Lizzie Borden meets Power Plant Man
Favorites Post #71
Originally posted March 8, 2014.
I have many stories that I am going to write about the extraordinary Power Plant Men in North Central Oklahoma from 1988 to 1994 this year, but it happened that I was watching a recorded episode of Forensic Files (otherwise known as Mystery Detectives) on TV tonight and it made me remember…. The story I was watching was about a women that was kidnapped in Pennsylvania June 1988 and murdered in order to draw the husband to a location where the kidnapper could collect the ransom and murder the husband. The man guilty of the crime was found to be a person that shared a pew in the Presbyterian Church with the couple but held a grudge against the husband for turning him down for a loan at the bank a few months earlier.
While I watched this show, I flashed back to June 8, 1988 and suddenly remembered the moment I was standing in the parts cage in the back of the electric shop in the main switchgear at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when I heard about the murder of Mark Stepp.
Mark Stepp (left) standing next to Alan Kramer back in 1982
Mark Stepp was an Instrument and Controls employee at our plant. Both he and his wife had been brutally murdered while they slept in their home in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Mark Stepp had been shot once and stabbed many times. His wife Delores had been stabbed to death an excessive amount of times until she was passed dead. I cringe to think about it to this day.
The next thing that entered my mind while watching this video was one month earlier on May 6, 1988. We had a new Electrical Supervisor, Tom Gibson, and he had sent Terry Blevins and I with two of the Instrument and Controls men to Tulsa to a class at Nelson Electric to learn how to program an Allen Bradley PLC (programmable Logic controller).
PLC Training Certificate
When I think about this instance, I remember Ron Madron driving us to Tulsa in a company vehicle to the training (Ron. I know you read this post, so you an correct me if I’m wrong). It could have been Glenn Morgan. One thing I definitely remember is that Mark Stepp was with us that day.
My dear friend Terry Blevins
The reason I remember that Mark was with us that day, was because when the training was over around 1:30 or 2:00 pm. Mark didn’t want to go directly back to the plant. He wanted to go for a ride around Tulsa. This wouldn’t be so peculiar, except that a little more than a month later, Mark Stepp was brutally shot and stabbed to death while he slept in his bed along with his wife.
Somehow I always felt that Mark’s behavior the day when we went to learn how to program Allen Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers was somehow related to his death. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. I’ll let you decide.
So, let me describe what happened early morning on June 8, 1988 (or 6/8/88 for those of you who are fascinated with numbers like I am). In the middle of the night, someone walked into Mark Stepp and his wife’s Dolores’s bedroom, and shot Mark Stepp in the neck. Then proceeded to stab Mark Stepp and his wife an excessive amount of times until they were surely dead. I don’t remember the number of stab wounds. They were stabbed an excessive amount of times.
I remember first hearing about this when I had walked into the electric shop parts cage when I had gone there to look for some receptacle boxes With Diana Brien. Andy Tubbs came into the cage and told us about the murder and that their daughter had found them. The entire Instrument and Control Shop was on “high alert”. Suppose this person was murdering Instrument and Controls Power Plant Men at our plant! That day, no one really knew the motive.
I think some people from our plant were interviewed about the murder. I don’t know. I do know that Francine Stepp, their daughter was often mentioned in the discussion. She was on the same Softball team with her mother and father and many people at the plant were on this same softball team. They were all concerned with her well-being since after spending the night at her friend’s house, she came home and found her parents murdered in their bed.
During the next month while the police were investigating the crime, many revelations came out about Mark Stepp and his wife Dolores. None of which surprised me, though, it may have surprised those that worked more closely with Mark. You see, Mark has showed his true colors that day when we had all driven together to Tulsa to go to training.
When training had finished for the day, Terry Blevins and I (and Ron Madron, if he was the person driving) had counted on getting back to the plant in time to go home at a decent time. Mark Stepp, on the other hand had something else in mind. He wanted to go for a drive through Tulsa.
