanted to go into business for himself. He wanted to start a cleaning business. He had made a business case for it and was trying to get the funding from a fund for American Indian Entrepreneurs. He just needed the down payment. This looked like the opportunity to do this. He wanted to buy a big steam cleaning truck.
A steam cleaning truck
So, I think Arthur’s last day was sometime early June, 1988. I always hate to see my friends walking out the door, not knowing if I will ever see them again. That was the way I felt when Arthur left.
The only shining event that came out of Arthur leaving was that it left an opening in the electric shop that was filled by Scott Hubbard from the Testing team. Scott and I would spend the rest of my years working together along with Charles Foster until the day I left the plant in 2001.
I did see Arthur three months later. He called me at work one day and asked me if I would help him out. His going away package that the company gave him to opt out had run out and he needed some cash. He had 50 shares of company stock left and was wondering if I would buy them from him. He knew that I bought and sold stock and thought I might be interested.
I was glad to help him out, so we arranged to meet at the house he was renting in Stillwater (I was living in Ponca City at the time), on a Saturday. He went to the Morrison, Oklahoma bank and had the bank president sign the stock certificates, and when I arrived, at his home, I handed him a check for $1600.00 and he gave me the stock certificate for 50 shares ($32 per share).
The price of the stock has gone up and down through the years…. I could have made a profit on them I suppose. I have kept them to this day. Every 3 months I receive a dividend check in the mail for $19 from those 50 shares….. I hang onto those shares. Maybe it is because ever three months, I am reminded of the day I bought those shares.
When I arrived at Arthur’s house out in the country, just down the road from where I eventually bought my own home up on the hill, Arthur handed me the certificates and said, “that’s it…. That’s the last of the package I received…. It sure didn’t last long.” I shook his hand, gave him a hug and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever heard from Arthur.
I think today he is living in Tulsa. I am not certain. He would be in his early 60’s now. I only hope that all is well with him and his family. I hope that he finally found a place to settle down. Some place where he could wake up each day….. go to work, or walk down the street and talk to a friend who enjoys a good argument. I know that if he could do that, then he would be content. Nothing was more enjoyable to Arthur than being able to take part in a good argument.
Personal Power Plant Hero — Charles Foster
Originally posted March 30, 2013:
When you think about it, you probably spend more time with your best friend than you ever did talking to your own father. That is, unless your father is your best friend. Charles Foster was my “Foster Father”. Though I was grateful for his effort to bring me into the Electric Shop at the Coal-Fired Plant, when I had little to no electrical experience, that wasn’t the reason why we became such good friends.
When I moved into the electric shop from the labor crew, Charles Foster was my B Foreman. He was my foreman for only the first year of the 18 years I spent as an electrician. He was my friend from the first day I met him until… well… until the end of eternity.
I found that most of the electricians were more intelligent than others it seemed. The shop had people that were Heroes in their own right. Andy Tubbs, Craig Jones, Terry Blevins, Diana Lucas and Ben Davis were what I thought of as “Delta Force” Electricians. They were sent to tackle the toughest of jobs because everyone knew that they would pour all they had into their work until the job was done.
Sonny Kendrick and Bill Rivers were the electronics buffs. They would work on calibrating, programming and monitoring different plant systems. These are the people that you went to when a piece of electronic equipment was on the fritz, and they would analyze, test and repair it with their endless drawers of all types of electronic parts.
There were some other electricians, such as Art Hammond, Bill Ennis, Jim Stevenson and Mike Rose that had their own special knowledge that made each of them unique (to be sure). The other two foremen were Howard Chumbley and O.D. McGaha (prounounced: Oh Dee Muh Gay Hay).
Charles Foster didn’t fall in the same category as the others. He wasn’t the type of person to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, or run conduit up the side of the boiler. Though he would do these tasks when the A-Team wasn’t around to do it. He liked to work alone, or at least alongside one other person. I felt lucky that Charles enjoyed working with me.
When I first joined the electric shop Charles made two things clear to me; don’t call him Charlie and don’t make fun of his spelling. He was sensitive about those two things. I agreed, and I never did…. call him Charlie or make fun of his spelling.
Charles knew he had a problem with spelling, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. So, I often checked over his work before he sent something. — This was before Personal Computers were available in the office with spell checkers.
During my first electrical year (1984), Charles and I would sit in the Electric Shop Office during lunch and talk about movies we had seen. We took turns relaying entire movies to each other. We would start out by saying, “Have you seen “Karate Kid”? Well you see, there was this boy who was moving to California with his mom from someplace in the east and….”
