Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy
Favorites Post #63
Originally Posted on May 11, 2013:
If you crossed Walter Matthau with Howdy Doody you would come out with someone that would remind you of Bob Kennedy. All right. Bob Kennedy looked more like Walter Matthau than he did Howdy Doody, but I could tell that when Bob was younger, even though he didn’t have red hair and freckles, I could picture him as a little boy playing with his stick horse wearing a cowboy hat, and to me he would have looked a lot like Howdy Doody…
Walter Matthau
Howdy Doody
Cowboy Bob Kennedy on his stick horse
The day I first met Bob Kennedy I instantly fell in love with him. He was an electrician at the Power Plant in Midwest City and I was there on overhaul for three months during the fall of 1985. Bob was assigned to be our acting foreman while Arthur Hammond and I were there for a major overhaul on Unit 5. — Yeah. Five. They actually had 7, but all of them weren’t operational at the time.
Actually, I think it was Unit 4 that was a small generator that came from a submarine. — Half of the plant was like a museum. I used to park at the far end of the plant just so that I could walk through the museum each morning on my way to the electric shop. I think years later they may have torn that part of the plant down, which should have been illegal since to me it easily was a historical monument.
I called this post “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy” because Bob was tall and when he walked he sort of lunged forward and walked as if he was a giant walking through a forest that was only knee deep to himself. Bob had been an electrician for over 35 years. I know this because one of the phrases he would often say was, “I’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years!”
He had some other phrases, that I will probably mention in a few minutes. First I want to tell you about the relationship I had with Bob…. So, often in the morning after the morning steam horn would go off signalling that it was time to go to work (yeah… .isn’t that cool? A horn powered by steam would go off when it was time to go to work! My gosh… That horn alone was a monument of the 1930’s each morning when I heard it!),
Bob would come out of the office to where I was standing in the shop and say, “Kev. Follow me. I’ll show you what you’re goin’ ta be workin’ on today.” Then he would head for the door. I would follow along behind him. I could tell that he preferred that I walk behind him. When I would walk faster, he would spread his lanky legs even farther to keep me one step behind him… so I quickly assumed my place two paces behind Bob.
He would have these large strides when he walked that would cause his body to move in a left and right motion where his arms were swinging at his side. I loved everything about Bob. I loved the way he talked… I loved the way he walked… I wished that I could be a miniature Bob. So, I started to imitate him.
As Bob would walk across the Turbine-Generator floor toward Unit 5 from Unit 7 (where the electric shop was located), I would follow along two paces behind him trying my best to walk just like him. I would make very long strides to match Bob’s. I would swing my arms and lean left and right as I walked just like Bob. Bob was my hero and I wanted to let everyone know that I loved Bob and I wanted to be as much like Bob as I possibly could. So, as I walked I had a tremendous grin on my face. My expression was full of the satisfaction of knowing that I was literally following in Bob’s footsteps!
Operators and other maintenance workers that would see us instantly understood my intentions as they would grin, or laugh, or fall down in a total convulsion of uncontrollable laughter, sharing in my elation of being a miniature Bob.
I wish I could say that my time with Bob was one of total contentment and joy at being a miniature Bob that had “done it this way for 35 years”, but there were some setbacks. The first problem was that Arthur Hammond was with me on overhaul, and there was one major flaw in this combination….. Arthur liked to argue. See my post from two weeks ago called “Power Plant Arguments With Arthur Hammond“.
Before I go into the contention part, I want to first tell you about my second best Bob Kennedy Phrase. It is…. “I have a tool for that.”. You see. At this older gas plant where Bob Kennedy had spent the greater portion of his life, he had created a special tool for just about every difficult job at the plant to make it easier.
Often in the morning when Bob would show me the job that I was going to be performing for the day, he would qualify it by saying, “I have a special tool for this.” Then he would take me back to the shop, reach under one of the work benches and pull out a work of art that comprised of chains, levers, pulleys and specialized cables that would make a seemingly impossible job, possible. He had a tool for everything.
So, when Arthur and I realized that Bob had a tool for everything we came up with a song for Bob that went to the tune of Big John. And old song about a guy named Big John that worked in a mine that collapsed one day. If you are older than I am (52 — well, now 60), then you may have heard it before.
In case you haven’t, here is a YouTube version of Big John sung by Jimmy Dean:
Now that you have listened to the song about Big John, here is the song that Arthur and I devised about Bob Kennedy:
Big Bob…. Big Bob….
Every morning when he showed up at the plant, You could see him arrive.
He was 6 foot 6, and weighed more than than 145.
Wore a chip on his shoulder
And kinda wobbly at the hip.
Everyone knew he didn’t give a flip… That was Bob….
Big Bo ahh… ob… Big Bad Bob. Big Bob….
Bob didn’t say much ’cause he was quiet and shy,
He hummed and we hawed and we didn’t know why.
That was Bo ahh…. ob…. Big Bad Bob….
When he would say, “I’ve gotta job… for the two of you…
Follow me… and I’ll show you what to do…
” That was Bob…. Bahhh….ob… Big Bad Bob….
When somethin’ didn’t work, he would say real quick,
Just spit in the back and give it a kick,
That was Bob…. Baaahhh…ob…. Big Bad Bob.
When you’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years,
It doesn’t matter what problem you’ve got sittin’ right here’s….
‘Cause I’m Bob…. Baaaah….ob…. Big Bad Bob…..
You see, I have a tool to fix it up just right,
Let me show you how it’s done. I’ll show you the light….
That was Bob….. Baaaah…..ob… Big Bad Bob!
Arthur and I would sing or hum this song as we worked. It made the day go by so fast that we wondered if Bob himself wasn’t warping time using some tool he kept under a workbench in the electric shop.
Like I said…. I love Bob, and I have since the day I met him, and I always will. There came a day when there was contention in the ranks…. I saw it beginning when Arthur was arguing each day with Bob. I think it had to do with the fact that Bob liked to argue also… and neither of them liked to lose an argument. So, each morning, either Arthur or Bob would win the argument (which sounds a lot like a Dilbert moment today)….
My two friends whom I love dearly (to this day) quickly were at each other’s throats. I didn’t realize how much until the morning of December 18, 1985, just before I left the shop to go to work on something and Bob Kennedy said to me… “That Arthur Hammond…. He sure can dish it out, but he just can’t take it”. I walked straight from that conversation down to the the mezzanine level of unit 5 where Art was working on a motor. The first thing he said to me was, “Bob sure can dish it out but he just can’t take it.”
At that point I told Art to just wait a minute. There was something I had to do…. I went back to the shop and told Bob that there was something at the motor where we needed his help. As I was walking with Bob across the mezzanine and down to the motor, my heart was split in two. Here were two of my friends at odds with each other….. Two people whom I would spend the rest of my life praying for their happiness. Yet they viewed each other as mortal enemies…
I had to figure that both of them were right in their own way, yet both of them were wrong about each other. So when Bob arrived at the motor I told them both (as if I had suddenly turned into their mother)…. “A little while ago, Bob told me that ‘Art can sure dish it out, but he just can’t take it.’. Then I walked down here and Art tells me the exact same thing about Bob. Now…. what is going on here? Bob?”
Bob looked at the two of us like the time had finally come to let it all out…. he said, “Every time we have an argument about anything Art here runs to Ellis Rook complaining about me. If he has something to say, he should come straight to me. Not run to our supervisor!”
Art said, “Now wait a minute! It isn’t me that is running to Ellis Rook! Ellis just spoke with me this morning about sending me back to the plant because I don’t get along with you (meaning Bob). Each time we have an argument, you run to Ellis Rook. Ellis has been telling me that he is thinking of sending me home because you can’t get along with me!” Bob had a shocked look on his face.
Playing the facilitator role, I asked Bob… “Is this so?” Because I remembered that one day before (on December 17, 1985) when I had to leave for part of the day to get my blood test because I was going to be married (and in Oklahoma you still needed a blood test to be married)…. when I had returned, I met Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) in the elevator, he had asked me about Arthur Hammond.
As a side note, because of the new changes in overtime rules, if I left the plant in the middle of the day, I wasn’t supposed to stay long enough to collect overtime. Ellis Rook started to tell me that I shouldn’t have come back to work after getting my blood test, because I wasn’t eligible to work overtime after taking off part of the day. After apologizing to him (humbly and profusely), he said, that it would be all right just this once… I figured it was because I was going to be married that Saturday on December 21, 1985. Ellis said that he had heard some bad things about Arthur and he was considering sending him back to our plant.
This would have been a terrible disgrace for Arthur and would have been on his permanent record as someone that wouldn’t be able to go on overhaul anymore. I assured Ellis that Arthur Hammond was the most upright of employees and that there wasn’t any reason to send him home.
So, I asked Arthur…. was it true that he had been going to Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) to complain about Bob each time they had an argument… Arthur assured the both of us that not only wasn’t it him, but that it was Bob that had been complaining to Ellis Rook about him each time they had an argument. That was why he said Bob could dish it out, but he just couldn’t take it.
Bob replied, “It wasn’t me! It was Arthur! Every time we had an argument Ellis Rook would come to me and ask me about it. That is how I know that Art has been running to Ellis complaining about me. I would never tell Ellis about it! I would deal with it directly with Art.”
Art said, “Ellis Rook was asking me the same thing!”
So, I asked…. “How would Ellis know if neither of you went to him to complain? I wouldn’t have told him….” This led us to the third person that was present during every argument….
You see, there was another electrician from the plant across town that was there every time Ellis came to Bob asking about Arthur after an argument… Let’s call it Mustang Plant (since that was the name). In order not to embarrass him, I won’t tell you his name, but his initials are “Randy Oxley”. Randy Oxley desperately wanted to move from Mustang Plant to the plant in Midwest City… (all right… since I’m already naming names of plants, I might as well say “Horseshoe Plant”).
For a time during this overhaul I spent a great deal of time in the electric shop working on motors. Each day I would stand at a workbench disassembling motors, cleaning out their sleeve bearings (yeah. these old motors at the old plant had sleeve bearings) and measuring them, and re-assembling them. During that time there were two things that I listened to. The first thing was the radio…. At that time in history… the leading rock radio stations would play the top 20 songs only. That meant that after listening to the top 20 songs, the only thing left to listen to was the top 20 songs all over again…. To me… It was like a nightmare.
The songs I listened to 100 times were songs like
“Say you Say Me” by Lionel Riche,
One More Night by Phil Collins:
Every Time you Go away by Paul Young:
We Built This City by Jefferson Starship:
Something in the Air Tonight by Phil Collins:
I’m sorry to do this to you, but this last song I know I must have listened to about 50 times as the top 20 played over and over again about every two hours as it has been drilled into my head. I know. I can feel the pity from every one of you who have just read this post.
Today I have “Something In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins on my iPod only because when I listen to it once each week it reminds me of the time I spent in the electric shop at Horseshoe plant working on those motors working around Reggie Deloney, Steven Trammell (otherwise known as ‘Roomie’), Paul Lucy, and the others that were there during that overhaul.
The second thing that I listened to while I was working on the motors in the electric shop was Randy Oxley. Randy was much like Steven Higginbotham, the summer help that I had worked with the first summer I had worked at our plant. See…. “Steve Higginbotham’s Junky Jalopy Late for the Boiler Blowdown“. He liked to talk.
Randy didn’t consider me as an important asset, so he didn’t talk much to me. He did, however, talk to one of the Maintenance Supervisors, who happened to be his uncle. You see… Randy wanted desperately to move from Mustang Plant to Horseshoe Plant. There was an opening for the B Foreman at Horseshoe plant because a long time foreman was retiring, and he figured that one of the men in the electric shop would surely get the new foreman opening, which would leave an opening for an electrician.
So Randy would try to butter up his uncle (His uncle was called “Balkenbush”). He didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there carefully honing a sleeve bearing for an old GE motor. He openly expressed his opinion. It is only because of his blatant disregard for discretion that I don’t feel any guilt passing on the conversation.
The one phrase that sticks in my mind is that Randy, while trying to convince his uncle that they should hire him in the electric shop at Horseshoe lake, said, “I am the best electrician at Mustang Plant. The only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it!”
I’m not kidding…. “I am the best electrician at the plant… the problem is that I’m the only one that knows it….”
This became one of my favorite phrases of all time. I couldn’t wait to share it with Arthur…. I told him… “I am the best darn BS’er of all time… the only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it…” Art would say…. “I’m the best goof ball of all time… only I’m the only one that knows it…” I know I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.
Actually, I use this phrase to also remind me to never get such a big head that I really think that I’m better at something than others think I am… because they usually know better than I do.
So, this brings us back to the Art and Bob Cage Fight….
It became obvious that both of them had become snookered. Every time Art and Bob had argued about something and Randy Oxley was around, Randy would run up to Ellis’s office and tell him that Art and Bob were at each other’s throats.
Randy was trying to butter himself up to Ellis so that he would hire him when there was an opening in the electric shop (which one was supposed to be coming up on the horizon). Art and Bob each thought the other had run to Ellis complaining about the other….
That was when the other shoe dropped….
Many years before, when I was still a summer help, and when I was a janitor, there was an electrician at our plant named Mel Woodring. Mel had decided that he didn’t have a future at our plant so he applied for a job at Muskogee. Of course, Bill Bennett and Leroy Godfrey (or was it Jackie Smith at that time?) were glad to give him a glowing recommendation because they thought that when Mel left, it gave them an opportunity to hire someone that would…. let us say… fit their culture in a more effective manner.
Because I was a janitor at this time, I was not eligible to apply for an Electrical job, even though Charles Foster had become my mentor and had me begin taking electrical courses through the company.
I had worked the year before I was working with Bob Kennedy at the plant in Midwest City, Oklahoma at Muskogee plant around Mel Woodring. I never worked directly with him, so I will just say that he met the expectations that had been set by my bucket buddy back home, Diana Brien.
Fast forward a year later to when I am on overhaul at Horseshoe plant….. Steven Trammell, Bob Kennedy and a few other electricians that had spent many years at the plant, all thought they would be possible contenders for new foreman’s job. Any of them would have been excellent candidates.
To their stunned surprise… Mel Woodring from Muskogee was given the job! To me, this was an obvious case of the “promote someone in order to get him out of the shop” syndrome.
It turned out that the foremen at Muskogee (John Manning), including our illustrious Don Spears, that I had the momentary lap dance with the year before (see, “Lap O’ Luxury at the Muskogee Power Plant“), had decided to give Mel the highest rating possible so that he would get the job at Midwest City, thus relieving Muskogee from the burden that our plant had placed on them by suggesting that Muskogee transfer him from our plant. Maybe some day he will be promoted to VP.
Not only was the Horseshoe plant in a state of shock, but so was Randy Oxley. This meant that there wasn’t going to be an opening in the electric shop, and all of his “schmoozing” had been for naught.
The last day of the overhaul was December 20, 1985, the day before my wedding. I remember that Paul Lucy wanted me to go to a “gentleman’s club”(quite the oxymoron if you ask me) to celebrate and have a sort of a bachelor’s party…. I remember looking straight at Art Hammond right after Paul asked me, and Art shook his head and said…. “Don’t listen to him. Do what is right.” I assured Art that I had no intention of ruining the rest of my life the day before my wedding.
I went directly home.