This didn’t make much sense to me at first, since I couldn’t figure out why someone wouldn’t want to return to the plant in plenty of time to fill out our time cards and get ready to go home to our wives and children (well… I didn’t have any children at the time, but I do remember wanting to go home at the regular time). We were on the clock and we were paid by the hour.
It didn’t make sense to me until we were driving down what seemed to be the frontage road of I-44 at the time and we came up to 6410 E. 11th Street. A similar thing happened to me just last week when a friend of mine was celebrating his 20th year at Dell and a person from Security who was playing a joke on my friend pulled into a location at 6528 North Lamar in Austin Texas. My gut sucked up like I was going to be sick as his friend pulled up to the entrance and proclaimed that this was the second part of his 20 year anniversary present. Well. my friend happened to be in like mind with me, which felt a sudden urge of betrayal and confusion. I’ll let you do your own homework at this point.
Mark Stepp asked us if we wanted to stop at a “Gentleman’s Club”. Really? With three die-hard Power Plant Men in a company car? The rest of us unanimously voted to go back to the plant. Ok. That was an indicator that Mark had something going on with his life that was not quite wholesome. What made this seem surreal was that I was the youngest at 27 years old, Mark was 40 years old and the other two in the car were in their 30s. It wasn’t like we were young unmarried irresponsible kids.
I bring this up because later I was not surprised to learn during the investigation of Mark Stepp’s murder that he had been involved with a group that included “Wife Swapping”. I know there were a lot of rumors going around at the time that one of the persons involved in the murder must have been involved in the occult, and that it made sense given the manner of death. None of this surprised me.
At one point we learned that hidden videotapes had been found in the house of their daughter while she thought she had privacy in her bathroom or bedroom. I don’t know if this was true or not, but I wasn’t surprised if it had been true. Actually, after that day in Tulsa, nothing surprised me about Mark Stepp anymore.
I don’t mean to sound cruel. I grieved when I learned about Mark and his wife’s death as much as many other Power Plant Men. No matter the circumstances. It was a great tragedy. Whatever hatred had been the cause of this murder, it had been caused by tragic events proceeding this murder, I have no doubt.
I say this, because within a month of the murder, the murderer had been located. It turned out to be their own daughter Francine. I didn’t know the family at all, and I have never met Francine. Other Power Plant people knew them much better. As I said, they were on a softball team together. Francine would go to the games to watch the team with her mother and father play their games. This came as a shock to them all.
Many people blamed her accomplice Cindy Sue Wynn. Francine’s parents had told Francine that they didn’t like Cindy and wanted her to stay away from her. The story is that Francine was spending the night at Cindy’s house when they devised a plot to kill Mark and Delores. Francine was 18 years old at the time, and was a Freshman at Oklahoma State University. If you would like to learn more about the murder you can find articles from the Daily Oklahoman here: “Two Stillwater Teens Facing Death Charges” and “Man Says he Heard Death Plot“.
They both pleaded guilty and Cindy was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1990, two years later, Cindy pleaded to be placed on a “pre-parole” program which was denied. Francine was sentenced to life in prison. Since that tragic day, Francine Stepp was eligible for parole in 2003. She was denied parole then, and has since been up for parole in 2006, 2009 and 2012. Francine’s next parole hearing is June 2015.
Francine Stepp
Just like the day that Jim Stevenson walked out of the shop telling Bill Ennis about the Snitch stealing the portable generator (See the post, “Power Plant Snitch“), I sat back and didn’t say anything when I heard about Francine’s conviction. What I had to say really wasn’t relevant. Just because it didn’t shock me that this particular daughter was so easily talked into murdering her parents by her friend, what I knew was no proof that she had been abused as a child.
Francine has now served 26 years in prison for murdering her parents. Her accomplice has been out of jail for at least 16 years. Francine is now over 44 years old (and now in 2020 is 50 years old). After 25 years, I think someone needs to take a fresh look at the motive as to why she would have wanted to take the life of her parents. Was it really because her parents didn’t want her to “play” with Cindy? Does that make much sense? Especially with all the other possible motives floating around.