The Karate Kid
We quickly learned that we liked the same kind of movies and shows, and even more, we liked telling each other about them. It seems that we spent years during lunch talking about one movie (or TV show) after the other. I looked forward to just sitting with Charles and talking during lunch.
I noticed in the years that I worked at the Power Plant that, in general, Power Plant Men have the knack of thinking outside of the box. Charles Foster was very good at doing this, and we would have discussions about all sorts of subjects. From God and the Universe to time travel and gardening. The more we talked, the more I came to realize that this man was brilliant.
Not “Newton” brilliant, but “Einstein” brilliant…. If you know what I mean…. Newton had a great mathematical mind and used that ability to become the father of Physics. Einstein on the other hand used his ability to take an observation and mix it with his idea of reality to come up with something that seemed totally unrelated, but made sense nonetheless. This was Charles.
So, what great plans did Charles come up with? What plot to take over the world (as my current manager at Dell, Clay Worley accuses me of weekly)? He became a good father to his son and daughter and a good husband to his wife Margaret. All the things that are really important for the survival of mankind.
One day while Andy Tubbs and I were driving to the River Pump station to check the transformers during substation checks, we stopped along the roadside and I picked a stalk from a Cattail that was about ready to bloom.
A Power Plant Cattail
The plan was to put it in Charles’ top right hand desk drawer. The reason is that when handled just right, this brown furry “flower” (if you want to call it that) will literally explode into tens of thousands of tiny floating bits of fur. Sort of like a dandelion does when it turns white, only more furry and much more numerous. A thousand times more numerous.
When we arrived back in the shop, I walked into the office and told Charles that I had a present for him. Holding the stalk in my hand I opened his drawer. As Charles leaped out of his chair to stop me, I dropped the cattail into his drawer full of tools and odds and end parts, and it exploded into a huge ball of fur. Cattail fur went flying around the room.
Charles was genuinely upset. You see… It wasn’t bad enough that our clothes and hair and nose were being speckled with fur… Charles had allergies and this fur wasn’t helping. So Charles hurried into the shop and wheeled the Shop Vac over to the door and unraveled the hose and plugged it in to vacuum out his drawer.
A Shop-Vac like this
Charles was trying to vacuum up the mess in his drawer before the office became flooded with the fur. He turned the vacuum on and turned around to put the end of the hose in the drawer. As he turned, Andy quickly disconnected the hose from the intake and attached it to the outtake. Notice the two holes on the front of the Shop-Vac. The bottom one is to vacuum while the top hose connect actually blows out the air.
By the time Charles plunged the end of the hose into the drawer, it was blasting air from the hose which caused just the opposite effect that Charles was hoping for. The entire room became so full of flying fur that any attempt to clean it up became impossible. I couldn’t help it, I was over in the corner laughing at the situation that Charles found himself in….. Of course… I was standing in the middle of what looked like a heavy snowstorm.
After about 5 minutes some of the flying fur had settled on the floor and the entire floor in the office was covered with what seemed like about 2 inches of fur. — Ok. So, I felt guilty about this. I hadn’t thought about Charles’ allergies. For the next 2 months (at least), each morning Charles would remind me that I was still supposed to feel bad about it by opening his drawer when he first came in, and blowing down into the drawer causing fur to stir up and fly around the room. Yeah, it was remarkable that it lasted so long.
During a Major Overhaul, the electricians do alarm checks. During this time, you go down the list of every alarm in the plant and test it to make sure it is still working as designed. There are hundreds of alarms. You take blueprints with you to go to every conceivable alarm on the unit that is down for overhaul. Then while someone is sitting in the control room watching the alarm printout and the alarm monitors, the electrician will place a jumper across the apparatus that brings in the alarm and wait until the person in the control room acknowledges the alarm.
To do this job, you need to read the wire numbers on the print and match them with the wires on the terminal blocks. Then you call the Control room on the radio and ask them if alarm so and so came in. We found out quickly that we didn’t want Charles doing either of these two jobs. Charles had the habit of reading the numbers out of order. Instead of wire number 25496, he might read 24956.
I know that some of you recognize the signs that I have described about Charles. I know that Charles felt a great frustration with his problem spelling and transposing numbers. One night in 1992, I watched a movie on TV called “The Secret” with Kirk Douglas.
I wouldn’t normally have sat and watched a movie like this because it dragged on for a while and didn’t seem to have much of a plot. What kept me glued to the TV was that the man in the movie played by Kirk Douglas was just like Charles except that he couldn’t read at all. He was very smart and was trying to hide the fact that he just couldn’t read.