The next day, Art Hammond was at my wedding with his wife. It was, and still is, the most blessed day of my life. Partly because Art was there at the reception dancing alongside me. I was lucky that I didn’t have a black eye… (which is another story — See the post A Slap in the Face at a Gas-fired Power Plant)… and lucky that Art and Sonny Kendrick (who sang at my wedding — See the post Singing Along with Sonny Kendrick) were there. Of all of my friends at the power plant, they were the ones that came to my wedding reception of all the people my mom had invited from the plant.
Years later, I traveled with Bob Kennedy on a bus from his plant to Oklahoma City to visit the new Transmission Control Room and back. We sat together and it was just like we had never been apart. Bob talked… and I wished in my mind that I could be a miniature Bob walking behind him every step of the way.
Today any time I have to take a big step for whatever reason…. Bob Kennedy immediately comes to mind. I think about when Bob climbed out of that bus… These words come to my mind….
Through the dust and the smoke of this man-made hell walked a giant of a man that ‘lectricians knew well…. Like a Giant Oak Tree, he just stood there all alone….Big Baaah…. ob…. Big Bad Bob…. Big Bob….. Everyone knew it was the end of line for Big Bob…. Big Bad Bob…. An Electrician from this Plant was a Big Big Man… He was Big Bob! Big Bad Bob! Big Bob!
Do Power Plant Men and Corporate Headquarters Mix?
Favorites Post #51
Originally posted May 22, 2015
August 6, 1996 in Corporate Headquarters America, jaws began dropping a few minutes before 8 a.m. At first the security guard just thought some Power Plant Giant had taken a wrong turn and showed up at Corporate Headquarters to ask for directions. When another one showed up, this time carrying his Playmate lunch box, hard hat on his head, and lip quivering looking for a handy spittoon, the men in their suits and women in their fine dresses began running for cover. That was the day eight Power Plant Men took over the floor in the building where the Corporate Engineers usually lived.
If you want to understand the shock that emanated throughout the building, just picture the following bunch showing up on your doorstep:
Guardians of the Galaxy acting like Power Plant Men!
We had come from the four corners of the Oklahoma Electric Company Power Plant Kingdom and we were there in Oklahoma City because Corporate America needed our help! Two Power Plant Men from each of the main Power Plants were picked to help the company transition from the old Mainframe computer system to a new computer application called SAP. SAP was going to combine all of our computer needs into one big application that runs on the new computer network.
SAP Logo
Ernst and Young was the consulting company that was helping us install and implement SAP at our company. The company began the implementation some time in March, and the big bang go live date was going to be January 1, 1997. According to Ernst and Young, this was a physical impossibility. There was no way we could convert all of our requirements into SAP realities in such a short time.
The Maintenance Module for SAP hadn’t even been fully developed. We were actually working with SAP to design the module. Our company had demonstrated how a Best In Class Maintenance process worked, and SAP was designing their module around our needs. Everyone insisted that our aggressive timeline was too unreasonable and would never be met.
The Electric Company in Central Oklahoma had one Ace up their sleeve (well, maybe more than one)… That was “Power Plant Men!” As I mentioned in last week’s post (See the post “Destruction of a Power Plant God“), I was told on Monday, August 5, to show up for work the following day in Oklahoma City to work for 10 weeks on an SAP project.
Mike Gibbs, a mechanic from our plant was going with me. Our task was to convert all the Power Plant parts in the Inventory system in searchable strings that had a limited number of characters. Mike Gibbs used to work in the warehouse, so he was a good candidate for knowing what odd parts actually were.
Mike Gibbs
We were a cross-section of mechanics and electricians, and warehouse people. To give you an idea of how big our job was, we had over 100,000 different parts in the system. 75,000 of those parts were in the warehouse at the power plant where I worked. There were over 5,000 different types of Nuts and Bolts… just to give you an idea of the task ahead of us.
Ernst and Young said the task would take the eight regular employees four months to complete the task. The Electric Company said, “Power Plant Men can do it in 10 weeks.
We were able to use the office space used by all of the engineers because they all happened to be at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma where I normally worked because of the big explosion that destroyed part of the Turbine Generator room early Monday morning. While they packed up to begin the work of reconstruction, Mike and I packed up and headed to Oklahoma City.
Most of the “out-of-town” Power Plant Men stayed in hotels for the next 2 1/2 months, but Mike Gibbs and I decided that we couldn’t be away from our families that long, so we decided that we would drive back and forth to work each day from Stillwater, Oklahoma. This was about an hour drive with going to work traffic. We would meet in the parking lot of a Mexican Restaurant at the edge of town and take turns each day driving to Oklahoma City.
Normally, in an instance like this, we would get paid a mileage that was farther than if we drove to the plant and maybe even driving time to and from work each day, but when our Plant Manager Bill Green found out we were driving back and forth, he refused to pay us anything. He told us that it was far enough away that he would only pay for us to stay in a Hotel (which would have cost more than the mileage), he wouldn’t pay us mileage or even a per diem (which is a daily amount for expenses).
Bill Green knew that we were family men that wouldn’t want to be away from our families during the week if it was only an hour drive, so he played his card and said that we had to stay in a hotel, and he would pay the expense for that or he would pay nothing and we could drive back and forth all we wanted at our own expense, already knowing that we would rather wear our cars out and pay the extra gas each day to be with our families. I just thought this was pay back for me being so rotten all the time.
The first week I was there, I worked on converting the 5,000 different nuts, bolts and screws into cryptic search strings that all began with the three letter search word for bolt: BLT. If you wanted to search for a Bolt in the SAP inventory, you would know it begins with a the letters BLT. This only made me hungry all week, because to me, a BLT was a sandwich. A mighty good one too, I may add.
Power Plant Man sized Bacon Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich
After the first week, it was decided that having Power Plant Men roaming around between offices asking each other questions about parts was a hazard waiting to happen, so the engineer that was running our project Mark Romano had a special holding pen… um… I mean, cubicle built just for us. It was decided that we should all be together in what is called a “Bullpen Cube”. All nine of us. Bullpen was a good name considering that there was a lot of bull going around for all of us.
There were nine, because a young Corporate executive had been assigned to help us with all things “Corporate”. His name is Kent Norris. He was lucky enough to stay behind to work with us, instead of having to go spend the next 2 1/2 months at our plant up north helping to repair the fire damage.
Well. I say lucky. Lucky for us, maybe not for him. After all, he was someone from “corporate” stuck in a cubicle with 8 rascally Power Plant Men that kept themselves motivated by playing practical jokes on whoever was willing to fall for them. Not ever having experienced the likes of us before, Kent was in for 2 1/2 months of relentless practical jokes being played at his expense.
I must say that we had a terrific time teasing poor Kent, but he was such fun and took our jokes so well, that we could only admire his resilience to bounce back and smile after we ran him ragged with one joke after the next. I will go into more detail about the jokes we played on Kent in a later post. For now, I am just mentioning our situation, so that you can get a picture of our situation.
Kent helped us with our expense reports each week, and showed us all the good places to eat lunch. He helped us adapt to corporate life. He even showed us how to use our temporary badges to badge in and out of the doors when we entered and left the building.
Mike Gibbs discovered a better way. He just put his badge in his wallet, and since he was tall enough, when he walked up to the badge reader, he just pressed the back pocket of his blue jeans against the badge reader, and voila! The door would open like magic! Onlookers were always staring at this strange assortment of men in blue jeans and tee shirts walking through the office building during lunch.
I tried to remember all the people that were there in the cube with us… I remember that I was there, and so was Mike Gibb from the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
Our Coal Fired Power Plant
Ken Scott, who was the Maintenance Superintendent at the Gas-fired Power Plant by Konawa, and David Roe who worked in the warehouse at that plant.
Seminole Power Plant at night outside of Konawa Oklahoma. This picture was found at: http://www.redbubble.com/people/harrietrn/works/1425122-seminole-power-plant
Doyle Fullen, an Electric Foreman from the coal fired plant in Muskogee, and Robert Christy, a mechanic also from that plant.
Power Plant in Muskogee Oklahoma
I believe Dan Hayer, the warehouse man, was there from the gas-fired plant in Harrah, Oklahoma on a small lake called Horseshoe Lake. I don’t remember who else was there from that plant. I remember seeing someone there, but I think he was a more of a quiet type and for some reason, his name has escaped me.
Horseshoe Lake Plant as it looked back then
I was a sort of a computer programmer at this time, so I created small programs that would make our jobs easier. I created icons on the computers so that people didn’t have to log into the apps, and I created a couple of other small programs that just automated the monotonous manual steps that we would have to do over and over again as we plowed through the 100,000 different part descriptions.
After the first week, we had converted over 15,000 parts, and were on our way to meeting our goal.
So, how did we do? The Power Plant Men were able to convert all 100,000 parts in the inventory system to SAP in eight weeks! Two weeks ahead of schedule. This was typical for Power Plant Men, especially when you tell them it is impossible. This was another example of doing things that others said couldn’t be done.
I felt like a few people on our team were not too happy with me for creating things that made their job faster because they wanted to stay the full 10 weeks. Here we were in an air conditioned building working on computers all day instead of out in the heat and dirt.
We were all scheduled to go back to our home plants two weeks early when Mark Romano, our project manager came to our cube to give us the news… We had performed our job so well, they wanted to expand our scope. It seems that another department… I won’t mention which one, but their initials are T&D had been working on their measly 60,000 parts for the past 4 months and had only completed about 10,000 of them. They wanted to know if the Power Plant Men would be willing to give them a hand to convert the 50,000 parts in their inventory system the same way we did for Power Supply. Otherwise the go-live of January 1, would not be met since we were coming up to the end of September already.
Our Plant Managers had agreed that we could spend the next four weeks converting T&D’s parts as well, so of course, we agreed to stay on. I’m not sure if Corporate Headquarters was ever the same after that. Because we were able to stay on for the next four weeks, we were invited to an SAP banquet that we would have otherwise missed. We stood out like a sore thumb. I will write more about that banquet in a separate post as well as go into detail with some of the jokes that we played on Kent Norris.
Spending the 12 weeks in Corporate Headquarters was an important turning point in my career as a Power Plant Electrician. When we were in the bullpen cube, I was sitting in a chair where I could turn my head to the right and look out a window over the parking lot for the building. During the day I would watch people walking to-and-fro going about their business.
I had worked most of my adult life up to that point at a plant out in the country where when you climbed to the top of the 500 foot smoke stack and looked around, you could see fields and trees for 20 miles in any direction. Looking out that window at people made a big impression on me. Here I was sitting in an air conditioned office. No Coal Dust. No Fly Ash. No ear plugs to deafen the sound of steam shooting through the pipes turning the turbines. No 100 degrees in the summer. No freezing my fingers off in the winter. Just Power Plant Men quietly tapping on their computer keyboards, while they played jokes on Corporate Executive Kent. — This was the life.
I thought… things don’t get better than this. I was in computer heaven. Even though it was unconscious at the time, something stirred in me that thought… maybe… just maybe, I’m ready for a change…. I’ll wait and see what God wants me to do…
Comments from previous posts
My hat’s off to you! You handled Bill’s refusal to pay for your travel expense much better than I would have.
Trust me. I experienced the four stages of grief before I accepted the reality of my situation. 🙂
Mike Gibbs looks like the kind of guy anyone would like to work with. The BLT looks wonderful even down to the last ounce of fatty substances know by medical science to clog arteries and all those smaller items adjoining them. BUT the main fact is that you chose GOD to help make your decision, Kudos and all to you for that!
A Slap in the Face at a Gas-fired Power Plant
Favorites Post # 6 (posted in no particular order)
Originally posted June 21, 2013:
Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Thanks to my high school math teacher Robert Burns, I have always admired Archimedes. I remember the day he was talking about him in class, and he was explaining how Archimedes had sat down in the bathtub and when the water overflowed he suddenly realized how to calculate the volume of the king’s crown, he jumped out of the tub and ran down the street in his birthday suit yelling “Eureka! Eureka!” Meaning… I have found it! I have found it! I especially remember Mr. Burn’s eyes tearing up as he told this story. To Mr. Burns, mathematics was an adventure. He instilled this love into me.
So, how does a discussion about Archimedes tie into a story about a Gas-fired Power Plant in central Oklahoma? Well it does, or it did, on December 19, 1985.
The day began with my drive from Oklahoma City, where I was staying, to Harrah, Oklahoma where I was on overhaul at a power plant called Horseshoe Lake Plant. The lake must have been named Horseshoe Lake for the obvious reason that it was shaped like a Horseshoe as it wrapped around the north part of the plant.
I suppose this lake was originally used to cool the condenser water once the steam had been used to turn the turbine, but it was much too small to be used by the units that were in operation when I was at the plant. Instead it was a Fish farm where Tilapia were raised.
A Power Plant Tilapia
I wrote about working at this plant on this overhaul in an earlier post called “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. This morning when I arrived, I figured I would be working in the shop repairing more of the older open-faced motors with their sleeve bearing and cambric insulation. It started out that way.
An example of an old GE open-faced motor
One time during the morning, Ellis Rook, the electrical Supervisor came up to me and started talking to me about the ROLM phone computer. He knew I had experience working on the Phone system. I had been trained by the best even before I had gone to Muskogee to take a class. Bill Rivers at our plant had taught me how to make “moves and changes” and how to troubleshoot the entire plant’s phone system without ever leaving the lab.
A ROLM Phone Computer
Anyway. Ellis Rook told me about the problem they were having with the phone system that day. He told me what had been done to try to fix the problem. I was thinking of a few things I would try (even though I was still more of a Rookie than Ellis Rook — ok. I couldn’t resist that one). I had been an electrician in training for just over 2 years, which still made me a rookie.
I originally thought Ellis had approached me for ideas on how to fix the problem, so I was formulating some answers in my mind while he was going on… then he said, “What I do every time to fix any problem is just reboot the computer.” — ok. He wasn’t seeking advice. He was seeking approval. So, I looked at him with as blank of a stare I could and just nodded and replied, “Well, that usually does it.” — Nevermind that it took about 25 minutes for one of these old ROLM computers to reboot and during that time all communication with the outside world was cut-off.
This was when I remembered a story that Bob Kennedy had told me about Ellis Rook.
One day, he took another electrician with him to inspect the exciter collector rings on one of the units. The exciter is connected to one end of the generator usually (though if I’m not mistaken, the exciter house was off to one side), and it spins at 3600 rpm. It is not coincidental that this is 60 cycles per second, which is how fast the electricity alternates between positive and negative in your house. This is exactly why the electricity alternates that fast. Because that is how fast the turbine-generator is spinning.
Anyway, Ellis had taken a strobe light with him to go inspect the collector rings on the exciter because there was some indication that a fuse had blown on one of the collectors. Using the strobe light, you could set it to blink at 3600 times per minute and the collector rings spinning at 3600 rpm would appear to stand still.
A typical strobe light
By slowly adjusting the rate that the strobe light was flashing, you could rotate the shaft slowly and inspect it just as if it was standing still, even though in reality it was still spinning at 3600 rpms (the same speed as the lawn mower in the post: “Something is in the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“).
After examining the shaft for a bit, they located the blown fuse. When the fuse blew, a little indicator would stick out so it could easily be seen. Ellis Rook slowly rotated the shaft around until the fuse was in a good position and then stopped the shaft from rotating by setting the strobe light to the exact same rate that the shaft was rotating.