I have recently been watching reruns of “Forensic Files” (also known as Mystery Detectives) on Headline News (CNN). I keep waiting for the episode about Francine Stepp running to her neighbor’s house on the morning of June 8, 1988 screaming that her parents have been murdered. Knowing full well that she had murdered them… But what really was the motive?
Was it really that her parents didn’t let this 18 year old girl spend time with her friend? Then how was she spending the night with her on June 7? Which parent hasn’t forbidden their child to play with someone because they were a bad influence? When did that ever do any good or amount to a hill of beans?
The little time I had spent with Mark Stepp a month before his murder gave me a small glimpse into his life, and maybe the life of his daughter. I didn’t really know the guy. I do know, however, that a true Power Plant Man wouldn’t try to drag three other married Power Power Plant Men (though I was only a pseudo-Power Plant Man myself), to an indecent “Gentleman’s Club” (especially while on the clock).
So, I have to wonder. Will anyone go to Francine’s defense in June 2015? Does she even care anymore? I don’t think she even showed up to her own parole hearing in 2012. She has spent many more years in prison than out of it in her life so far. If she was released, what would she do? Can you start your life over again when it came to a halt when you were only 18?
This is a hard post for me to write. I have a daughter who is 24 (now 30) years old this month. She was born almost 2 years after this tragic event took place, and one year after Francine was convicted of murdering her parents. During my own daughter’s entire life, Francine has been in jail for murdering her parents. Her father worked at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
If Mark Stepp could speak from the grave today at Francine’s next parole hearing, I wonder what he would say? I only know what those at the plant who knew her would say. They all thought she got along with her parents. They thought her parents were proud of her. Billy Joel sang a song called “The Stranger“. It is about looking in the mirror and seeing that other side of you that you don’t let anyone else see. I suppose some people really have one of those lives where they aren’t really honest with the rest of the world. Billy Joel did, evidently. Maybe Mark Stepp did as well.
I have known for a while that I had to write about this story. I have dreaded this post. I am glad to have finally written it. Now I can put it behind me.
Comments from the original Post:
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Wow, that’s an intense story. It certainly seems like there was more going on with Francine than anyone knew. Sad all around, but a very interesting post.
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I can only imagine how hard this was to write. Nice job, I hope writing this helps you in some way. It is amazing how friends can detect something below the surface in other friends. I know that feeling, but nothing like this.
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Hard to read, too. But if we are to understand our species, we have to know such things. And we need to understand when we raise kids … and when we vote, too.
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I can’t for the life of me find the person’s name who wrote this, but I wanted to thank them for doing so. I went to school with Francine and had some of the same classes, but we did not know each other well. I always wondered what happened on that night and why she did it. She was very quiet in high school and as the years progressed she seemed to go from being ‘shy quiet’ to ‘angry quiet’ if that makes sense. I knew absolutely nothing about her life whatsoever so this is just an outsider’s observation. Reading the news made one think that she was this monster. I mean who could fathom killing their parents? However, none of us knew what Francine had to deal with in her life. To be able to commit this type of crime possibly points to some deep-seated anger and animosity. Your input gave me a little snippet of another viewpoint and I thank you for that and I’m sure Francine would as well.
You say you dreaded this post and I’m sure it was very difficult for you. I hope it released anything you were carrying within you. Thank you again as it has shed some light for me and hopefully others as well
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I would encourage anyone reading this post (and the author of this post) to read the book “Unlikely Assassins: The Shocking True Story of a Couple Savagely Murdered by Their Own Teenage Daughter”. It is a book about this murder and contains a lot of information that was gathered while interviewing the detectives involved in this case.
I knew Dee at OSU – as a student and as a coworker. She shared stories about her family, and I believed her and Mark to be loving, involved parents. I was saddened and shocked to hear about these deaths, Francine’s involvement and the things they were involved in. It looks like Dee and Mark were not the only victims in this family. It reminds me that we never know everything about our friends and acquaintances, and that we need to remember to pray constantly for others.