When his grandson began having the same problem, he realized he had to do something about it. That was when he found out that he had Dyslexia. There are different forms or degrees of Dyslexia, but I recognized right away that this was a story about Charles Foster. I knew that his son Tim who was in High School at the time was having the same difficulty with spelling.
The next morning when I arrived in the Electric Shop Office I had to tell Charles right away (I couldn’t wait until our normal lunch time movie review) that I knew why he had so much trouble spelling and why he always jumbled his numbers around. It was because he had Dyslexia. I explained the movie to him. As I was telling this to Charles I could see that he was beginning to understand…. everything fit.
I watched as Charles soaked in what I had just told him. A lifetime of feeling like he had failed at the most simple of tasks were drying up before his eyes. He had a condition that was not only common, but was also treatable in the sense that you could learn to improve using the correct techniques. Just knowing why was good enough for Charles. He had spent years coping and working around. Now he knew why. I will never forget that moment when I was sitting in the office smiling at Charles smiling back at me.
Charles Foster – A True Power Plant Hero!
I mentioned above tha:t Charles reminded me of Albert Einstein. It is an interesting coincidence (or is it?) that the movie “The Secret” earned the Einstein Award from the National Dyslexia Research Foundation in 1992. It seems that Einstein, Charles Foster and Dyslexia go together.
God Bless you Charles and your wonderful family!
Comment from Previous Post:
-
This was an awesome piece of writing! I liked that you described your ordinary man turned into a hero in your life. I like that using his last name Foster, you made him into your Foster father or friend. It is a great tribute to YOU, though, that this quiet solitary man took you under his wing. Thanks for all the ‘likes’ you push on my posts. I am belated at getting back. Have you ever seen in my comments, that I work at a warehouse so get only about an hour a day at the library and then, scurry on the weekend, visiting grandkids, reading blogs at the library and trying to be able to stay connected? Not an ‘excuse’ more of an “I’m Sorry to you!” Take care, robin
Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond — Repost
Originally posted April 26, 2013:
Less than 6 months after Arthur Hammond was hired as an electrician, OD McGaha (proununced Muh Gay Hay), his foreman, wanted to fire him. Not because he wasn’t a good electrician. Not because he had done something wrong. Not even because he smelled bad, or used bad language. OD (prounounced “Oh Dee”) wanted to fire him because he argued too much.
Art and I started the same day in the electric shop. I remember very well when I first walked in the door the morning that I became an electrician. I talked about that day in an earlier post New Home in the Power Plant Electric Shop. That was the first day I met Arthur Francis Hammond Jr. Oh yes. I remember his full name. Everyone just called him Art. I always called him Arthur.
I had the habit of calling people by their full name…. Sometimes I would even embellish their name some. For instance. I used to call Scott Hubbard “Scotland”. Not because he looked Scottish, but because Scott seemed too short of a name for such a great guy. It would be like calling Jesus “Geez”.
Anyway. Arthur had this one trait that became obvious for anyone that had spent more than 5 minutes with him. He liked to argue. He may have thought of it more of playing the devil’s advocate. So, often when you made a statement about anything, Arthur would say something like, “Nah. That couldn’t be true. Nope. What about this?….”
Well. OD McGaha (OD’s first name was OD. The O and the D didn’t stand for anything other than O and D… OD) didn’t like being told he was wrong by anyone, especially by one of his direct reports. He soon went to Bill Bennett to see about having Arthur fired. Of course, Arthur never really did anything to be fired over, he was just pushing OD’s buttons and OD was falling for it.
So, in less than 6 months after Arthur and I joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett decided it would be best if Arthur Hammond moved to our team to help keep the peace in the shop. I’m not sure, but I think Ben Davis was traded from Howard Chumbley’s crew while Diana Lucas (later Brien) moved from our team over to Howard’s, making the circle complete…. except that now Ben, who was as content as all get out to stay on Howard’s crew (who wouldn’t be?), was stuck on OD’s crew… which is another story in itself that I will not be writing about in a later post (well, I may mention an after effect in passing).
Once Arthur was on my team, we worked together often. One reason was that I was perfectly content arguing with Art Hammond (See… I can call him Art, especially in the same sentence as “arguing”, since Arthur made an art out of arguing). I wish I had a picture of this tall man with tired eyes, yet a happy disposition (once you overlooked the tendency to argue). I do have this picture though:
This is Sgt. Arthur Hammond who earned the Military Medal for his heroic work in the swamps of Flanders as a Newfoundland soldier during World War I. I thought that this Arthur Hammond was related to our Arthur Hammond since they look just like twins. A member of Sgt. Arthur Hammond’s family has assured me that they are not related.