Then Ellis said something that would go down in the Annals of History at Horseshoe Lake. He told the electrician to change out the fuse. — Ok. Stop and think about this for a minute. The room where the collector rings are is normally dark, so all they can see is this turbine shaft in front of them and it looked like it was standing still. Forget the roar of the spinning turbine and just chalk it up to a loud fan running.
Luckily the electrician wasn’t lulled into a false sense of security and didn’t put his hand forward to remove the fuse. That would have easily have been the last thing he would have ever done (as a live human being). — There has to be a good murder mystery plot involving a strobe light. Maybe dealing with a running fan that looks like it is standing still because someone sets up a strobe light. I’m sure one of the great writers at WordPress can come up with one. I can think of a couple myself – like the ones I have just mentioned.
Anyway, when Ellis Rook told me how he fixed the telephone computer problems by rebooting the computer, this story flashed through my mind for about 3 seconds. I think I put my hands in my back pocket just for safe keeping.
Anyway. I ate lunch in the electric shop office with my ol’ “Roomie” Steven Trammell, (We have called each other roomie from the time we were in Muskogee on overhaul in 1984. See the post about Muskogee in the link above. To this day, we call each other roomie, as we have kept in touch throughout the years). While I was sitting there arguing with Art Hammond about something (See the post: “Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond“) I was reading an instruction manual about some electronic sensor that could tell you the percentage open a series of valves all in one little box.
Reggie Deloney (who immediately reminds you of Richard Pryor) had been working with the engineer on this valve detecting device for the past 4 weeks, and couldn’t get it to work. The engineer asked me if I would look at it to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it, because it wasn’t working at all…. It would work every now and then, but then it would stop.
When I read the manual I noticed that there was a “common” in the circuitry and that Reggie and the engineer had assumed that the common was the same as the “ground”. This usually isn’t true in electronic circuits as it is in regular electrical wiring. So, I stood up from where I was lounging back reading the pamphlet and lifted the common wire up so that it wasn’t touching the metal cart, and suddenly the valve indicator worked.
When Reggie returned from lunch, I excitedly told him what I had found. He looked a little astonished, so I showed him. He had only spent the last 4 weeks working on this. So, I went into the shop and worked on another motor.
Later I walked into the office figuring that Reggie had told the good news to the engineer. He was sitting there with the engineer scratching their heads still trying to figure out why the instrument still wasn’t working. So, I picked up the wire so it wasn’t touching the cart, and said. “See? Works.” Reggie with a very irritated voice said, “Yes! You figured it out!” He looked at me with a look that said, “Get out of here!” So, I left.
Richard Pryor trying to look like Reggie Deloney telling me to leave
Art, who was listening said, “I don’t think Reggie is ready to figure it out yet.” Then I got it. Oh. I see… It is nice and cool and clean in the office. The engineer wasn’t going to figure it out on his own…. Just a week or so left of overhaul….
About that time, Bob Kennedy, my acting Foreman told me to go with Bill Thomas and help him out. Bill was from our plant and was a welder. He was working out of our shop to help us out with any mechanical needs we had from welding to uncoupling pumps and fans and realigning motors and any other stuff. Now… I know that Bill Thomas had a nickname. But I usually called people by their real names, so I only remember him as Bill Thomas. Maybe a Power Plant Man reading this post will remind me of Bill’s nickname.
This is where Archimedes comes into the story.
So, Bill Thomas had been working on a cooling water fan structure all morning single-handed lifting it up. It weighed somewhere between 50 to 75 tons. um… yes…. I think that is about it… about 100,000 pounds. yet, Bill using nothing but the muscles in his arms and back had been lifting this monstrosity off of the ground. Like Archimedes who lifted an entire ship out of the water once using a lever.
Bill was lifting the big top round part of the cooling tower off of the ground so that he could work under it.
You see. With True Power Plant Men, you really don’t ever hear that something “can’t” be done. Bill had to work under this large round hunk of metal, so he had to pick it up. After spending two hours lifting it with only his two arms spinning a huge chain-fall, he had managed to lift the structure 2 inches from the ground. — well. No one said anything about tossing it in the air… just lifting it off the ground. He still had about 22 inches more to go.
This is a 3 ton chain-fall. The one we were using was more than 20 times bigger
This was where I came in. Did I tell you this plant was old? Well it was. They didn’t have a lot of electricity in this building we were in (which is interesting since the only product we produced was electricity), and there wasn’t an electric hoist, so Bill had to pull a chain that went around a pulley that turned a shaft to a gearbox that would slowly (real slowly) lift something huge. So, the Power Plant Men from this plant had created a “tool” to make this job faster.
Bill had pulled an air compressor over to the building and had hooked the air hose up to the special tool.
This is the exact size and type of air compressor
This was going to make his job much faster. There was only one catch. He needed an extra weight. I was the extra weight that he needed.
You see. The special tool was an air powered grinder.
An air powered grinder. Only the one we used was much bigger
The grinder was mounted to a piece of plywood. the grinding wheel had been replaced with a pulley. The idea was to stand on the plywood and step on the lever that operated the grinder so that it would spin the pulley. The chain for the chain-fall would fit through the pulley assembly.
Bill had asked the person that gave him this special tool what happens when the chain snags. They said, that’s when you need the extra weight. They explained to Bill that when two people are standing on the plywood, they will be able to overpower the grinder so that it can’t pull itself out from under them. If there isn’t enough weight on the plywood, then if the chain snags, the special tool will slide across the floor and attempt to climb up to the top of the chain-fall until someone lets off of the lever that operates the grinder.
So. I was the extra weight. Not that I was all that big at the time.
Anyway. The next thing I knew, I was standing on the plywood, and Bill was operating the large grinder with his foot and we were lifting the large cylinder off of the ground. Before long we had it at least a foot off the ground. Bill had put some stops under the cylinder in case we had to set it down for some reason, it wouldn’t have to go all the way to the ground.
That’s when it hit me…. No. I didn’t suddenly remember that I hadn’t had any chocolate for lunch (though, that would have been a tragedy). No. That is when as I was watching the chain spin through the pulley at breakneck speed, the chain suddenly went taut. As the chain became snagged in the chain-fall, the chain whipped up, and before I could perceive what had happened I found myself lifted off of the ground and being thrown backward.
The chain had flown back and slapped me across the face, sending my hardhat flying and shattering my safety glasses. I ended up on my back about 5 feet from where I had been standing. Bill rushed to my side to check if I was all right. I checked myself out and decided that I was going to be all right.
I told him I needed to go get another pair of safety glasses from the tool room. he looked at my eyes and said. “Boy. That is really going to be a shiner tomorrow.” Evidently, I was developing a black eye. I was thinking… “Great! And I’m getting married in two days! I can just see my wedding pictures.” (I can see myself trying to explain to my children in the future that – “No. Your mother didn’t sock me in the eye during the wedding”).
I went to the tool room and checked out a new pair of safety glasses:
The one on the bottom is the kind of safety glasses we had at the time
When I returned to the electric shop, Bill Thomas and Arthur were there. Everyone was saying the same thing. “Boy! That is sure going to be a shiner tomorrow.”
A little while later, Ellis Rook came in the shop and said that Larry Hatley (the plant manager) wanted to talk to me. So, I followed Ellis to the Plant Manager’s office. Larry asked me if I was all right. He wanted to know if I needed medical attention. I assured him that I was all right. My safety glasses had protected me. They had been destroyed in the process, but I was just fine. I think as I left I heard Larry say under his breath, “boy… that is going to be a shiner tomorrow.”
Well. The next day (December 20, 1985) when I showed up at work (my last day there for overhaul before leaving to be married the following day), everyone came around to look at my eye. There wasn’t anything to see really. Any swelling had gone down over the night, and my face was back to it’s regular… um…. tolerable self.
The people I worked with the fall of 1985 at Horseshoe Power Plant treated me like family while I was there. That was the way it was when you worked with True Power Plant Men. I cherish their memory.
Comment from original post:
Something Is In The Water at the Muskogee Power Plant
Originally posted: April 15, 2013:
“Something is in the water in Muskogee.” That is what I used to say. Something that makes people feel invulnerable. That was what I attributed to David Stewart’s belief that he could jump up in a falling elevator just before it crashed into the ground and he would be saved (see After Effects of Power Plant Drop Tests).
There was another story at the Muskogee Coal-fired Power Plant where this one mechanic believed that he could stick his finger in a running lawnmower and pull it out so fast that it wouldn’t cut his finger off. Of course, True Power Plant Men tried to reason with him to convince him that it was impossible…. Then there were others who said… “Ok. Prove it.”
Think about it. A lawnmower spins at the same rate that a Turbine Generator spins when it makes electricity. 3,600 time a minute. Or 60 times each second. Since the blade in a lawnmower extends in both directions, a blade would fly by your finger 120 times each second. Twice as fast as the electric current in your house cycles positive and negative.
Typical Power Plant Lawnmower
This means that the person will have to stick their finger in the path of the lawnmower blade and pull it out within 8/1000th of a second…. IF they were able to time it so that they put their finger in the path at the precise moment that the blade passed by. Meaning that on average, the person only has 4/1000th of a second (or 0.004 seconds) to perform this feat (on average… could be a little more, could be less).
Unfortunately for this person, he was not convinced by the logicians that it was impossible, and therefore proceeded to prove his case. If you walked over and met this person in the maintenance shop at Muskogee, you would find that he was missing not only one finger, but two. Why? Because after failing the first time and having his finger chopped off, he was still so stubborn to think that he could have been wrong, so later he tried it again. Hence the reason why two of his fingers were missing.
Upon hearing this story, I came to the conclusion that there must be something in the water at Muskogee. I drank soft drinks as much as possible while I was there on overhaul during the fall of 1984.
As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Rags to Riches, in 1984 I was on overhaul at Muskogee with Ben Davis. An overhaul is when a unit is taken offline for a number of weeks so that maintenance can be performed on equipment that is only possible when the unit is offline. During this particular overhaul, Unit 6 at Muskogee was offline.
Ben and I were working out of the Unit 6 Electric shop. Ben was staying with his friend Don Burnett, a machinist that used to work at our plant when I was a summer help. Before Don worked for the electric company, he worked in a Zinc Smelting plant by Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Not only was Don an expert machinist, he was also one of the kindest people you would run across. Especially at Muskogee.
I was staying in a “trailer down by the river” by the old plant. Units one, two and three. They were older gas-fired units. I think at the time, only Unit 3 was still operational. The first 2 weeks of the overhaul, I stayed in a rectory with the Catholic priests in town. Then David Stewart offered to let me stay in his trailer down by the river for only $50 a week.
After the first couple of weeks it was decided that the 4 week overhaul had turned into a 9 week overhaul because of some complications that they found when inspecting something on the turbine. So, I ended up staying another month.
When they found out that they were going to be down for an extra 5 weeks, they called in for reinforcements, and that is when I met my new “roomie”, Steven Trammell from the plant in Midwest City. He shared the trailer for the last 4 weeks of the overhaul. From that time on, Steven and I were good friends. To this day (and I know Steven reads this blog) we refer to each other as “roomie”, even though it has been 29 years (now 35 years) since we bunked together in a trailer…..down by the river.
I have one main story that I would like to tell with this post that I am saving until the end. It was what happened to me the day I think I accidentally drank some of the water…. (sounds like Mexico doesn’t it?). Before I tell that story, I want to introduce you to a couple of other True Power Plant Men that lived next door to “roomie” and me in another trailer down by the river (this was the Arkansas River by the way…. Yeah… The Arkansas river that flowed from Kansas into Oklahoma… — go figure. The same river that we used at our plant to fill our lake. See the post Power Plant Men taking the Temperature Down By The River).
Joe Flannery was from Seminole Plant and I believe that Chet Turner was from Horseshoe Plant, though I could be mistaken about Chet. I know he was living in south Oklahoma City at the time, so he could have been working at Seminole as well. These were two electricians that were very great guys. Joe Flannery had a nickname. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was “Bam Bam”.
Yeah. This Bam Bam. From the Flintstones
Joe was very strong, like Bam Bam. He also reminded me of Goober on the Andy Griffith Show, though Gary Lyons at our plant even resembled Goober more:
Goober from the Andy Griffith Show (played by George Lindsey)
Chet was older than Joe by quite a lot, but I could tell that my Roomie and Joe held him in high esteem… So much so, that I might just wait on the story I was going to tell you about the time that I drank the water in Muskogee to focus more on Chet Turner… otherwise known as Chester A Turner.
I first met Chet when my roomie asked me if I wanted to go out and eat with him and our two trailer neighbors. On the way to dinner, we had to stop by a used car lot to look at what was available because Chet loved looking at cars. He had gray hair and was 60 years old at the time.
During the next 5 weeks, we went out to eat almost every night during the week with Chet and Joe. We explored Muskogee as best we could. That means that we visited about every car lot in the town. We also ate at a really good BBQ place where you sat at a picnic table and ate the BBQ on a piece of wax paper.
One night we were invited by another electrician (I think his name was Kevin Davis) to meet him at a Wal-Mart (or some other similar store) parking lot where his son was trying to win a car by being the last person to keep his hand on the car. He had already been doing it for about 4 days, and was exhausted. It would have reminded me of the times I had spent adjusting the precipitator controls after a fouled start-up, only, only I hadn’t done that yet.
I was usually hungry when we were on our way to dinner, and I was slightly annoyed by the many visits to car lots when my stomach was set on “growl” mode. I never said anything about it, because I could tell that Chet was having a lot of fun looking at cars.
If only I had known Chet’s story when I met him, I would have treated him with the respect that he deserved. If I had known his history, I would have paid for his meals. It was only much later that I learned the true nature of Chet, a humble small gray-haired man that seemed happy all the time, and just went with the flow.
You know… It is sometimes amazing to me that I can work next to someone for a long time only to find out that they are one of the nation’s greatest heroes. I never actually worked with Chet, but I did sit next to him while we ate our supper only to return to the trailers down by the river exhausted from the long work days.
Let me start by saying that Chet’s father was a carpenter. Like another friend of mine, and Jesus Christ himself, Chester had a father that made furniture by hand. During World War II, Chester’s mother helped assemble aircraft for the United States Air Force.
While Chet’s mother was working building planes for the Air Force, Chet had joined the Navy and learned to be an electrician. He went to work on a ship in the Pacific called the USS Salt Lake City. It was in need of repairs, so he was assigned to work on the repairs.
While working on the ship, it was called to service, and Chet went to war. After a couple of battles where the ship was damaged from Japanese shelling it went to Hawaii to be repaired. After that, it was sent to the battle at Iwo Jima. That’s right. The Iwo Jima that we all know about. Chet was actually there to see the flag being raised by the Marines on Mount Suribachi:
The Iwo Jima Monument
Chet fought valiantly in the battle at Iwo Jima and was able to recall stories of specific attacks against targets that would make your hair stand on end to listen to. After it was all said and done, Chet was awarded the Victory Medal,
The Victory Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal,
and the Philippine Liberation Campaign Ribbon.
Philippine Liberation Ribbon
As well as others….
At the time that I knew Chet, I didn’t know any of this about him. Isn’t that the case so many times in our lives. Think twice about that Wal-Mart Greeter when you go to the store (well, I heard that Wal-Mart is no longer going to have greeters, so my long term retirement plan has taken a turn). When you see an elderly old man or woman struggling with her cart to put her groceries in her car…. You may be looking at a hero.