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Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis
Favorites Post #67
Originally posted January 24, 2014:
Reorganizations naturally shuffle things around. People are generally resistant to change and don’t like to find that their routine has been changed without having their input on how to make things better. When the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma went through a downsizing and reorganization in the latter part of 1987, my job changed slightly. Personally, I was grateful for the changes.
Before the reorganization, I had inherited both the precipitators (the large boxes at a power plant that take the ash out of the exhaust from the boiler). This meant that every overhaul, I knew what I was doing. I was working on and in the precipitator. This was generally a dirty and thankless job.
The plant has a similar electrostatic precipitator, only it is twice as long
After the reorganization, however, Terry Blevins was assigned to work on the Unit 2 precipitator, while I worked on Unit 1. I will go into this in more detail later, but for this post, I’ll just point out that this meant that when Unit 2 was on an overhaul (that means the unit is taken offline for one to three months in order to fix and repair things that can only be done while it is offline) I wasn’t automatically assigned to the precipitator. So, I could work on other things.
Terry Blevins
Before the reorganization, Sonny Kendrick had the title “Electric Specialist”. After the reorganization we no longer had a specialist. I’m not sure exactly why. I know that at Muskogee, they still had a specialist in the electric shop. — I will talk about him next year (the specialist at Muskogee). Anyway, I know that Sonny, at the time, was not too happy about his change in job title. I don’t blame him. I would be too. — As you can see by the picture below, he eventually learned to be happy again:
Sonny as he is today
One of the things that the Electric Specialist did during overhauls was test tripping relays. Now that we no longer had a specialist, that was left up to whomever…. The first electricians, besides Sonny, that were assigned to relay testing was Ben Davis and myself. I had started doing it on my own and after about a week, Ben Davis was assigned to help me out.
Ben Davis
We were on a major overhaul on Unit 2 and it had been decided that we were not only going to test the regular super-high voltage breaker relays, we were also going to test all the 480 volt switchgear relays for Unit 2, as well as the intake and coalyard switchgears. I seem to remember making it to the river pump switchgear. Once we started, there was no stopping us.
When I first was told to test the relays, Bill Bennett (our A foreman) told me to have Sonny tell me how to do them. So, I walked into the lab and told Sonny that Bill had told me to ask him to help me learn how to test the protective relays on the switchgear. Sonny, not looking too happy, grabbed a small stack of manuals, walked out into the main switchgear with me, and said, “Here is the relay test set. Here are the manuals that tell you how to hook up the test set and test them.” He turned and walked away…. I was sort of hoping for a more intimate lesson…
I knew the reason Sonny was so upset. Later I learned why he would be as upset as he was to not be able to test the protective relays. It was because when you test, clean and adjust protective relays you have an immediate rush of satisfaction that you have just done something very important. Let me just say quickly (because in another post I will expound upon this), a protective relay is what keeps motors from blowing up. It is what prevents blackouts from happening across the nation. Without properly calibrated protective relays, a power company is just asking for a disaster (or… well….. their insurance company is, because they are the ones that usually end up paying for the damage — which I will also talk about in a later post).
I thought the relay test set that Sonny showed me was the neatest thing I had seen so far in the electric shop. There were two boxes that hooked together with an umbilical cord. They had dials, switches, connectors, meters and a digital readout down to the millisecond. That is, you can read the time to trip a relay down to the one thousandth of a second.
AVO Multi-Amp SR-76 Relay Test Set
I only wish that I had a bigger picture of this relay test set so that you could admire it as much as I did. Even today it gives me goosebumps! Ok. I can imagine those relay technicians that read this blog are looking at this and thinking…. “What kind of piece of junk is this?” Hey (as Mark Fielder used to say), this was my “baby” (only he was referring to the precipitator).
So, back to the story at hand…
Even though I was having a heck of a fun time trying to figure out how to perform these relay tests by reading these manuals about the different kinds of relays, I was glad when Ben Davis was assigned to work with me. I don’t know if he had worked on relays before, but he seemed to know just what to do to hook up the test set and make things easier.