Arthur and I were able to happily work together because he liked to argue and I liked to argue back. You see, I had grown up with an Italian mom. Few people like to argue like Italian mothers, especially mine.
I remember one Thanksgiving sitting with my brother on the couch in the house of my mom’s cousin Larry listening to our Italian relatives arguing in the dining room. We were keeping count on our fingers of how many people were talking at the same time. All of them sounded like they were arguing. Usually it took more than the fingers on one hand.
After a while, we realized that there were several conversations (well…. arguments really) going on at the same time. Yet, there was one person that was in the middle of all the arguments at the same time….. yep….. my mother. She would be taking part in at least three arguments simultaneously. My children grew up thinking that I hated my mother because we were always arguing. It wasn’t until they were older that they realized that we were just trying to decide where to go eat for dinner.
Anyway. When Arthur and I would be working together, all I had to do was say something… anything…. and the argument would start. At least that would be how it would appear to an unsuspecting person walking by listening to us. I knew that what it really meant was nothing more important than my mom and I trying to figure out where we should go out for dinner.
An argument with Arthur would go something like this. Here is one particular one I remember…. I was explaining that what someone had said wasn’t really what they meant. They were just saying that to get a reaction, because they really wanted to see how someone else would react (come to think of it… we were probably talking about Bill Rivers, See the post Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant from last week).
Arthur then proceeded to tell me that lying was never right…. ever. It was never all right to lie. If someone says something, it should be what they mean. I pointed out that people may tell a “white lie”. One that isn’t intended to deceive someone as much as it is to hide something for another purpose. Arthur said that he disagreed. That even a white lie is always wrong….
So, I asked him if he ever told his kids that Santa Claus brought them Christmas Presents on Christmas Day, or that the Tooth Fairy put a coin under their pillow at night. He had to admit that he did. He did have to ponder whether it was right or not. So I told him that I thought it was all right to tell his children this. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing something wrong.
I could see that this had really puzzled him, because this was a steadfast dogma of Arthur’s. One thing that really bugged him was when someone lied to him. I have another post that I will write in a few weeks that will give a definite situation where someone was lying to Arthur. It really bugged the heck out of him.
So, I explained to Arthur that even though he told his children that Santa Claus had given them presents, that in some way, maybe Santa Claus really did. Maybe Santa Claus represented the spirit of Christmas, and it was the Spirit of Christmas that prompted Arthur to go out and buy the presents for his children in order to surprise and delight them on Christmas morning. That seemed to satisfy him…..
So, we immediately found something else to argue about, and you know what? The days would fly by when I was working with Arthur. We would go out to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, using regular rubber tape (as this was before we started using the synthetic stuff), and four hours would go by like nothing. Three small arguments and we would be done.
A Boiler Water Circulating Pump Motor like ours, only ours was painted Silver
To get an idea of how big this pump is…. you can easily stand (and dance… um…. if you were inclined to… er…) on the junction box on the lower left corner of this motor.
I actually had a great time working with Arthur Hammond. I was heartbroken the day he told me in 1988 that he had decided to take the money being offered for anyone that wanted to leave before a downsizing was going to occur. He explained the reasons to me. I just wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him “No!” I wanted him to realize that he was making a mistake….. but I didn’t.
You see, Arthur had been a construction electrician before joining the electric shop. He had traveled from one job to another. He hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple of years. He was already working on 3 1/2 years in the shop…. He wasn’t used to that. He said that he just didn’t like settling down in one job. He had to keep moving.
I know what he really wanted to do. He wanted to go into business for himself. He wanted to start a cleaning business. He had made a business case for it and was trying to get the funding from a fund for American Indian Entrepreneurs. He just needed the down payment. This looked like the opportunity to do this. He wanted to buy a big steam cleaning truck.
A steam cleaning truck
So, I think Arthur’s last day was sometime early June, 1988. I always hate to see my friends walking out the door, not knowing if I will ever see them again. That was the way I felt when Arthur left.
The only shining event that came out of Arthur leaving was that it left an opening in the electric shop that was filled by Scott Hubbard from the Testing team. Scott and I would spend the rest of my years working together along with Charles Foster until the day I left the plant in 2001.
I did see Arthur three months later. He called me at work one day and asked me if I would help him out. His going away package that the company gave him to opt out had run out and he needed some cash. He had 50 shares of company stock left and was wondering if I would buy them from him. He knew that I bought and sold stock and thought I might be interested.
I was glad to help him out, so we arranged to meet at the house he was renting in Stillwater (I was living in Ponca City at the time), on a Saturday. He went to the Morrison, Oklahoma bank and had the bank president sign the stock certificates, and when I arrived, at his home, I handed him a check for $1600.00 and he gave me the stock certificate for 50 shares ($32 per share).