I was looking at Chet thinking, “boy. This guy sure enjoys looking at cars…. I’m hungry.” This past week I was thinking about writing tonight about an event that took place while Ben and I were on overhaul at Muskogee. I thought it would be a funny story that you would enjoy. So, I asked my roomie, “What was the name of the guy that was staying with Joe Flannery in the trailer? The one with the gray hair?”
He reminded me that his name was Chet Turner. Steven told me that Chet had died a while back (on January 12, 2013, less than two weeks after I started writing about Power Plant Men) and that he was a good friend. So much so, that Steven found it hard to think about him being gone without bringing tears to his eyes. This got me thinking…. I knew Chet for a brief time. I wondered what was his story. I knew from my own experience that most True Power Plant Men are Heroes of some kind, so I looked him up.
Now you know what I found. What I have told you is only a small portion of the wonderful life of a great man. I encourage everyone to go and read about Chet Turner. The Story of Chester A. Turner
Notice the humble beginning of this man who’s father was a carpenter. Who’s mother worked in the same effort that her son did during the war to fight against tyranny. How he became an electrician at a young age, not to rule the world, but to serve mankind.
Looking at cars has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. I am honored today to have Chet forever in my memory.
Comment from Original Post:
Hey Roomy, been on vacation for a while. Just got around to the story. All I can say is thanks. My eyes are a little blurry at the moment. I will write you later when I can see better.
Comment from Previous post:
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I enjoy reading your blog very much and am so happy you take the time to share these memories. Chet was a wonderful man and I am very blessed to have been raised in the presence of these true heroes.
Looking forward to reading more!
Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy
Originally Posted on May 11, 2013:
If you crossed Walter Matthau with Howdy Doody you would come out with someone that would remind you of Bob Kennedy. All right. Bob Kennedy looked more like Walter Matthau than he did Howdy Doody, but I could tell that when Bob was younger, even though he didn’t have red hair and freckles, I could picture him as a little boy playing with his stick horse wearing a cowboy hat, and to me he would have looked a lot like Howdy Doody…
Walter Matthau
Howdy Doody
Cowboy Bob Kennedy on his stick horse
The day I first met Bob Kennedy I instantly fell in love with him. He was an electrician at the Power Plant in Midwest City and I was there on overhaul for three months during the fall of 1985. Bob was assigned to be our acting foreman while Arthur Hammond and I were there for a major overhaul on Unit 5. — Yeah. Five. They actually had 7, but all of them weren’t operational at the time.
Actually, I think it was Unit 4 that was a small generator that came from a submarine. — Half of the plant was like a museum. I used to park at the far end of the plant just so that I could walk through the museum each morning on my way to the electric shop. I think years later they may have torn that part of the plant down, which should have been illegal since to me it easily was a historical monument.
I called this post “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy” because Bob was tall and when he walked he sort of lunged forward and walked as if he was a giant walking through a forest that was only knee deep to himself. Bob had been an electrician for over 35 years. I know this because one of the phrases he would often say was, “I’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years!”
He had some other phrases, that I will probably mention in a few minutes. First I want to tell you about the relationship I had with Bob…. So, often in the morning after the morning steam horn would go off signalling that it was time to go to work (yeah… .isn’t that cool? A horn powered by steam would go off when it was time to go to work! My gosh… That horn alone was a monument of the 1930’s each morning when I heard it!),
Bob would come out of the office to where I was standing in the shop and say, “Kev. Follow me. I’ll show you what you’re goin’ ta be workin’ on today. Then he would head for the door. I would follow along behind him. I could tell that he preferred that I walk behind him. When I would walk faster, he would spread his lanky legs even farther to keep me one step behind him… so I quickly assumed my place two paces behind Bob.
He would have these large strides when he walked that would cause his body to move in a left and right motion where his arms were swinging at his side. I loved everything about Bob. I loved the way he talked… I loved the way he walked… I wished that I could be a miniature Bob. So, I started to imitate him.
As Bob would walk across the Turbine-Generator floor toward Unit 5 from Unit 7 (where the electric shop was located)), I would follow along two paces behind him trying my best to walk just like him. I would make very long strides to match Bob’s. I would swing my arms and lean left and right as I walked just like Bob. Bob was my hero and I wanted to let everyone know that I loved Bob and I wanted to be as much like Bob as I possibly could. So, as I walked I had a tremendous grin on my face. My expression was full of the satisfaction of knowing that I was literally following in Bob’s footsteps!
Operators and other maintenance workers that would see us instantly understood my intentions as they would grin, or laugh, or fall down in a total convulsion of uncontrollable laughter, sharing in my elation of being a miniature Bob.
I wish I could say that my time with Bob was one of total contentment and joy at being a miniature Bob that had “done it this way for 35 years”, but there were some setbacks. The first problem was that Arthur Hammond was with me on overhaul, and there was one major flaw in this combination….. Arthur liked to argue. See my post from two weeks ago called “Power Plant Arguments With Arthur Hammond“.
Before I go into the contention part, I want to first tell you about my second best Bob Kennedy Phrase. It is…. “I have a tool for that.”. You see. At this older gas plant where Bob Kennedy had spent the greater portion of his life, he had created a tool for just about every difficult job at the plant to make it easier.
Often in the morning when Bob would show me the job that I was going to be performing for the day, he would qualify it by saying, “I have a special tool for this.” Then he would take me back to the shop, reach under one of the work benches and pull out a work of art that comprised of chains, levers, pulleys and specialized cables that would make a seemingly impossible job, possible. He had a tool for everything.
So, when Arthur and I realized that Bob had a tool for everything we came up with a song for Bob that went to the tune of Big John. And old song about a guy named Big John that worked in a mine that collapsed one day. If you are older than I am (52), then you may have heard it before.
In case you haven’t, here is a YouTube version of Big John sung by Jimmy Dean:
Now that you have listened to the song about Big John, here is the song that Arthur and I devised about Bob Kennedy:
Big Bob…. Big Bob….
Every morning when he showed up at the plant, You could see him arrive.
He was 6 foot 6, and weighed more than than 145.
Wore a chip on his shoulder
And kinda wobbly at the hip.
Everyone knew he didn’t give a flip… That was Bob….
Big Bo ahh… ob… Big Bad Bob. Big Bob….
Bob didn’t say much ’cause he was quiet and shy,
He hummed and we hawed and we didn’t know why.
That was Bo ahh…. ob…. Big Bad Bob….
When he would say, “I’ve gotta job… for the two of you…
Follow me… and I’ll show you what to do…
” That was Bob…. Bahhh….ob… Big Bad Bob….
When somethin’ didn’t work, he would say real quick,
Just spit in the back and give it a kick,
That was Bob…. Baaahhh…ob…. Big Bad Bob.
When you’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years,
It doesn’t matter what problem you’ve got sittin’ right here’s….
‘Cause I’m Bob…. Baaaah….ob…. Big Bad Bob…..
You see, I have a tool to fix it up just right,
Let me show you how it’s done. I’ll show you the light….
That was Bob….. Baaaah…..ob… Big Bad Bob!
Arthur and I would sing or hum this song as we worked. It made the day go by so fast that we wondered if Bob himself wasn’t warping time using some tool he kept under a workbench in the electric shop.
Like I said…. I love Bob, and I have since the day I met him, and I always will. There came a day when there was contention in the ranks…. I saw it beginning when Arthur was arguing each day with Bob. I think it had to do with the fact that Bob liked to argue also… and neither of them liked to lose an argument. So, each morning, either Arthur or Bob would win the argument (which sounds a lot like a Dilbert moment today)….
My two friends whom I love dearly (to this day) quickly were at each other’s throats. I didn’t realize how much until the morning of December 18, 1985, just before I left the shop and Bob Kennedy said to me… “That Arthur Hammond…. He sure can dish it out, but he just can’t take it”. I walked straight from that conversation down to the the mezzanine level of unit 5 where Art was working on a motor. The first thing he said to me was, “Bob sure can dish it out but he just can’t take it.”
At that point I told Art to just wait a minute. There was something I had to do…. I went back to the shop and told Bob that there was something at the motor where we needed his help. As I was walking with Bob across the mezzanine and down to the motor, my heart was split in two. Here were two of my friends at odds with each other….. Two people whom I would spend the rest of my life praying for their happiness. Yet they viewed each other as mortal enemies…
I had to figure that both of them were right in their own way, yet both of them were wrong about each other. So when Bob arrived at the motor I told them both (as if I had suddenly turned into their mother)…. A little while ago, Bob told me that ‘Art can sure dish it out, but he just can’t take it.’. Then I walked down here and Art tells me the exact same thing about Bob. Now…. what is going on here? Bob?
Bob looked at the two of us like the time had finally come to let it all out…. he said, “Every time we have an argument about anything Art here runs to Ellis Rook complaining about me. If he has something to say, he should come straight to me. Not run to our supervisor!”
Art said, “Now wait a minute! It isn’t me that is running to Ellis Rook! Ellis just spoke with me this morning about sending me back to the plant because I don’t get along with you (meaning Bob). Each time we have an argument, you run to Ellis Rook. Ellis has been telling me that he is thinking of sending me home because you can’t get along with me! Bob had a shocked look on his face.
Playing the facilitator role, I asked Bob… “Is this so?” Because I remembered that one day before (on December 17, 1985) when I had to leave for part of the day to get my blood test because I was going to be married (and in Oklahoma you still needed a blood test to be married)…. when I had returned, I met Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) in the elevator, he had asked me about Arthur Hammond.
As a side note, because of the new changes in overtime rules, if I left the plant in the middle of the day, I wasn’t supposed to stay long enough to collect overtime. Ellis Rook started to tell me that I shouldn’t have come back to work after getting my blood test, because I wasn’t eligible to work overtime after taking off part of the day. After apologizing to him (humbly and profusely), he said, that it would be all right just this once… I figured it was because I was going to be married that Saturday on December 21, 1985. Ellis said that he had heard some bad things about Arthur and he was considering sending him back to our plant.
This would have been a terrible disgrace for Arthur and would have been on his permanent record as someone that wouldn’t be able to go on overhaul anymore. I assured Ellis that Arthur Hammond was the most upright of employees and that there wasn’t any reason to send him home.
So, I asked Arthur…. was it true that he had been going to Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) to complain about Bob each time they had an argument… Arthur assured the both of us that not only wasn’t it him, but that it was Bob that had been complaining to Ellis Rook about him each time they had an argument. That was why he said Bob could dish it out, but he just couldn’t take it.
Bob replied, “It wasn’t me! It was Arthur! Every time we had an argument Ellis Rook would come to me and ask me about it. That is how I know that Art has been running to Ellis complaining about me. I would never tell Ellis about it! I would deal with it directly with Art.” Art said, “Ellis Rook was asking me the same thing!”
So, I asked…. How would Ellis know if neither of you went to him to complain? I wouldn’t have told him…. This led us to the third person that was present during every argument….
You see, there was another electrician from the plant across town that was there every time Ellis came to Bob asking about Arthur after an argument… Let’s call it Mustang Plant (since that was the name). In order not to embarrass him, I won’t tell you his name, but his initials are “Randy Oxley”. Randy Oxley desperately wanted to move from Mustang Plant to the plant in Midwest City… (all right… since I’m already naming names of plants, I might as well say “Horseshoe Plant”)…
For a time during this overhaul I spent a great deal of time in the electric shop working on motors. Each day I would stand at a workbench disassembling motors, cleaning out their sleeve bearings (yeah. these old motors at the old plant had sleeve bearings) and measuring them, and re-assembling them. During that time there were two things that I listened to. The first thing was the radio…. At that time in history… the leading rock radio stations would play the top 20 songs only. That meant that after listening to the top 20 songs, the only thing left to listen to was the top 20 songs all over again…. To me… It was like a nightmare.
The songs I listened to 100 times were songs like
“Say you Say Me” by Lionel Riche,
One More Night by Phil Collins:
Every Time you Go away by Paul Young:
We Built This City by Jefferson Starship:
Something in the Air Tonight by Phil Collins:
I’m sorry to do this to you, but this last song I know I must have listened to about 50 times as the top 20 played over and over again about every two hours as it has been drilled into my head. I know. I can feel the pity from every one of you who have just read this post.
Today I have “Something In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins on my iPod only because when I listen to it once each week it reminds me of the time I spent in the electric shop at Horseshoe plant working on those motors working around Reggie Deloney, Steven Trammell (otherwise known as ‘Roomie’), Paul Lucy, and the others that were there during that overhaul.
The second thing that I listened to while I was working on the motors in the electric shop was Randy Oxley. Randy was much like Steven Higginbotham, the summer help that I had worked with the first summer I had worked at our plant. See…. “Steve Higginbotham’s Junky Jalopy Late for the Boiler Blowdown“. He liked to talk.
Randy didn’t consider me as an important asset, so he didn’t talk much to me. He did, however, talk to one of the Maintenance Supervisors, who happened to be his uncle. You see… Randy wanted desperately to move from Mustang Plant to Horseshoe Plant. There was an opening for the B Foreman at Horseshoe plant, and he figured that one of the men in the electric shop would surely get the new foreman opening, which would leave an opening for an electrician.
So Randy would try to butter up his uncle (His uncle was called “Balkenbush”). He didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there carefully honing a sleeve bearing for an old GE motor. He openly expressed his opinion. It is only because of his blatant disregard for discretion that I don’t feel any guilt to pass on the conversation.
The one phrase that sticks in my mind is that Randy, while trying to convince his uncle that they should hire him in the electric shop at Horseshoe lake, said, “I am the best electrician at Mustang Plant. The only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it!”
I’m not kidding…. “I am the best electrician at the plant… the problem is that I’m the only one that knows it….”
This became one of my favorite phrases of all time. I couldn’t wait to share it with Arthur…. I told him… “I am the best darn BS’er of all time… the only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it…” Art would say…. “I’m the best goof ball of all time… only I’m the only one that knows it…” I know I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.
Actually, I use this phrase to also remind me to never get such a big head that I really think that I’m better at something than others think I am… because they usually know better than I do.
So, this brings us back to the Art and Bob Cage Fight….
It became obvious that both of them had become snookered. Every time Art and Bob had argued about something and Randy Oxley was around, Randy would run up to Ellis’s office and tell him that Art and Bob were at each other’s throats.
Randy was trying to butter himself up to Ellis so that he would hire him when there was an opening in the electric shop (which one was supposed to be coming up on the horizon). Art and Bob each thought the other had run to Ellis complaining about the other….
That was when the other shoe dropped….
Many years before, when I was still a summer help, and when I was a janitor, there was an electrician at our plant named Mel Woodring. Mel had decided that he didn’t have a future at our plant so he applied for a job at Muskogee. Of course, Bill Bennett and Leroy Godfrey (or was it Jackie Smith?) were glad to give him a glowing recommendation because they thought that when Mel left, it gave them an opportunity to hire someone that would…. let us say… fit their culture in a more effective manner.
Because I was a janitor at this time, I was not eligible to apply for an Electrical job, even though Charles Foster had become my mentor and had me begin taking electrical courses through the company.