A panel of Protective Relays
The best suggestion that Ben had right off the bat was that we should be listening to the radio while we were working. This might have been a preventative measure after the first couple of days to prevent the same situation from occurring that happened to Ed Shiever when he and I were trapped inside a confined space for a couple of weeks (See the post: “Ed Shiever Trapped in a Confined Space with a disciple of Ramblin’ Ann“). Either way, it was a great idea.
You wouldn’t think that inside a switchgear 20 miles from the nearest town with a radio station, that we would have any reception on a little transistor radio, but we were able to manage. It seemed that we had to be a little creative at times with the antenna in certain locations, but, like I said. We managed.
My perception of Ben Davis up to this point was that he was a “Good-ol’ boy”. That is, a country music type Oklahoman that had grown up in Shidler, Oklahoma where the major attraction in the town was the High School. To my surprise, I quickly found out that he was a connoisseur of Rock and Roll.
It wasn’t until I was in college before I realized that the easy listening station I had been listening to on our family radio at home while I was growing up was playing rock and roll songs using an orchestra with violins and clarinets instead of electric guitars. I learned from my dorm mates all about groups like Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles (yeah… can you believe it? I mean. I knew “Hey Jude”, “Let it Be” and a few others, but most of the Beatles I thought were instrumentals normally played on violins with a man waving a wand) and many others. When I found out about “Rock and Roll”, I had to go out and buy dozens of 8-track tapes, as fast as I could find them.
A stack of 8 Track Tapes
So, here was Ben Davis. Even better than the “Good Ol’ Boy” that I already thought he was. And he loved classical rock and roll. I can only say that the next month and a half while we tested relays all over the plant, were one of the best times I have ever spent in my life! He knew all the 60’s and 70’s rock and roll bands.
As each song would come on the radio, we would guess (well, I was guessing most of the time…. most of the time Ben already knew), what the name of the song was and the name of the band. So, not only were we doing one of the most satisfying jobs at a power plant, but I was also have a lot of fun with Ben listening to the radio! Who would have thought it? No wonder Sonny was upset he wasn’t testing relays this overhaul.
I could go on about all the different bands and their backgrounds that I learned from Ben during that overhaul, but (unlike me), you probably already know all that stuff. It never ceases to amaze me how many holes I have in my education until one is staring at me in the face.
This reminds me of a side story, and I apologize if I have told this before…. I don’t think I have….
After the Reorganization, and after I moved to Stillwater from Ponca City, Scott Hubbard (and Toby O’Brien) and I began carpooling. One morning as we were listening to NPR, Scott Hubbard mentioned something about a “cur”. I asked him, “What’s a cur?” Well, he had the exact same reaction when 11 years earlier I had asked my friends in college at Oklahoma University, Tim Flowers and Kirby Davis, “What’s an orgasm?” — See how little holes in your education can make a big impact?
Just so you don’t get caught in the same predicament… A “Cur” is a mongrel dog. Scott Hubbard couldn’t believe that someone that read the dictionary for fun wouldn’t know what a “cur” was. What the heck? I didn’t grow up in Oklahoma! I checked and the Dictionary in the electric shop didn’t include the word “Cur” — end of side story… which really isn’t a side story, since it was about a Power Plant Man — Scott Hubbard. He probably knew what a “cur” was before he could walk. — I know I haven’t told that story before! I would have remembered that.
I’m not going to go on about all the fun that I had with Ben Davis testing protective relays. I enjoy my memories, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear all about how much I looked up to this Power Plant Hero. The only thing I will add is that the time I spent with Ben during that overhaul has been etched into my memory as one of the most enjoyable times of my life. So, I’ll go onto the next step in our Protective Relay story….
A few years later, in 1993, Sonny Kendrick and Ben Davis and I were sent to “Advanced Protective Relay Maintenance” training in Dallas, Texas. I remember this time so well, I remember the address where we were went. It was at 4271 Bronze Way, Dallas, Texas. It was hosted by the same company that made that wonderful test set I pictured above. The AVO Multi-Amp Corporation.