The price of the stock has gone up and down through the years…. I could have made a profit on them I suppose. I have kept them to this day. Every 3 months I receive a dividend check in the mail for $19 from those 50 shares….. I hang onto those shares. Maybe it is because ever three months, I am reminded of the day I bought those shares.
When I arrived at Arthur’s house out in the country, just down the road from where I eventually bought my own home up on the hill, Arthur handed me the certificates and said, “that’s it…. That’s the last of the package I received…. It sure didn’t last long.” I shook his hand, gave him a hug and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever heard from Arthur.
I think today he is living in Tulsa. I am not certain. He would be in his early 60’s now. I only hope that all is well with him and his family. I hope that he finally found a place to settle down. Some place where he could wake up each day….. go to work, or walk down the street and talk to a friend who enjoys a good argument. I know that if he could do that, then he would be content. Nothing was more enjoyable to Arthur than being able to take part in a good argument.
Personal Power Plant Hero — Charles Foster — Repost
Originally posted March 30, 2013:
When you think about it, you probably spend more time with your best friend than you ever did talking to your own father. That is, unless your father is your best friend. Charles Foster was my “Foster Father”. Though I was grateful for his effort to bring me into the Electric Shop at the Coal-Fired Plant, when I had little to no electrical experience, that wasn’t the reason why we became such good friends.
When I moved into the electric shop from the labor crew, Charles Foster was my B Foreman. He was my foreman for only the first year of the 18 years I spent as an electrician. He was my friend from the first day I met him until… well… until the end of eternity. I found that most of the electricians were more intelligent than others it seemed. The shop had people that were Heroes in their own right. Andy Tubbs, Craig Jones, Terry Blevins, Diana Lucas and Ben Davis were what I thought of as “Delta Force” Electricians. They were sent to tackle the toughest of jobs because everyone knew that they would pour all they had into their work until the job was done.
Sonny Kendrick and Bill Rivers were the electronics buffs. They would work on calibrating, programming and monitoring different plant systems. These are the people that you went to when a piece of electronic equipment was on the fritz, and they would analyze, test and repair it with their endless drawers of all types of electronic parts.
There were some other electricians, such as Art Hammond, Bill Ennis, Jim Stevenson and Mike Rose that had their own special knowledge that made each of them unique (to be sure). The other two foremen were Howard Chumbley and O.D. McGaha (prounounced: Oh Dee Muh Gay Hay).
Charles Foster didn’t fall in the same category as the others. He wasn’t the type of person to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, or run conduit up the side of the boiler. Though he would do these tasks when the A-Team wasn’t around to do it. He liked to work alone, or at least alongside one other person. I felt lucky that Charles enjoyed working with me.
When I first joined the electric shop Charles made two things clear to me; don’t call him Charlie and don’t make fun of his spelling. He was sensitive about those two things. I agreed, and I never did…. call him Charlie or make fun of his spelling. Charles knew he had a problem with spelling, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. So, I often checked over his work before he sent something. — This was before Personal Computers were available in the office with spell checkers.
During my first electrical year (1984), Charles and I would sit in the Electric Shop Office during lunch and talk about movies we had seen. We took turns relaying entire movies to each other. We would start out by saying, “Have you seen “Karate Kid”? Well you see, there was this boy who was moving to California with his mom from someplace in the east and….”
The Karate Kid
We quickly learned that we liked the same kind of movies and shows, and even more, we liked telling each other about them. It seems that we spent years during lunch talking about one movie (or TV show) after the other. I looked forward to just sitting with Charles and talking during lunch.
I noticed in the years that I worked at the Power Plant that, in general, Power Plant Men have the knack of thinking outside of the box. Charles Foster was very good at doing this, and we would have discussions about all sorts of subjects. From God and the Universe to time travel and gardening. The more we talked, the more I came to realize that this man was brilliant.
Not “Newton” brilliant, but “Einstein” brilliant…. If you know what I mean…. Newton had a great mathematical mind and used that ability to become the father of Physics. Einstein on the other hand used his ability to take an observation and mix it with his idea of reality to come up with something that seemed totally unrelated, but made sense nonetheless. This was Charles.
So, what great plans did Charles come up with? What plot to take over the world (as my current manager at Dell, Clay Worley accuses me of weekly)? He became a good father to his son and daughter and a good husband to his wife Margaret. All the things that are really important for the survival of mankind.