I had worked the year before I was working with Bob Kennedy at the plant in Midwest City, Oklahoma at Muskogee plant around Mel Woodring. I never worked directly with him, so I will just say that he met the expectations that had been set by my bucket buddy back home, Diana Brien.
Fast forward a year later to when I am on overhaul at Horseshoe plant….. Steven Trammell, Bob Kennedy and a few other electricians that had spent many years at the plant, all thought they would be possible contenders for new foreman’s job. Any of them would have been excellent candidates.
To their stunned surprise… Mel Woodring from Muskogee was given the job! To me, this was an obvious case of the “promote someone in order to get him out of the shop” syndrome.
It turned out that the foremen at Muskogee (John Manning), including our illustrious Don Spears, that I had the momentary lap dance with the year before (see, “Lap O’ Luxury at the Muskogee Power Plant“), had decided to give Mel the highest rating possible so that he would get the job at Midwest City, thus relieving Muskogee from the burden that our plant had placed on them by suggesting that Muskogee transfer him from our plant.
Not only was the Horseshoe plant in a state of shock, but so was Randy Oxley. This meant that there wasn’t going to be an opening in the electric shop, and all of his “schmoozing” had been for naught.
The last day of the overhaul was December 20, 1985, the day before my wedding. I remember that Paul Lucy wanted me to go to a “gentleman’s club”(quite the oxymoron if you ask me) to celebrate and have a sort of a bachelor’s party…. I remember looking straight at Art Hammond right after Paul asked me, and Art shook his head and said…. “Don’t listen to him. Do what is right.” I assured Art that I had no intention of ruining the rest of my life the day before my wedding.
I went directly home.
The next day, Art Hammond was at my wedding with his wife. It was, and still is, the most blessed day of my life. Partly because Art was there at the reception dancing alongside me. I was lucky that I didn’t have a black eye… (which is another story)… and lucky that Art and Sonny Kendrick (who sang at my wedding) were there. Of all of my friends at the power plant, they were the ones that came to my wedding reception of all the people my mom had invited from the plant.
Years later, I traveled with Bob Kennedy on a bus from his plant to Oklahoma City to visit the new Transmission Control Room and back. We sat together and it was just like we had never been apart. Bob talked… and I wished in my mind that I could be a miniature Bob walking behind him every step of the way.
Today any time I have to take a big step for whatever reason…. Bob Kennedy immediately comes to mind. I think about when Bob climbed out of that bus… These words come to my mind….
Through the dust and the smoke of this manmade hell walked a giant of a man that ‘lectricians knew well…. Like a Giant Oak Tree, he just stood there all alone….Big Baaah…. ob…. Big Bad Bob…. Big Bob….. Everyone knew it was the end of line for Big Bob…. Big Bad Bob…. An Electrician from this Plant was a Big Big Man… He was Big Bob! Big Bad Bob! Big Bob!
A Slap in the Face at a Gas-fired Power Plant
Originally posted June 21, 2013:
Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Thanks to my high school math teacher Robert Burns, I have always admired Archimedes. I remember the day he was talking about him in class, and he was explaining how Archimedes had sat down in the bathtub and when the water overflowed, and he suddenly realized how to calculate the volume of the king’s crown, he jumped out of the tub and ran down the street in his birthday suit yelling “Eureka! Eureka!” Meaning… I have found it! I have found it! I especially remember Mr. Burn’s eyes tearing up as he told this story. To Mr. Burns, mathematics was an adventure. He instilled this love into me.
So, how does a discussion about Archimedes tie into a story about a Gas-fired Power Plant in central Oklahoma? Well it does, or it did, on December 19, 1985.
The day began with my drive from Oklahoma City, where I was staying, to Harrah, Oklahoma where I was on overhaul at a power plant called Horseshoe Lake Plant. The lake must have been named Horseshoe Lake for the obvious reason that it was shaped like a Horseshoe as it wrapped around the north part of the plant.
I suppose this lake was originally used to cool the condenser water once the steam had been used to turn the turbine, but it was much too small to be used by the units that were in operation when I was at the plant. Instead it was a Fish farm where Tilapia were raised.
A Power Plant Tilapia
I wrote about working at this plant on this overhaul in an earlier post called “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. This morning when I arrived, I figured I would be working in the shop repairing more of the older open-faced motors with their sleeve bearing and cambric insulation. It started out that way.
An example of an old GE open-faced motor
One time during the morning, Ellis Rook, the electrical Supervisor came up to me and started talking to me about the ROLM phone computer. He knew I had experience working on the Phone system. I had been trained by the best even before I had gone to Muskogee to take a class. Bill Rivers at our plant had taught me how to make “moves and changes” and how to troubleshoot the entire plant’s phone system without ever leaving the lab.
A ROLM Phone Computer
Anyway. Ellis Rook told me about the problem they were having with the phone system that day. He told me what had been done to try to fix the problem. I was thinking of a few things I would try (even though I was still more of a Rookie than Ellis Rook — ok. I couldn’t resist that one). I had been an electrician in training for just over 2 years, which still made me a rookie.
I originally thought Ellis had approached me for ideas on how to fix the problem, so I was formulating some answers in my mind while he was going on… then he said, “What I do every time to fix any problem is just reboot the computer.” — ok. He wasn’t seeking advice. He was seeking approval. So, I looked at him with as blank of a stare I could and just nodded and replied, “Well, that usually does it.” — Nevermind that it took about 25 minutes for one of these old ROLM computers to reboot and during that time all communication with the outside world was cut-off.
This was when I remembered a story that Bob Kennedy had told me about Ellis Rook.
One day, he took another electrician with him to inspect the exciter collector rings on one of the units. The exciter is connected to one end of the generator usually (though if I’m not mistaken, the exciter house was off to one side), and it spins at 3600 rpm. It is not coincidental that this is 60 cycles per second, which is how fast the electricity alternates between positive and negative in your house. This is exactly why the electricity alternates that fast. Because that is how fast the turbine-generator is spinning.
Anyway, Ellis had taken a strobe light with him to go inspect the collector rings on the exciter because there was some indication that a fuse had blown on one of the collectors. Using the strobe light, you could set it to blink at 3600 times per minute and the collector rings spinning at 3600 rpm would appear to stand still.
A typical strobe light
By slowly adjusting the rate that the strobe light was flashing, you could rotate the shaft slowly and inspect it just as if it was standing still, even though in reality it was still spinning at 3600 rpms (the same speed as the lawn mower in the post: “Something is in the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“).
After examining the shaft for a bit, they located the blown fuse. When the fuse blew, a little indicator would stick out so it could easily be seen. Ellis Rook slowly rotated the shaft around until the fuse was in a good position and then stopped the shaft from rotating by setting the strobe light to the exact same rate that the shaft was rotating.
Then Ellis said something that would go down in the Annals of History at Horseshoe Lake. He told the electrician to change out the fuse. — Ok. Stop and think about this for a minute. The room where the collector rings are is normally dark, so all they can see is this turbine shaft in front of them and it looked like it was standing still. Forget the roar of the spinning turbine and just chalk it up to a loud fan running.
Luckily the electrician wasn’t lulled into a false sense of security and didn’t put his hand forward to remove the fuse. That would have easily have been the last thing he would have ever done (as a live human being). — There has to be a good murder mystery plot involving a strobe light. I’m sure one of the great writers at WordPress can come up with one. I can think of a couple myself.
Anyway, when Ellis Rook told me how he fixed the telephone computer problems by rebooting the computer, this story flashed through my mind for about 3 seconds. I think I put my hands in my back pocket just for safe keeping.
Anyway. I ate lunch in the electric shop office with my ol’ “Roomie” Steven Trammell, (We have called each other roomie from the time we were in Muskogee on overhaul in 1984. See the post about Muskogee in the link above. To this day, we call each other roomie, as we have kept in touch throughout the years). While I was sitting there arguing with Art Hammond about something (See the post: “Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond“) I was reading an instruction manual about some electronic sensor that could tell you the percentage open a series of valves all in one little box.
Reggie Deloney had been working with the engineer on this valve detecting device for the past 4 weeks, and couldn’t get it to work. The engineer asked me if I would look at it to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it, because it wasn’t working at all…. It would work every now and then, but then it would stop.
When I read the manual I noticed that there was a “common” in the circuitry and that Reggie and the engineer had assumed that the common was the same as the “ground”. This usually isn’t true in electronic circuits as it is in regular electrical wiring. So, I stood up from where I was lounging back reading the pamphlet and lifted the common wire up so that it wasn’t touching the metal cart, and suddenly the valve indicator worked.
When Reggie returned from lunch, I excitedly told him what I had found. He looked a little astonished, so I showed him. He had only spent the last 4 weeks working on this. So, I went into the shop and worked on another motor.
Later I walked into the office figuring that Reggie had told the good news to the engineer. He was sitting there with the engineer scratching their heads still trying to figure out why the instrument still wasn’t working. So, I picked up the wire so it wasn’t touching the cart, and said. “See? Works.” Reggie with a very irritated voice said, “Yes! You figured it out!” He looked at me with a look that said, “Get out of here!” So, I left.
Art, who was listening said, “I don’t think Reggie is ready to figure it out yet.” Then I got it. Oh. I see… It is nice and cool and clean in the office. The engineer wasn’t going to figure it out on his own…. Just a week or so left of overhaul….
About that time, Bob Kennedy, my acting Foreman told me to go with Bill Thomas and help him out. Bill was from our plant and was a welder. He was working out of our shop to help us out with any mechanical needs we had from welding to uncoupling pumps and fans and realigning motors and any other stuff. Now… I know that Bill Thomas had a nickname. But I usually called people by their real names, so I only remember him as Bill Thomas. Maybe a Power Plant Man reading this post will remind me of Bill’s nickname.
This is where Archimedes comes into the story.
So, Bill Thomas had been working on a cooling water fan structure all morning single-handed lifting it up. It weighed somewhere between 50 to 75 tons. um… yes…. I think that is about it… about 100,000 pounds. yet, Bill using nothing but the muscles in his arms and back had been lifting this monstrosity off of the ground. Like Archimedes who lifted an entire ship out of the water once using a lever.
Bill was lifting the top round part off of the ground so that he could work under it.
You see. With True Power Plant Men, you really don’t ever hear that something “can’t” be done. Bill had to work under this large round hunk of metal, so he had to pick it up. After spending two hours lifting it with only his two arms spinning a huge chain-fall, he had managed to lift the structure 2 inches from the ground. — well. No one said anything about tossing it in the air… just lifting it off the ground. He still had about 22 inches more to go.
This is a 3 ton chain-fall. The one we were using was more than 10 times bigger
This was where I came in. Did I tell you this plant was old? Well it was. They didn’t have a lot of electricity in this building we were in, and there wasn’t an electric hoist, so Bill had to pull a chain that went around a pulley that turned a shaft to a gearbox that would slowly (real slowly) lift something huge. So, the Power Plant Men from this plant had created a “tool” to make this job faster.
Bill had pulled an air compressor over to the building and had hooked the air hose up to the special tool.
This is the exact size and type of air compressor
This was going to make his job much faster. There was only once catch. He needed an extra weight. I was the extra weight that he needed.
You see. The special tool was an air powered grinder.
An air powered grinder. Only the one we used was much bigger
And it was mounted to a piece of plywood. the grinding wheel had been replaced with a pulley. The idea was to stand on the plywood and step on the lever that operated the grinder so that it would spin the pulley. The chain for the chain-fall would fit through the pulley assembly.
Bill had asked the person that gave him this special tool what happens when the chain snags. They said, that’s when you need the extra weight. They explained to Bill that when two people are standing on the plywood, they will be able to overpower the grinder so that it can’t pull itself out from under them. If there isn’t enough weight on the plywood, then if the chain snags, the special tool will slide across the floor and attempt to climb up to the top of the chain-fall until someone lets off of the lever that operates the grinder.
So. I was the extra weight. Not that I was all that big at the time.
Anyway. The next thing I knew, I was standing on the plywood, and Bill was operating the large grinder with his foot and we were lifting the large cylinder off of the ground. Before long we had it at least a foot up. Bill had put some stops under the cylinder in case we had to set it down for some reason, it wouldn’t have to go all the way to the ground.
That’s when it hit me…. No. I didn’t suddenly remember that I hadn’t had any chocolate for lunch (though, that would have been a tragedy). No. That is when as I was watching the chain spin through the pulley at breakneck speed, the chain suddenly went taut. As the chain became snagged in the chain-fall, the chain whipped up, and before I could perceive what had happened I found myself lifted off of the ground and being thrown backward.
The chain had flown back and slapped me across the face, sending my hardhat flying and shattering my safety glasses. I ended up on my back about 5 feet from where I had been standing. Bill rushed to my side to check if I was all right. I checked myself out and decided that I was going to be all right.
I told him I needed to go get another pair of safety glasses from the tool room. he looked at my eyes and said. “Boy. That is really going to be a shiner tomorrow.” Evidently, I was developing a black eye. I was thinking… “Great! And I’m getting married in two days. I can just see my wedding pictures.” (I can see myself trying to explain to my children in the future that – “No. Your mother didn’t sock me in the eye during the wedding”).
I went to the tool room and checked out a new pair of safety glasses:
The one on the bottom is the kind of safety glasses we had at the time
When I returned to the electric shop, Bill Thomas and Arthur were there. Everyone was saying the same thing. “Boy! That is sure going to be a shiner tomorrow.”
A little while later, Ellis Rook came in the shop and said that Larry Hatley (the plant manager) wanted to talk to me. So, I followed Ellis to the Plant Manager’s office. Larry asked me if I was ok. He wanted to know if I needed medical attention. I assured him that I was all right. My safety glasses had protected me. They had been destroyed in the process, but I was just fine. I think as I left I heard Larry say under his breath, “boy… that is going to be a shiner tomorrow.”
Well. The next day (December 20, 1985) when I showed up at work (my last day there for overhaul before leaving to be married the following day), everyone came around to look at my eye. There wasn’t anything to see really. Any swelling had gone down over the night, and my face was back to it’s regular… um…. tolerable self.
The people I worked with the fall of 1985 at Horseshoe Power Plant treated me like family while I was there. That was the way it was when you worked with True Power Plant Men. I cherish their memory.
Comment from original post:
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Great story! The manager at HLS was Hatley (with a “t”). Larry and I were good friends. He had flown airplanes some (as had I) so we swapped piloting adventures, some of which were actually true. Larry was a good guy.
Do Power Plant Men and Corporate Headquarters Mix?
August 6, 1996 in Corporate Headquarters America, jaws began dropping a few minutes before 8 a.m. At first the security guard just thought some Power Plant Giant had taken a wrong turn and showed up at Corporate Headquarters to ask for directions. When another one showed up, this time carrying his Playmate lunch box, hard hat on his head, and lip quivering looking for a handy spittoon, the men in their suits and women in their fine dresses began running for cover. That was the day eight Power Plant Men took over the floor in the building where the Corporate Engineers usually lived.
If you want to understand the shock that emanated throughout the building, just picture the following bunch showing up on your doorstep:
Guardians of the Galaxy acting like Power Plant Men!
We had come from the four corners of the Oklahoma Electric Company Power Plant Kingdom and we were there in Oklahoma City because Corporate America needed our help! Two Power Plant Men from each of the main Power Plants were picked to help the company transition from the old Mainframe computer system to a new computer application called SAP. SAP was going to combine all of our computer needs into one big application that runs on the new computer network.