I brought my wife Kelly and my three year old daughter Elizabeth with me. They stayed at the hotel during the day and played in the swimming pool, while I went to class.
The classes lasted four days, Monday through Thursday. That was where I learned that even though I thought our relay test set was the coolest piece of equipment in the electric shop, it turned out to be archaic by “Protective Relay Maintenance” standards. Not that it didn’t do the job…. So, in order to train us properly, they let us use our own old test set during the training so that we could see how to properly test really advanced relays such as Distant Relays, Syncro-verifier relays, Negative Sequence Relays,directional distance relays and Pilot Wire relays. — These are relays that are found in a large substation that trips high voltage lines that run long distances across the country. — I can tell you’re jealous. — Well.. I imagine it anyway. Knowing what I know now.
This is the book we used in class
So, why drag you all the way to Dallas for this story? There’s a reason.
time for a second side story:
You see. Tim Flowers, whom I mentioned above, knew not too long after he met me that I have the knack of running into people that I know (or should have known in this case), would love this story. You see, I met Tim and Kirby at Oklahoma University and they drove with me to Columbia Missouri in 1979 (along with my brother Greg) when I went to register for classes at Missouri University when I decided to go back to school in my home town.
When we arrived in the town, we were hungry after driving for 8 hours straight from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Columbia, Missouri… so we stopped at Godfather’s Pizza. As we walked in, there was a girl and a guy standing at the counter ordering a pizza. The pretty girl (Pamela Ramsey) with long red hair turned and saw me. She immediately came toward me saying “Kevin Breazile!!!! You owe Me!!! Slightly shocked and pleased, I said, “What for?” She reminded me that I never gave her the pictures that were taken during the Senior Prom. You see. I had taken her to the Senior Prom.
Later I explained that this happens to me a lot. I meet people that I know in the oddest places (even though this wasn’t so odd, since I had grown up in Columbia). It was just that this was the first person we had seen since we entered town. From that point on, Tim (who later worked as a summer help at the power plant) expected that everywhere we went we would run into someone I knew….
End of the second side story. I’m sorry that this is making the post a little longer than usual. I know you have to get back to work….
So, back to the relay training course in 1993 that Ben Davis, Sonny Kendrick and I were taking in Dallas…. On Wednesday night during the training there was a dinner held in a small banquet room in the hotel. Well… of course I had to take my wife and my daughter. So here we were sitting around this table at dinner with the rest of the class of about 10 other non-Sooner Plant employees….
I decided to talk to the guy next to me. He said something back and my wife Kelly asked him, “Where in New Jersey are you from?” She had picked up on a New Jersey accent. He said, Well.. I work in the east for a company called Ebasco, but I’m really from the Midwest. (oh. That was my territory). So I asked a follow-up question. “Where in the Midwest are you from?” He said, “From Missouri.” — Oh. I thought. This is interesting. So was I.
I asked a follow-up question. “Where in Missouri are you from?” He answered…. “Columbia, Missouri.” (What? Where I had grown up?)…. So, I asked a second follow-up Question…. “What High School did you go to?” With a curious look the man answered….. “Rockbridge High School…” (Man!!! the same one as me!!!)…. The third follow-up question….. “What year did you graduate?” Now, looking really suspicious… he said, “1978”. Trying to contain my excitement… I replied….. “Oh… so, you graduated from Rockbridge High School the same year I did….”
What are the odds? There were 254 students in our graduating class. This guy who currently lived somewhere in the east is sitting next to me at a dinner of about 10 people attending Advanced Protective Relay Training in Dallas, Texas where neither of us are from, and we both graduated from the same school back in Columbia, Missouri 15 years earlier! His name is Randy Loesing. He was working for a company called Ebasco at the time. He said, “I thought I recognized you! I just wasn’t sure.” I didn’t recognize him at all until I went back home and looked in my yearbook.