One day while Andy Tubbs and I were driving to the River Pump station to check the transformers during substation checks, we stopped along the roadside and I picked a stalk from a Cattail that was about ready to bloom.
A Power Plant Cattail
The plan was to put it in Charles’ top right hand desk drawer. The reason is that when handled just right, this brown furry “flower” (if you want to call it that) will literally explode into tens of thousands of tiny floating bits of fur. Sort of like a dandelion does when it turns white, only more furry and much more numerous. A thousand times more numerous.
When we arrived back in the shop, I walked into the office and told Charles that I had a present for him. Holding the stalk in my hand I opened his drawer. As Charles leaped out of his chair to stop me, I dropped the cattail into his drawer full of tools and odds and end parts, and it exploded into a huge ball of fur. Cattail fur went flying around the room.
Charles was genuinely upset. You see… It wasn’t bad enough that our clothes and hair and nose were being speckled with fur… Charles had allergies and this fur wasn’t helping. So Charles hurried into the shop and wheeled the Shop Vac over to the door and unraveled the hose and plugged it in to vacuum out his drawer.
A Shop-Vac like this
Charles was trying to vacuum up the mess in his drawer before the office became flooded with the fur. He turned the vacuum on and turned around to put the end of the hose in the drawer. As he turned, Andy quickly disconnected the hose from the intake and attached it to the outtake. Notice the two holes on the front of the Shop-Vac. The bottom one is to vacuum while the top hose connect actually blows out the air.
By the time Charles plunged the end of the hose into the drawer, it was blasting air from the hose which caused just the opposite effect that Charles was hoping for. The entire room became so full of flying fur that any attempt to clean it up became impossible. I couldn’t help it, I was over in the corner laughing at the situation that Charles found himself in….. Of course… I was standing in the middle of what looked like a heavy snowstorm.
After about 5 minutes some of the flying fur had settled on the floor and the entire floor in the office was covered with what seemed like about 2 inches of fur. — Ok. So, I felt guilty about this. I hadn’t thought about Charles’ allergies. For the next 2 months (at least), each morning Charles would remind me that I was still supposed to feel bad about it by opening his drawer when he first came in, and blowing down into the drawer causing fur to stir up and fly around the room. Yeah, it was remarkable that it lasted so long.
During a Major Overhaul, the electricians do alarm checks. During this time, you go down the list of every alarm in the plant and test it to make sure it is still working as designed. There are hundreds of alarms. You take blueprints with you to go to every conceivable alarm on the unit that is down for overhaul. Then while someone is sitting in the control room watching the alarm printout and the alarm monitors, the electrician will place a jumper across the apparatus that brings in the alarm and wait until the person in the control room acknowledges the alarm.
To do this job, you need to read the wire numbers on the print and match them with the wires on the terminal blocks. Then you call the Control room on the radio and ask them if alarm so and so came in. We found out quickly that we didn’t want Charles doing either of these two jobs. Charles had the habit of reading the numbers out of order. Instead of wire number 25496, he might read 24956.
I know that some of you recognize the signs that I have described about Charles. I know that Charles felt a great frustration with his problem spelling and transposing numbers. One night in 1992, I watched a movie on TV called “The Secret” with Kirk Douglas.
I wouldn’t normally have sat and watched a movie like this because it dragged on for a while and didn’t seem to have much of a plot. What kept me glued to the TV was that the man in the movie played by Kirk Douglas was just like Charles except that he couldn’t read at all. He was very smart and was trying to hide the fact that he just couldn’t read.
When his grandson began having the same problem, he realized he had to do something about it. That was when he found out that he had Dyslexia. There are different forms or degrees of Dyslexia, but I recognized right away that this was a story about Charles Foster. I knew that his son Tim who was in High School at the time was having the same difficulty with spelling.
The next morning when I arrived in the Electric Shop Office I had to tell Charles right away (I couldn’t wait until our normal lunch time movie review) that I knew why he had so much trouble spelling and why he always jumbled his numbers around. It was because he had Dyslexia. I explained the movie to him. As I was telling this to Charles I could see that he was beginning to understand…. everything fit.
I watched as Charles soaked in what I had just told him. A lifetime of feeling like he had failed at the most simple of tasks were drying up before his eyes. He had a condition that was not only common, but was also treatable in the sense that you could learn to improve using the correct techniques. Just knowing why was good enough for Charles. He had spent years coping and working around. Now he knew why. I will never forget that moment when I was sitting in the office smiling at Charles smiling back at me.
Charles Foster – A True Power Plant Hero!
I mentioned above that Charles reminded me of Albert Einstein. It is an interesting coincidence (or is it?) that the movie “The Secret” earned the Einstein Award from the National Dyslexia Research Foundation in 1992. It seems that Einstein, Charles Foster and Dyslexia go together.