SAP Logo
Ernst and Young was the consulting company that was helping us install and implement SAP at our company. The company began the implementation some time in March, and the big bang go live date was going to be January 1, 1997. According to Ernst and Young, this was a physical impossibility. There was no way we could convert all of our requirements into SAP realities in such a short time.
The Maintenance Module for SAP hadn’t even been fully developed. We were actually working with SAP to design the module. Our company had demonstrated how a Best In Class Maintenance process worked, and SAP was designing their module around our needs. Everyone insisted that our aggressive timeline was too unreasonable and would never be met.
The Electric Company in Central Oklahoma had one Ace up their sleeve (well, maybe more than one)… That was “Power Plant Men!” As I mentioned in last week’s post (See the post “Destruction of a Power Plant God“), I was told on Monday, August 5, to show up for work the following day in Oklahoma City to work for 10 weeks on an SAP project.
Mike Gibbs, a mechanic from our plant was going with me. Our task was to convert all the Power Plant parts in the Inventory system in searchable strings that had a limited number of characters. Mike Gibbs used to work in the warehouse, so he was a good candidate for knowing what odd parts actually were.
Mike Gibbs
We were a cross-section of mechanics and electricians, and warehouse people. To give you an idea of how big our job was, we had over 100,000 different parts in the system. 75,000 of those parts were in the warehouse at the power plant where I worked. There were over 5,000 different types of Nuts and Bolts… just to give you an idea of the task ahead of us.
Ernst and Young said the task would take the eight regular employees four months to complete the task. The Electric Company said, “Power Plant Men can do it in 10 weeks.
We were able to use the office space used by all of the engineers because they all happened to be at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma where I normally worked because of the big explosion that destroyed part of the Turbine Generator room early Monday morning. While they packed up to begin the work of reconstruction, Mike and I packed up and headed to Oklahoma City.
Most of the “out-of-town” Power Plant Men stayed in hotels for the next 2 1/2 months, but Mike Gibbs and I decided that we couldn’t be away from our families that long, so we decided that we would drive back and forth to work each day from Stillwater, Oklahoma. This was about an hour drive with going to work traffic. We would meet in the parking lot of a Mexican Restaurant at the edge of town and take turns each day driving to Oklahoma City.
Normally, in an instance like this, we would get paid a mileage that was farther than if we drove to the plant and maybe even driving time to and from work each day, but when our Plant Manager Bill Green found out we were driving back and forth, he refused to pay us anything. He told us that it was far enough away that he would only pay for us to stay in a Hotel (which would have cost more than the mileage), he wouldn’t pay us mileage or even a per diem (which is a daily amount for expenses).
Bill Green knew that we were family men that wouldn’t want to be away from our families during the week if it was only an hour drive, so he played his card and said that we had to stay in a hotel, and he would pay the expense for that or he would pay nothing and we could drive back and forth all we wanted at our own expense, already knowing that we would rather wear our cars out and pay the extra gas each day to be with our families. I just thought this was pay back for me being so rotten all the time.
The first week I was there, I worked on converting the 5,000 different nuts, bolts and screws into cryptic search strings that all began with the three letter search word for bolt: BLT. If you wanted to search for a Bolt in the SAP inventory, you would know it begins with a the letters BLT. This only made me hungry all week, because to me, a BLT was a sandwich. A mighty good one too, I may add.
Power Plant Man sized Bacon lettuce and Tomato Sandwich
After the first week, it was decided that having Power Plant Men roaming around between offices asking each other questions about parts was a hazard waiting to happen, so the engineer that was running our project Mark Romano had a special holding pen… um… I mean, cubicle built just for us. It was decided that we should all be together in what is called a “Bullpen Cube”. All nine of us. Bullpen was a good name considering that there was a lot of bull going around for all of us.
There were nine, because a young Corporate executive had been assigned to help us with all things “Corporate”. His name is Kent Norris. He was lucky enough to stay behind to work with us, instead of having to go spend the next 2 1/2 months at our plant up north helping to repair the fire damage.
Well. I say lucky. Lucky for us, maybe not for him. After all, he was someone from “corporate” stuck in a cubicle with 8 rascally Power Plant Men that kept themselves motivated by playing practical jokes on whoever was willing to fall for them. Not ever having experienced the likes of us before, Kent was in for 2 1/2 months of relentless practical jokes being played at his expense.
I must say that we had a terrific time teasing poor Kent, but he was such fun and took our jokes so well, that we could only admire his resilience to bounce back and smile after we ran him ragged with one joke after the next. I will go into more detail about the jokes we played on Kent in a later post. For now, I am just mentioning our situation, so that you can get a picture of our situation.
Kent helped us with our expense reports each week, and showed us all the good places to eat lunch. He helped us adapt to corporate life. He even showed us how to use our temporary badges to badge in and out of the doors when we entered and left the building.
Mike Gibbs discovered a better way. He just put his badge in his wallet, and since he was tall enough, when he walked up to the badge reader, he just pressed the back pocket of his blue jeans against the badge reader, and voila! The door would open like magic! Onlookers were always staring at this strange assortment of men in blue jeans and tee shirts walking through the office building during lunch.
I tried to remember all the people that were there in the cube with us… I remember that I was there, and so was Mike Gibb from the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
Our Coal Fired Power Plant
Ken Scott, who was the Maintenance Superintendent at the Gas-fired Power Plant by Konawa, and David Roe who worked in the warehouse at that plant.
Seminole Power Plant at night outside of Konawa Oklahoma. This picture was found at: http://www.redbubble.com/people/harrietrn/works/1425122-seminole-power-plant
Doyle Fullen, an Electric Foreman from the coal fired plant in Muskogee, and Robert Christy, a mechanic also from that plant.
Power Plant in Muskogee Oklahoma
I believe Dan Hayer, the warehouse man, was there from the gas-fired plant in Harrah, Oklahoma on a small lake called Horseshoe Lake. I don’t remember who else was there from that plant. I remember seeing someone there, but I think he was a more of a quiet type and for some reason, his name has escaped me.
Horseshoe Lake Plant as it looked back then
I was a sort of a computer programmer at this time, so I created small programs that would make our jobs easier. I created icons on the computers so that people didn’t have to log into the apps, and I created a couple of other small programs that just automated the monotonous manual steps that we would have to do over and over again as we plowed through the 100,000 different part descriptions.
After the first week, we had converted over 15,000 parts, and were on our way to meeting our goal.
So, how did we do? The Power Plant Men were able to convert all 100,000 parts in the inventory system to SAP in eight weeks! Two weeks ahead of schedule. This was typical for Power Plant Men, especially when you tell them it is impossible. This was another example of doing things that others said couldn’t be done.
We were all scheduled to go back to our home plants two weeks early when Mark Romano, our project manager came to our cube to give us the news… We had performed our job so well, they wanted to expand our scope. It seems that another department… I won’t mention which one, but their initials are T&D had been working on their measly 60,000 parts for the past 4 months and had only completed about 10,000 of them. They wanted to know if the Power Plant Men would be willing to give them a hand to convert the 50,000 parts in their inventory system the same way we did for Power Supply. Otherwise the go-live of January 1, would not be met since we were coming up to the end of September already.
Our Plant Managers had agreed that we could spend the next four weeks converting T&D’s parts as well, so of course, we agreed to stay on. I’m not sure if Corporate Headquarters was ever the same after that. Because we were able to stay on for the next four weeks, we were invited to an SAP banquet that we would have otherwise missed. We stood out like a sore thumb. I will write more about that banquet in a separate post as well as go into detail with some of the jokes that we played on Kent Norris.
Spending the 12 weeks in Corporate Headquarters was an important turning point in my career as a Power Plant Electrician. When we were in the bullpen cube, I was sitting in a chair where I could turn my head to the right and look out a window over the parking lot for the building. During the day I would watch people walking to-and-fro going about their business.
I had worked most of my adult life up to that point at a plant out in the country where when you climbed to the top of the 500 foot smoke stack and looked around, you could see fields and trees for 20 miles in any direction. Looking out that window at people made a big impression on me. Here I was sitting in an air conditioned office. No Coal Dust. No Fly Ash. No ear plugs to deafen the sound of steam shooting through the pipes turning the turbines. No 100 degrees in the summer. No freezing my fingers off in the winter. Just Power Plant Men quietly tapping on their computer keyboards, while they played jokes on Corporate Executive Kent. — This was the life.
I thought… things don’t get better than this. I was in computer heaven. Even though it was unconscious at the time, something stirred in me that thought… maybe… just maybe, I’m ready for a change…. I’ll wait and see what God wants me to do…
Something Is In The Water at the Muskogee Power Plant
Originally posted: April 15, 2013:
“Something is in the water in Muskogee.” That is what I used to say. Something that makes people feel invulnerable. That was what I attributed to David Stewart’s belief that he could jump up in a falling elevator just before it crashed into the ground and he would be saved (see After Effects of Power Plant Drop Tests).
There was another story at the Muskogee Coal-fired Power Plant where this one mechanic believed that he could stick his finger in a running lawnmower and pull it out so fast that it wouldn’t cut his finger off. Of course, True Power Plant Men tried to reason with him to convince him that it was impossible…. Then there were others who said… “Ok. Prove it.”
Think about it. A lawnmower spins at the same rate that a Turbine Generator spins when it makes electricity. 3,600 time a minute. Or 60 times each second. Since the blade in a lawnmower extends in both directions, a blade would fly by your finger 120 times each second. Twice as fast as the electric current in your house cycles positive and negative.
Typical Power Plant Lawnmower
This means that the person will have to stick their finger in the path of the lawnmower blade and pull it out within 8/1000th of a second…. IF they were able to time it so that they put their finger in the path at the precise moment that the blade passed by. Meaning that on average, the person only has 4/1000th of a second (or 0.004 seconds) to perform this feat (on average… could be a little more, could be less).
Unfortunately for this person, he was not convinced by the logicians that it was impossible, and therefore proceeded to prove his case. If you walked over and met this person in the maintenance shop at Muskogee, you would find that he was missing not only one finger, but two. Why? Because after failing the first time and having his finger chopped off, he was still so stubborn to think that he could have been wrong, so later he tried it again. Hence the reason why two of his fingers were missing.
Upon hearing this story, I came to the conclusion that there must be something in the water at Muskogee. I drank soft drinks as much as possible while I was there on overhaul during the fall of 1984.
As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Rags to Riches, in 1984 I was on overhaul at Muskogee with Ben Davis. An overhaul is when a unit is taken offline for a number of weeks so that maintenance can be performed on equipment that is only possible when the unit is offline. During this particular overhaul, Unit 6 at Muskogee was offline.
Ben and I were working out of the Unit 6 Electric shop. Ben was staying with his friend Don Burnett, a machinist that used to work at our plant when I was a summer help. Before Don worked for the electric company, he worked in a Zinc Smelting plant by Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Not only was Don an expert machinist, he was also one of the kindest people you would run across. Especially at Muskogee.
I was staying in a “trailer down by the river” by the old plant. Units one, two and three. They were older gas-fired units. I think at the time, only Unit 3 was still operational. The first 2 weeks of the overhaul, I stayed in a rectory with the Catholic priests in town. Then David Stewart offered to let me stay in his trailer down by the river for only $50 a week.
After the first couple of weeks it was decided that the 4 week overhaul had turned into a 9 week overhaul because of some complications that they found when inspecting something on the turbine. So, I ended up staying another month.
When they found out that they were going to be down for an extra 5 weeks, they called in for reinforcements, and that is when I met my new “roomie”, Steven Trammell from the plant in Midwest City. He shared the trailer for the last 4 weeks of the overhaul. From that time on, Steven and I were good friends. To this day (and I know Steven reads this blog) we refer to each other as “roomie”, even though it has been 28 years since we bunked together in a trailer…..down by the river.
I have one main story that I would like to tell with this post that I am saving until the end. It was what happened to me the day I think I accidentally drank some of the water…. (sounds like Mexico doesn’t it?). Before I tell that story, I want to introduce you to a couple of other True Power Plant Men that lived next door to “roomie” and me in another trailer down by the river (this was the Arkansas River by the way…. Yeah… The Arkansas river that flowed from Kansas into Oklahoma… — go figure. The same river that we used at our plant to fill our lake. See the post Power Plant Men taking the Temperature Down By The River).
Joe Flannery was from Seminole Plant and I believe that Chet Turner was from Horseshoe Plant, though I could be mistaken about Chet. I know he was living in south Oklahoma City at the time, so he could have been working at Seminole as well. These were two electricians that were very great guys. Joe Flannery had a nickname. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was “Bam Bam”.
Yeah. This Bam Bam. From the Flintstones
Joe was very strong, like Bam Bam. He also reminded me of Goober on the Andy Griffith Show, though Gary Lyons at our plant even resembled Goober more:
Goober from the Andy Griffith Show (played by George Lindsey)
Chet was older than Joe by quite a lot, but I could tell that my Roomie and Joe held him in high esteem… So much so, that I might just wait on the story I was going to tell you about the time that I drank the water in Muskogee to focus more on Chet Turner… otherwise known as Chester A Turner.
I first met Chet when my roomie asked me if I wanted to go out and eat with him and our two trailer neighbors. On the way to dinner, we had to stop by a used car lot to look at what was available because Chet loved looking at cars. He had gray hair and was 60 years old at the time.
During the next 5 weeks, we went out to eat almost every night during the week with Chet and Joe. We explored Muskogee as best we could. That means that we visited about every car lot in the town. We also ate at a really good BBQ place where you sat at a picnic table and ate the BBQ on a piece of wax paper.
One night we were invited by another electrician (I think his name was Kevin Davis) to meet him at a Wal-Mart (or some other similar store) parking lot where his son was trying to win a car by being the last person to keep his hand on the car. He had already been doing it for about 4 days, and was exhausted. It would have reminded me of the times I had spent adjusting the precipitator controls after a fouled start-up, only, I hadn’t done that yet.
I was usually hungry when we were on our way to dinner, and I was slightly annoyed by the many visits to car lots when my stomach was set on “growl” mode. I never said anything about it, because I could tell that Chet was having a lot of fun looking at cars.
If only I had known Chet’s story when I met him, I would have treated him with the respect that he deserved. If I had known his history, I would have paid for his meals. It was only much later that I learned the true nature of Chet, a humble small gray-haired man that seemed happy all the time, and just went with the flow.
You know… It is sometimes amazing to me that I can work next to someone for a long time only to find out that they are one of the nation’s greatest heroes. I never actually worked with Chet, but I did sit next to him while we ate our supper only to return to the trailers down by the river exhausted from the long work days.
Let me start by saying that Chet’s father was a carpenter. Like another friend of mine, and Jesus Christ himself, Chester had a father that made furniture by hand. During World War II, Chester’s mother helped assemble aircraft for the United States Air Force.
While Chet’s mother was working building planes for the Air Force, Chet had joined the Navy and learned to be an electrician. He went to work on a ship in the Pacific called the USS Salt Lake City. It was in need of repairs, so he was assigned to work on the repairs.
While working on the ship, it was called to service, and Chet went to war. After a couple of battles where the ship was damaged from Japanese shelling it went to Hawaii to be repaired. After that, it was sent to the battle at Iwo Jima. That’s right. The Iwo Jima that we all know about. Chet was actually there to see the flag being raised by the Marines on Mount Suribachi:
The Iwo Jima Monument
Chet fought valiantly in the battle at Iwo Jima and was able to recall stories of specific attacks against targets that would make your hair stand on end to listen to. After it was all said and done, Chet was awarded the Victory Medal,
The Victory Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal,
and the Philippine Liberation Campaign Ribbon.
Philippine Liberation Ribbon
As well as others….
At the time that I knew Chet, I didn’t know any of this about him. Isn’t that the case so many times in our lives. Think twice about that Wal-Mart Greeter when you go to the store. When you see an elderly old man or woman struggling with her cart to put her groceries in her car…. You may be looking at a hero.
I was looking at Chet thinking, “boy. This guy sure enjoys looking at cars…. I’m hungry.” This past week I was thinking about writing tonight about an event that took place while Ben and I were on overhaul at Muskogee. I thought it would be a funny story that you would enjoy. So, I asked my roomie, “What was the name of the guy that was staying with Joe Flannery in the trailer? The one with the gray hair?”
He reminded me that his name was Chet Turner. Steven told me that Chet had died a while back (on January 12, 2013, less than two weeks after I started writing about Power Plant Men) and that he was a good friend. So much so, that Steven found it hard to think about him being gone without bringing tears to his eyes. This got me thinking…. I knew Chet for a brief time. I wondered what was his story. I knew from my own experience that most True Power Plant Men are Heroes of some kind, so I looked him up.
Now you know what I found. What I have told you is only a small portion of the wonderful life of a great man. I encourage everyone to go and read about Chet Turner. The Story of Chester A. Turner
Notice the humble beginning of this man who’s father was a carpenter. Who’s mother worked in the same effort that her son did during the war to fight against tyranny. How he became an electrician at a young age, not to rule the world, but to serve mankind.
Looking at cars has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. I am honored today to have Chet forever in my memory.
Comment from Original Post:
Hey Roomy, been on vacation for a while. Just got around to the story. All I can say is thanks. My eyes are a little blurry at the moment. I will write you later when I can see better.
Comment from Previous post:
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I enjoy reading your blog very much and am so happy you take the time to share these memories. Chet was a wonderful man and I am very blessed to have been raised in the presence of these true heroes.
Looking forward to reading more!
Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy
Originally Posted on May 11, 2013:
If you crossed Walter Matthau with Howdy Doody you would come out with someone that would remind you of Bob Kennedy. All right. Bob Kennedy looked more like Walter Matthau than he did Howdy Doody, but I could tell that when Bob was younger, even though he didn’t have red hair and freckles, I could picture him as a little boy playing with his stick horse wearing a cowboy hat, and to me he would have looked a lot like Howdy Doody…
Walter Matthau
Howdy Doody
Cowboy Bob Kennedy on his stick horse
The day I first met Bob Kennedy I instantly fell in love with him. He was an electrician at the Power Plant in Midwest City and I was there on overhaul for three months during the fall of 1985. Bob was assigned to be our acting foreman while Arthur Hammond and I were there for a major overhaul on Unit 5. — Yeah. Five. They actually had 7, but all of them weren’t operational at the time.
Actually, I think it was Unit 4 that was a small generator that came from a submarine. — Half of the plant was like a museum. I used to park at the far end of the plant just so that I could walk through the museum each morning on my way to the electric shop. I think years later they may have torn that part of the plant down, which should have been illegal since to me it easily was a historical monument.
I called this post “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy” because Bob was tall and when he walked he sort of lunged forward and walked as if he was a giant walking through a forest that was only knee deep to himself. Bob had been an electrician for over 35 years. I know this because one of the phrases he would often say was, “I’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years!”
He had some other phrases, that I will probably mention in a few minutes. First I want to tell you about the relationship I had with Bob…. So, often in the morning after the morning steam horn would go off signalling that it was time to go to work (yeah… .isn’t that cool? A horn powered by steam would go off when it was time to go to work! My gosh… That horn alone was a monument of the 1930’s each morning when I heard it!),
Bob would come out of the office to where I was standing in the shop and say, “Kev. Follow me. I’ll show you what you’re goin’ ta be workin’ on today. Then he would head for the door. I would follow along behind him. I could tell that he preferred that I walk behind him. When I would walk faster, he would spread his lanky legs even farther to keep me one step behind him… so I quickly assumed my place two paces behind Bob.
He would have these large strides when he walked that would cause his body to move in a left and right motion where his arms were swinging at his side. I loved everything about Bob. I loved the way he talked… I loved the way he walked… I wished that I could be a miniature Bob. So, I started to imitate him.
As Bob would walk across the Turbine-Generator floor toward Unit 5 from Unit 7 (where the electric shop was located)), I would follow along two paces behind him trying my best to walk just like him. I would make very long strides to match Bob’s. I would swing my arms and lean left and right as I walked just like Bob. Bob was my hero and I wanted to let everyone know that I loved Bob and I wanted to be as much like Bob as I possibly could. So, as I walked I had a tremendous grin on my face. My expression was full of the satisfaction of knowing that I was literally following in Bob’s footsteps!
Operators and other maintenance workers that would see us instantly understood my intentions as they would grin, or laugh, or fall down in a total convulsion of uncontrollable laughter, sharing in my elation of being a miniature Bob.
I wish I could say that my time with Bob was one of total contentment and joy at being a miniature Bob that had “done it this way for 35 years”, but there were some setbacks. The first problem was that Arthur Hammond was with me on overhaul, and there was one major flaw in this combination….. Arthur liked to argue. See my post from two weeks ago called “Power Plant Arguments With Arthur Hammond“.
Before I go into the contention part, I want to first tell you about my second best Bob Kennedy Phrase. It is…. “I have a tool for that.”. You see. At this older gas plant where Bob Kennedy had spent the greater portion of his life, he had created a tool for just about every difficult job at the plant to make it easier.
Often in the morning when Bob would show me the job that I was going to be performing for the day, he would qualify it by saying, “I have a special tool for this.” Then he would take me back to the shop, reach under one of the work benches and pull out a work of art that comprised of chains, levers, pulleys and specialized cables that would make a seemingly impossible job, possible. He had a tool for everything.
So, when Arthur and I realized that Bob had a tool for everything we came up with a song for Bob that went to the tune of Big John. And old song about a guy named Big John that worked in a mine that collapsed one day. If you are older than I am (52), then you may have heard it before.
In case you haven’t, here is a YouTube version of Big John sung by Jimmy Dean:
Now that you have listened to the song about Big John, here is the song that Arthur and I devised about Bob Kennedy:
Big Bob…. Big Bob….
Every morning when he showed up at the plant, You could see him arrive.
He was 6 foot 6, and weighed more than than 145.
Wore a chip on his shoulder
And kinda wobbly at the hip.
Everyone knew he didn’t give a flip… That was Bob….
Big Bo ahh… ob… Big Bad Bob. Big Bob….
Bob didn’t say much ’cause he was quiet and shy,
He hummed and we hawed and we didn’t know why.
That was Bo ahh…. ob…. Big Bad Bob….
When he would say, “I’ve gotta job… for the two of you…
Follow me… and I’ll show you what to do…
” That was Bob…. Bahhh….ob… Big Bad Bob….
When somethin’ didn’t work, he would say real quick,
Just spit in the back and give it a kick,
That was Bob…. Baaahhh…ob…. Big Bad Bob.
When you’ve been doin’ it this way for 35 years,
It doesn’t matter what problem you’ve got sittin’ right here’s….
‘Cause I’m Bob…. Baaaah….ob…. Big Bad Bob…..
You see, I have a tool to fix it up just right,
Let me show you how it’s done. I’ll show you the light….
That was Bob….. Baaaah…..ob… Big Bad Bob!
Arthur and I would sing or hum this song as we worked. It made the day go by so fast that we wondered if Bob himself wasn’t warping time using some tool he kept under a workbench in the electric shop.
Like I said…. I love Bob, and I have since the day I met him, and I always will. There came a day when there was contention in the ranks…. I saw it beginning when Arthur was arguing each day with Bob. I think it had to do with the fact that Bob liked to argue also… and neither of them liked to lose an argument. So, each morning, either Arthur or Bob would win the argument (which sounds a lot like a Dilbert moment today)….
My two friends whom I love dearly (to this day) quickly were at each other’s throats. I didn’t realize how much until the morning of December 18, 1985, just before I left the shop and Bob Kennedy said to me… “That Arthur Hammond…. He sure can dish it out, but he just can’t take it”. I walked straight from that conversation down to the the mezzanine level of unit 5 where Art was working on a motor. The first thing he said to me was, “Bob sure can dish it out but he just can’t take it.”
At that point I told Art to just wait a minute. There was something I had to do…. I went back to the shop and told Bob that there was something at the motor where we needed his help. As I was walking with Bob across the mezzanine and down to the motor, my heart was split in two. Here were two of my friends at odds with each other….. Two people whom I would spend the rest of my life praying for their happiness. Yet they viewed each other as mortal enemies…
I had to figure that both of them were right in their own way, yet both of them were wrong about each other. So when Bob arrived at the motor I told them both (as if I had suddenly turned into their mother)…. A little while ago, Bob told me that ‘Art can sure dish it out, but he just can’t take it.’. Then I walked down here and Art tells me the exact same thing about Bob. Now…. what is going on here? Bob?
Bob looked at the two of us like the time had finally come to let it all out…. he said, “Every time we have an argument about anything Art here runs to Ellis Rook complaining about me. If he has something to say, he should come straight to me. Not run to our supervisor!”
Art said, “Now wait a minute! It isn’t me that is running to Ellis Rook! Ellis just spoke with me this morning about sending me back to the plant because I don’t get along with you (meaning Bob). Each time we have an argument, you run to Ellis Rook. Ellis has been telling me that he is thinking of sending me home because you can’t get along with me! Bob had a shocked look on his face.
Playing the facilitator role, I asked Bob… “Is this so?” Because I remembered that one day before (on December 17, 1985) when I had to leave for part of the day to get my blood test because I was going to be married (and in Oklahoma you still needed a blood test to be married)…. when I had returned, I met Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) in the elevator, he had asked me about Arthur Hammond.
As a side note, because of the new changes in overtime rules, if I left the plant in the middle of the day, I wasn’t supposed to stay long enough to collect overtime. Ellis Rook started to tell me that I shouldn’t have come back to work after getting my blood test, because I wasn’t eligible to work overtime after taking off part of the day. After apologizing to him (humbly and profusely), he said, that it would be all right just this once… I figured it was because I was going to be married that Saturday on December 21, 1985. Ellis said that he had heard some bad things about Arthur and he was considering sending him back to our plant.
This would have been a terrible disgrace for Arthur and would have been on his permanent record as someone that wouldn’t be able to go on overhaul anymore. I assured Ellis that Arthur Hammond was the most upright of employees and that there wasn’t any reason to send him home.
So, I asked Arthur…. was it true that he had been going to Ellis Rook (the electrical supervisor) to complain about Bob each time they had an argument… Arthur assured the both of us that not only wasn’t it him, but that it was Bob that had been complaining to Ellis Rook about him each time they had an argument. That was why he said Bob could dish it out, but he just couldn’t take it.
Bob replied, “It wasn’t me! It was Arthur! Every time we had an argument Ellis Rook would come to me and ask me about it. That is how I know that Art has been running to Ellis complaining about me. I would never tell Ellis about it! I would deal with it directly with Art.” Art said, “Ellis Rook was asking me the same thing!”
So, I asked…. How would Ellis know if neither of you went to him to complain? I wouldn’t have told him…. This led us to the third person that was present during every argument….
You see, there was another electrician from the plant across town that was there every time Ellis came to Bob asking about Arthur after an argument… Let’s call it Mustang Plant (since that was the name). In order not to embarrass him, I won’t tell you his name, but his initials are “Randy Oxley”. Randy Oxley desperately wanted to move from Mustang Plant to the plant in Midwest City… (all right… since I’m already naming names of plants, I might as well say “Horseshoe Plant”)…
For a time during this overhaul I spent a great deal of time in the electric shop working on motors. Each day I would stand at a workbench disassembling motors, cleaning out their sleeve bearings (yeah. these old motors at the old plant had sleeve bearings) and measuring them, and re-assembling them. During that time there were two things that I listened to. The first thing was the radio…. At that time in history… the leading rock radio stations would play the top 20 songs only. That meant that after listening to the top 20 songs, the only thing left to listen to was the top 20 songs all over again…. To me… It was like a nightmare.
The songs I listened to 100 times were songs like
“Say you Say Me” by Lionel Riche,
One More Night by Phil Collins:
Every Time you Go away by Paul Young:
We Built This City by Jefferson Starship:
Something in the Air Tonight by Phil Collins:
I’m sorry to do this to you, but this last song I know I must have listened to about 50 times as the top 20 played over and over again about every two hours as it has been drilled into my head. I know. I can feel the pity from every one of you who have just read this post.
Today I have “Something In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins on my iPod only because when I listen to it once each week it reminds me of the time I spent in the electric shop at Horseshoe plant working on those motors working around Reggie Deloney, Steven Trammell (otherwise known as ‘Roomie’), Paul Lucy, and the others that were there during that overhaul.
The second thing that I listened to while I was working on the motors in the electric shop was Randy Oxley. Randy was much like Steven Higginbotham, the summer help that I had worked with the first summer I had worked at our plant. See…. “Steve Higginbotham’s Junky Jalopy Late for the Boiler Blowdown“. He liked to talk.
Randy didn’t consider me as an important asset, so he didn’t talk much to me. He did, however, talk to one of the Maintenance Supervisors, who happened to be his uncle. You see… Randy wanted desperately to move from Mustang Plant to Horseshoe Plant. There was an opening for the B Foreman at Horseshoe plant, and he figured that one of the men in the electric shop would surely get the new foreman opening, which would leave an opening for an electrician.
So Randy would try to butter up his uncle (His uncle was called “Balkenbush”). He didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there carefully honing a sleeve bearing for an old GE motor. He openly expressed his opinion. It is only because of his blatant disregard for discretion that I don’t feel any guilt to pass on the conversation.
The one phrase that sticks in my mind is that Randy, while trying to convince his uncle that they should hire him in the electric shop at Horseshoe lake, said, “I am the best electrician at Mustang Plant. The only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it!”
I’m not kidding…. “I am the best electrician at the plant… the problem is that I’m the only one that knows it….”
This became one of my favorite phrases of all time. I couldn’t wait to share it with Arthur…. I told him… “I am the best darn BS’er of all time… the only problem is that I’m the only one that knows it…” Art would say…. “I’m the best goof ball of all time… only I’m the only one that knows it…” I know I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.
Actually, I use this phrase to also remind me to never get such a big head that I really think that I’m better at something than others think I am… because they usually know better than I do.
So, this brings us back to the Art and Bob Cage Fight….
It became obvious that both of them had become snookered. Every time Art and Bob had argued about something and Randy Oxley was around, Randy would run up to Ellis’s office and tell him that Art and Bob were at each other’s throats.
Randy was trying to butter himself up to Ellis so that he would hire him when there was an opening in the electric shop (which one was supposed to be coming up on the horizon). Art and Bob each thought the other had run to Ellis complaining about the other….