God Bless you Charles and your wonderful family!
Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond
Less than 6 months after Arthur Hammond was hired as an electrician, OD McGaha (proununced Muh Gay Hay), his foreman, wanted to fire him. Not because he wasn’t a good electrician. Not because he had done something wrong. Not even because he smelled bad, or used bad language. OD (prounounced “Oh Dee”) wanted to fire him because he argued too much.
Art and I started the same day in the electric shop. I remember very well when I first walked in the door the morning that I became an electrician. I talked about that day in an earlier post New Home in the Power Plant Electric Shop. That was the first day I met Arthur Francis Hammond Jr. Oh yes. I remember his full name. Everyone just called him Art. I always called him Arthur.
I had the habit of calling people by their full name…. Sometimes I would even embellish their name some. For instance. I used to call Scott Hubbard “Scotland”. Not because he looked Scottish, but because Scott seemed too short of a name for such a great guy. It would be like calling Jesus “Geez”.
Anyway. Arthur had this one trait that became obvious for anyone that had spent more than 5 minutes with him. He liked to argue. He may have thought of it more of playing the devil’s advocate. So, often when you made a statement about anything, Arthur would say something like, “Nah. That couldn’t be true. Nope. What about this?….”
Well. OD McGaha (OD’s first name was OD. The O and the D didn’t stand for anything other than O and D… OD) didn’t like being told he was wrong by anyone, especially by one of his direct reports. He soon went to Bill Bennett to see about having Arthur fired. Of course, Arthur never really did anything to be fired over, he was just pushing OD’s buttons and OD was falling for it.
So, in less than 6 months after Arthur and I joined the electric shop, Bill Bennett decided it would be best if Arthur Hammond moved to our team to help keep the peace in the shop. I’m not sure, but I think Ben Davis was traded from Howard Chumbley’s crew while Diana Lucas (later Brien) moved from our team over to Howard’s, making the circle complete…. except that now Ben, who was as content as all get out to stay on Howard’s crew (who wouldn’t be?), was stuck on OD’s crew… which is another story in itself that I will not be writing about in a later post (well, I may mention an after effect in passing).
Once Arthur was on my team, we worked together often. One reason was that I was perfectly content arguing with Art Hammond (See… I can call him Art, especially in the same sentence as “arguing”, since Arthur made an art out of arguing). I wish I had a picture of this tall man with tired eyes, yet a happy disposition (once you overlooked the tendency to argue). I do have this picture though:
This is Sgt. Arthur Hammond who earned the Military Medal for his heroic work in the swamps of Flanders as a Newfoundland soldier during World War I. I thought that this Arthur Hammond was related to our Arthur Hammond since they look just like twins. A member of Sgt. Arthur Hammond’s family has assured me that they are not related.
Arthur and I were able to happily work together because he liked to argue and I liked to argue back. You see, I had grown up with an Italian mom. Few people like to argue like Italian mothers, especially mine.
I remember one Thanksgiving sitting with my brother on the couch in the house of my mom’s cousin Larry listening to our Italian relatives arguing in the dining room. We were keeping count on our fingers of how many people were talking at the same time. All of them sounded like they were arguing. Usually it took more than the fingers on one hand.
After a while, we realized that there were several conversations (well…. arguments really) going on at the same time. Yet, there was one person that was in the middle of all the arguments at the same time….. yep….. my mother. She would be taking part in at least three arguments simultaneously. My children grew up thinking that I hated my mother because we were always arguing. It wasn’t until they were older that they realized that we were just trying to decide where to go eat for dinner.
Anyway. When Arthur and I would be working together, all I had to do was say something… anything…. and the argument would start. At least that would be how it would appear to an unsuspecting person walking by listening to us. I knew that what it really meant was nothing more important than my mom and I trying to figure out where we should go out for dinner.
An argument with Arthur would go something like this. Here is one particular one I remember…. I was explaining that what someone had said wasn’t really what they meant. They were just saying that to get a reaction, because they really wanted to see how someone else would react (come to think of it… we were probably talking about Bill Rivers, See the post Resistance in a Coal-Fired Power Plant from last week).
Arthur then proceeded to tell me that lying was never right…. ever. It was never all right to lie. If someone says something, it should be what they mean. I pointed out that people may tell a “white lie”. One that isn’t intended to deceive someone as much as it is to hide something for another purpose. Arthur said that he disagreed. That even a white lie is always wrong….