That was when the other shoe dropped….
Many years before, when I was still a summer help, and when I was a janitor, there was an electrician at our plant named Mel Woodring. Mel had decided that he didn’t have a future at our plant so he applied for a job at Muskogee. Of course, Bill Bennett and Leroy Godfrey (or was it Jackie Smith?) were glad to give him a glowing recommendation because they thought that when Mel left, it gave them an opportunity to hire someone that would…. let us say… fit their culture in a more effective manner.
Because I was a janitor at this time, I was not eligible to apply for an Electrical job, even though Charles Foster had become my mentor and had me begin taking electrical courses through the company.
I had worked the year before I was working with Bob Kennedy at the plant in Midwest City, Oklahoma at Muskogee plant around Mel Woodring. I never worked directly with him, so I will just say that he met the expectations that had been set by my bucket buddy back home, Diana Brien.
Fast forward a year later to when I am on overhaul at Horseshoe plant….. Steven Trammell, Bob Kennedy and a few other electricians that had spent many years at the plant, all thought they would be possible contenders for new foreman’s job. Any of them would have been excellent candidates.
To their stunned surprise… Mel Woodring from Muskogee was given the job! To me, this was an obvious case of the “promote someone in order to get him out of the shop” syndrome.
It turned out that the foremen at Muskogee (John Manning), including our illustrious Don Spears, that I had the momentary lap dance with the year before (see, “Lap O’ Luxury at the Muskogee Power Plant“), had decided to give Mel the highest rating possible so that he would get the job at Midwest City, thus relieving Muskogee from the burden that our plant had placed on them by suggesting that Muskogee transfer him from our plant.
Not only was the Horseshoe plant in a state of shock, but so was Randy Oxley. This meant that there wasn’t going to be an opening in the electric shop, and all of his “schmoozing” had been for naught.
The last day of the overhaul was December 20, 1985, the day before my wedding. I remember that Paul Lucy wanted me to go to a “gentleman’s club”(quite the oxymoron if you ask me) to celebrate and have a sort of a bachelor’s party…. I remember looking straight at Art Hammond right after Paul asked me, and Art shook his head and said…. “Don’t listen to him. Do what is right.” I assured Art that I had no intention of ruining the rest of my life the day before my wedding.
I went directly home.
The next day, Art Hammond was at my wedding with his wife. It was, and still is, the most blessed day of my life. Partly because Art was there at the reception dancing alongside me. I was lucky that I didn’t have a black eye… (which is another story)… and lucky that Art and Sonny Kendrick (who sang at my wedding) were there. Of all of my friends at the power plant, they were the ones that came to my wedding reception of all the people my mom had invited from the plant.
Years later, I traveled with Bob Kennedy on a bus from his plant to Oklahoma City to visit the new Transmission Control Room and back. We sat together and it was just like we had never been apart. Bob talked… and I wished in my mind that I could be a miniature Bob walking behind him every step of the way.
Today any time I have to take a big step for whatever reason…. Bob Kennedy immediately comes to mind. I think about when Bob climbed out of that bus… These words come to my mind….
Through the dust and the smoke of this manmade hell walked a giant of a man that ‘lectricians knew well…. Like a Giant Oak Tree, he just stood there all alone….Big Baaah…. ob…. Big Bad Bob…. Big Bob….. Everyone knew it was the end of line for Big Bob…. Big Bad Bob…. An Electrician from this Plant was a Big Big Man… He was Big Bob! Big Bad Bob! Big Bob!
A Slap in the Face at a Gas-fired Power Plant
Originally posted June 21, 2013:
Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Thanks to my high school math teacher Robert Burns, I have always admired Archimedes. I remember the day he was talking about him in class, and he was explaining how Archimedes had sat down in the bathtub and when the water overflowed, and he suddenly realized how to calculate the volume of the king’s crown, he jumped out of the tub and ran down the street in his birthday suit yelling “Eureka! Eureka!” Meaning… I have found it! I have found it! I especially remember Mr. Burn’s eyes tearing up as he told this story. To Mr. Burns, mathematics was an adventure. He instilled this love into me.
So, how does a discussion about Archimedes tie into a story about a Gas-fired Power Plant in central Oklahoma? Well it does, or it did, on December 19, 1985.
The day began with my drive from Oklahoma City, where I was staying, to Harrah, Oklahoma where I was on overhaul at a power plant called Horseshoe Lake Plant. The lake must have been named Horseshoe Lake for the obvious reason that it was shaped like a Horseshoe as it wrapped around the north part of the plant.
I suppose this lake was originally used to cool the condenser water once the steam had been used to turn the turbine, but it was much too small to be used by the units that were in operation when I was at the plant. Instead it was a Fish farm where Tilapia were raised.
A Power Plant Tilapia
I wrote about working at this plant on this overhaul in an earlier post called “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. This morning when I arrived, I figured I would be working in the shop repairing more of the older open-faced motors with their sleeve bearing and cambric insulation. It started out that way.
An example of an old GE open-faced motor
One time during the morning, Ellis Rook, the electrical Supervisor came up to me and started talking to me about the ROLM phone computer. He knew I had experience working on the Phone system. I had been trained by the best even before I had gone to Muskogee to take a class. Bill Rivers at our plant had taught me how to make “moves and changes” and how to troubleshoot the entire plant’s phone system without ever leaving the lab.
A ROLM Phone Computer
Anyway. Ellis Rook told me about the problem they were having with the phone system that day. He told me what had been done to try to fix the problem. I was thinking of a few things I would try (even though I was still more of a Rookie than Ellis Rook — ok. I couldn’t resist that one). I had been an electrician in training for just over 2 years, which still made me a rookie.
I originally thought Ellis had approached me for ideas on how to fix the problem, so I was formulating some answers in my mind while he was going on… then he said, “What I do every time to fix any problem is just reboot the computer.” — ok. He wasn’t seeking advice. He was seeking approval. So, I looked at him with as blank of a stare I could and just nodded and replied, “Well, that usually does it.” — Nevermind that it took about 25 minutes for one of these old ROLM computers to reboot and during that time all communication with the outside world was cut-off.
This was when I remembered a story that Bob Kennedy had told me about Ellis Rook.
One day, he took another electrician with him to inspect the exciter collector rings on one of the units. The exciter is connected to one end of the generator usually (though if I’m not mistaken, the exciter house was off to one side), and it spins at 3600 rpm. It is not coincidental that this is 60 cycles per second, which is how fast the electricity alternates between positive and negative in your house. This is exactly why the electricity alternates that fast. Because that is how fast the turbine-generator is spinning.
Anyway, Ellis had taken a strobe light with him to go inspect the collector rings on the exciter because there was some indication that a fuse had blown on one of the collectors. Using the strobe light, you could set it to blink at 3600 times per minute and the collector rings spinning at 3600 rpm would appear to stand still.
A typical strobe light
By slowly adjusting the rate that the strobe light was flashing, you could rotate the shaft slowly and inspect it just as if it was standing still, even though in reality it was still spinning at 3600 rpms (the same speed as the lawn mower in the post: “Something is in the Water at the Muskogee Power Plant“).
After examining the shaft for a bit, they located the blown fuse. When the fuse blew, a little indicator would stick out so it could easily be seen. Ellis Rook slowly rotated the shaft around until the fuse was in a good position and then stopped the shaft from rotating by setting the strobe light to the exact same rate that the shaft was rotating.
Then Ellis said something that would go down in the Annals of History at Horseshoe Lake. He told the electrician to change out the fuse. — Ok. Stop and think about this for a minute. The room where the collector rings are is normally dark, so all they can see is this turbine shaft in front of them and it looked like it was standing still. Forget the roar of the spinning turbine and just chalk it up to a loud fan running.
Luckily the electrician wasn’t lulled into a false sense of security and didn’t put his hand forward to remove the fuse. That would have easily have been the last thing he would have ever done (as a live human being). — There has to be a good murder mystery plot involving a strobe light. I’m sure one of the great writers at WordPress can come up with one. I can think of a couple myself.
Anyway, when Ellis Rook told me how he fixed the telephone computer problems by rebooting the computer, this story flashed through my mind for about 3 seconds. I think I put my hands in my back pocket just for safe keeping.
Anyway. I ate lunch in the electric shop office with my ol’ “Roomie” Steven Trammell, (We have called each other roomie from the time we were in Muskogee on overhaul in 1984. See the post about Muskogee in the link above. To this day, we call each other roomie, as we have kept in touch throughout the years). While I was sitting there arguing with Art Hammond about something (See the post: “Power Plant Arguments with Arthur Hammond“) I was reading an instruction manual about some electronic sensor that could tell you the percentage open a series of valves all in one little box.
Reggie Deloney had been working with the engineer on this valve detecting device for the past 4 weeks, and couldn’t get it to work. The engineer asked me if I would look at it to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it, because it wasn’t working at all…. It would work every now and then, but then it would stop.
When I read the manual I noticed that there was a “common” in the circuitry and that Reggie and the engineer had assumed that the common was the same as the “ground”. This usually isn’t true in electronic circuits as it is in regular electrical wiring. So, I stood up from where I was lounging back reading the pamplet and lifted the common wire up so that it wasn’t touching the metal cart, and suddenly the valve indicator worked.
When Reggie returned from lunch, I excitedly told him what I had found. He looked a little astonished, so I showed him. He had only spent the last 4 weeks working on this. So, I went into the shop and worked on another motor.
Later I walked into the office figuring that Reggie had told the good news to the engineer. He was sitting there with the engineer scratching their heads still trying to figure out why the instrument still wasn’t working. So, I picked up the wire so it wasn’t touching the cart, and said. “See? Works.” Reggie with a very irritated voice said, “Yes! You figured it out!” He looked at me with a look that said, “Get out of here!” So, I left.
Art, who was listening said, “I don’t think Reggie is ready to figure it out yet.” Then I got it. Oh. I see… It is nice and cool and clean in the office. The engineer wasn’t going to figure it out on his own…. Just a week or so left of overhaul….
About that time, Bob Kennedy, my acting A Foreman told me to go with Bill Thomas and help him out. Bill was from our plant and was a welder. He was working out of our shop to help us out with any mechanical needs we had from welding to uncoupling pumps and fans and realigning motors and any other stuff. Now… I know that Bill Thomas had a nickname. But I usually called people by their real names, so I only remember him as Bill Thomas. Maybe a Power Plant Man reading this post will remind me of Bill’s nickname.
This is where Archimedes comes into the story.
So, Bill Thomas had been working on a cooling water fan structure all morning single-handed lifting it up. It weighed somewhere between 50 to 75 tons. um… yes…. I think that is about it… about 100,000 pounds. yet, Bill using nothing but the muscles in his arms and back had been lifting this monstrosity off of the ground. Like Archimedes who lifted an entire ship out of the water once using a lever.
Bill was lifting the top round part off of the ground so that he could work under it.
You see. With True Power Plant Men, you really don’t ever hear that something “can’t” be done. Bill had to work under this large round hunk of metal, so he had to pick it up. After spending two hours lifting it with only his two arms spinning a huge chain-fall, he had managed to lift the structure 2 inches from the ground. — well. No one said anything about tossing it in the air… just lifting it off the ground. He still had about 22 inches more to go.
This is a 3 ton chain-fall. The one we were using was more than 10 times bigger
This was where I came in. Did I tell you this plant was old? Well it was. They didn’t have a lot of electricity in this building we were in, and there wasn’t an electric hoist, so Bill had to pull a chain that went around a pulley that turned a shaft to a gearbox that would slowly (real slowly) lift something huge. So, the Power Plant Men from this plant had created a “tool” to make this job faster.
Bill had pulled an air compressor over to the building and had hooked the air hose up to the special tool.
This is the exact size and type of air compressor
This was going to make his job much faster. There was only once catch. He needed an extra weight. I was the extra weight that he needed.
You see. The special tool was an air powered grinder.
An air powered grinder. Only the one we used was much bigger
And it was mounted to a piece of plywood. the grinding wheel had been replaced with a pulley. The idea was to stand on the plywood and step on the lever that operated the grinder so that it would spin the pulley. The chain for the chain-fall would fit through the pulley assembly.
Bill had asked the person that gave him this special tool what happens when the chain snags. They said, that’s when you need the extra weight. They explained to Bill that when two people are standing on the plywood, they will be able to overpower the grinder so that it can’t pull itself out from under them. If there isn’t enough weight on the plywood, then if the chain snags, the special tool will slide across the floor and attempt to climb up to the top of the chain-fall until someone lets off of the lever that operates the grinder.
So. I was the extra weight. Not that I was all that big at the time.
Anyway. The next thing I knew, I was standing on the plywood, and Bill was operating the large grinder with his foot and we were lifting the large cylinder off of the ground. Before long we had it at least a foot up. Bill had put some stops under the cylinder in case we had to set it down for some reason, it wouldn’t have to go all the way to the ground.
That’s when it hit me…. No. I didn’t suddenly remember that I hadn’t had any chocolate for lunch (though, that would have been a tragedy). No. That is when as I was watching the chain spin through the pulley at breakneck speed, the chain suddenly went taut. As the chain became snagged in the chain-fall, the chain whipped up, and before I could perceive what had happened I found myself lifted off of the ground and being thrown backward.
The chain had flown back and slapped me across the face, sending my hardhat flying and shattering my safety glasses. I ended up on my back about 5 feet from where I had been standing. Bill rushed to my side to check if I was all right. I checked myself out and decided that I was going to be all right.
I told him I needed to go get another pair of safety glasses from the tool room. he looked at my eyes and said. “Boy. That is really going to be a shiner tomorrow.” Evidently, I was developing a black eye. I was thinking… “Great! And I’m getting married in two days. I can just see my wedding pictures.” (I can see myself trying to explain to my children in the future that – “No. Your mother didn’t sock me in the eye during the wedding”).
I went to the tool room and checked out a new pair of safety glasses:
The one on the bottom is the kind of safety glasses we had at the time
When I returned to the electric shop, Bill Thomas and Arthur were there. Everyone was saying the same thing. “Boy! That is sure going to be a shiner tomorrow.”
A little while later, Ellis Rook came in the shop and said that Larry Hatley (the plant manager) wanted to talk to me. So, I followed Ellis to the Plant Manager’s office. Larry asked me if I was ok. He wanted to know if I needed medical attention. I assured him that I was all right. My safety glasses had protected me. They had been destroyed in the process, but I was just fine. I think as I left I heard Larry say under his breath, “boy… that is going to be a shiner tomorrow.”
Well. The next day (December 20, 1985) when I showed up at work (my last day there for overhaul before leaving to be married the following day), everyone came around to look at my eye. There wasn’t anything to see really. Any swelling had gone down over the night, and my face was back to it’s regular… um…. tolerable self.
The people I worked with the fall of 1985 at Horseshoe Power Plant treated me like family while I was there. That was the way it was when you worked with True Power Plant Men. I cherish their memory.
Comment from original post:
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Great story! The manager at HLS was Hatley (with a “t”). Larry and I were good friends. He had flown airplanes some (as had I) so we swapped piloting adventures, some of which were actually true. Larry was a good guy.
Power Plant Men 
Great story! The manager at HLS was Hatley (with a “t”). Larry and I were good friends. He had flown airplanes some (as had I) so we swapped piloting adventures, some of which were actually true. Larry was a good guy.