So, I asked him if he ever told his kids that Santa Claus brought them Christmas Presents on Christmas Day, or that the Tooth Fairy put a coin under their pillow at night. He had to admit that he did. He did have to ponder whether it was right or not. So I told him that I thought it was all right to tell his children this. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing something wrong.
I could see that this had really puzzled him, because this was a steadfast dogma of Arthur’s. One thing that really bugged him was when someone lied to him. I have another post that I will write in a few weeks that will give a definite situation where someone was lying to Arthur. It really bugged the heck out of him.
So, I explained to Arthur that even though he told his children that Santa Claus had given them presents, that in some way, maybe Santa Claus really did. Maybe Santa Claus represented the spirit of Christmas, and it was the Spirit of Christmas that prompted Arthur to go out and buy the presents for his children in order to surprise and delight them on Christmas morning. That seemed to satisfy him…..
So, we immediately found something else to argue about, and you know what? The days would fly by when I was working with Arthur. We would go out to wire up a Boiler Water Circulating Pump, using regular rubber tape (as this was before we started using the synthetic stuff), and four hours would go by like nothing. Three small arguments and we would be done.
A Boiler Water Circulating Pump Motor like ours, only ours was painted Silver
To get an idea of how big this pump is…. you can easily stand (and dance… um…. if you were inclined to… er…) on the junction box on the lower left corner of this motor.
I actually had a great time working with Arthur Hammond. I was heartbroken the day he told me in 1988 that he had decided to take the money being offered for anyone that wanted to leave before a downsizing was going to occur. He explained the reasons to me. I just wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him “No!” I wanted him to realize that he was making a mistake….. but I didn’t.
You see, Arthur had been a construction electrician before joining the electric shop. He had traveled from one job to another. He hadn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple of years. He was already working on 3 1/2 years in the shop…. He wasn’t used to that. He said that he just didn’t like settling down in one job. He had to keep moving.
I know what he really wanted to do. He wanted to go into business for himself. He wanted to start a cleaning business. He had made a business case for it and was trying to get the funding from a fund for American Indian Entrepreneurs. He just needed the down payment. This looked like the opportunity to do this. He wanted to buy a big steam cleaning truck.
A steam cleaning truck
So, I think Arthur’s last day was sometime early June, 1988. I always hate to see my friends walking out the door, not knowing if I will ever see them again. That was the way I felt when Arthur left.
The only shining event that came out of Arthur leaving was that it left an opening in the electric shop that was filled by Scott Hubbard from the Testing team. Scott and I would spend the rest of my years working together along with Charles Foster until the day I left the plant in 2001.
I did see Arthur three months later. He called me at work one day and asked me if I would help him out. His going away package that the company gave him to opt out had run out and he needed some cash. He had 50 shares of company stock left and was wondering if I would buy them from him. He knew that I bought and sold stock and thought I might be interested.
I was glad to help him out, so we arranged to meet at the house he was renting in Stillwater (I was living in Ponca City at the time), on a Saturday. He went to the Morrison, Oklahoma bank and had the bank president sign the stock certificates, and when I arrived, at his home, I handed him a check for $1600.00 and he gave me the stock certificate for 50 shares ($32 per share).
The price of the stock has gone up and down through the years…. I could have made a profit on them I suppose. I have kept them to this day. Every 3 months I receive a dividend check in the mail for $19 from those 50 shares….. I hang onto those shares. Maybe it is because ever three months, I am reminded of the day I bought those shares.
When I arrived at Arthur’s house out in the country, just down the road from where I eventually bought my own home up on the hill, Arthur handed me the certificates and said, “that’s it…. That’s the last of the package I received…. It sure didn’t last long.” I shook his hand, gave him a hug and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever heard from Arthur.
I think today he is living in Tulsa. I am not certain. He would be in his early 60’s now. I only hope that all is well with him and his family. I hope that he finally found a place to settle down. Some place where he could wake up each day….. go to work, or walk down the street and talk to a friend who enjoys a good argument. I know that if he could do that, then he would be content. Nothing was more enjoyable to Arthur than being able to take part in a good argument.
Power Plant Men 
This was an awesome piece of writing! I liked that you described your ordinary man turned into a hero in your life. I like that using his last name Foster, you made him into your Foster father or friend. It is a great tribute to YOU, though, that this quiet solitary man took you under his wing. Thanks for all the ‘likes’ you push on my posts. I am belated at getting back. Have you ever seen in my comments, that I work at a warehouse so get only about an hour a day at the library and then, scurry on the weekend, visiting grandkids, reading blogs at the library and trying to be able to stay connected? Not an ‘excuse’ more of an “I’m Sorry to you!” Take care, robin