It turned out that he kept in touch with two of my oldest friends from the second grade, Mark Schlemper and Brent Stewart. So we talked about them. What an incredible coincidence. Like I may have mentioned before. It happens to me all the time. It turns out that an old friend of mine from the 3rd grade in Columbia, Missouri that I used to go to his house when we were stamp collectors and had a stamp collecting club, lives 5 miles south of me today in Round Rock Texas (He’s in Pflugerville).
Russell Somers lives in the same direction and just about the same number of miles as when we were kids. Not only that, but he worked at Dell while I was working at Dell (though I didn’t know it at the time). He has an older daughter and a younger son, just like me only younger. The same is true for another 3rd grade friend that I graduated from Rockbridge Highschool and the University of Missouri with, Caryn Lile (now Caryn Iber) who lives in Wisconsin. She has a daughter and a son the same age as my kids. She was living in Tulsa when I was living in Stillwater, Oklahoma. — Like I said… happens to me all the time.
Tim Flowers realized this odd phenomenon in college. I had told him earlier that my father told me that if I was ever stranded somewhere that I could look up the local Veterinarian and tell him that I was the son of Dr. James Edward Breazile, and they would help me. So, when we were hiking in the mountains in Colorado and we met a man walking along a trail in the middle of nowhere above Estes Park near the Great Divide, when I told him who I was, he gave us a curious look…. then divulged his most intimate secrets of his life and where he had stashed his most values possessions, Tim told me later. “I really thought he was going to know who you were when he gave us that funny look.” I replied. “I think he did..”
I again apologize for the length of this post. It is rare that I ramble on this long. I can thank Ramblin’ Ann for the ability to Ramble so well. I can thank Ben Davis for recognizing a rambling situation and replacing it with a rock and roll learning opportunity. As I said earlier. One of the most enjoyable times I have spent in my entire life is the time I spent with Ben Davis testing Protective Relays! Bless you Ben and I pray for you, your wife, your son and your daughter on the way to work each morning.
Today when I hear any of the hundreds of rock and roll songs come on the radio that we listened to that month and a half, I can see us testing the relays, looking off into space saying, “Rolling Stones?” “No. Steve Miller Band?” Really? I thought Browneyed Girl was sung by the Rolling Stone! It turned out that the version that we listened to was from the creator of the song, Van Morrison. Who would have thought that he would sound so much like Mick Jagger. I can see Ben saying… I see what you mean… it kind of sounds like Mick Jagger.
As an add on to this story…
I now work at General Motors in Austin Texas. My best friend in High School was a guy named Jesse Cheng (I have mentioned him in other posts, especially in reference to the phrase “Jesse! Come get your Chili!). He was two years older than me, and throughout the years we would lose track of each other and then reconnect. He went to Yale to become an Engineer, then to the University of Missouri to become a Medical Doctor, then to Harvard to earn a Masters in Public Health and Epidemiology.
It turns out that we both now work at General Motors where he works in Arlington Texas as a Medical Director and I work in IT in Austin. We can IM (Instant Message) each other whenever we want, and we talk now at least once every week.
A Power Plant Day to Remember
Favorites Post # 5 (posted in no particular order)
Originally posted June 1, 2013:
There seem to be some days of the year where every few years, I am not surprised to learn something out of the ordinary has happened. Almost as if it was a personal holiday or anniversary for some unknown reason. One of those days of the year for me is June 25. It is 2 days before my sister’s birthday and another grade school friend of mine…. It is a few days after the beginning of summer…. It is exactly 6 months or 1/2 year from Christmas. We sometimes jokingly refer to June 25 as the “anti-Christmas”.
June 25 was the date my son was born. Exactly 14 years later to the day, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died on the same day, as well as a relative of mine.
Farrah Fawcett
Michael Jackson
A day my son remembers well. He told me that we went out to eat at Logan’s Roadhouse for dinner, and reminds me of the people that died on that day. He has a detailed memory of his 14th birthday and what we did during the day on June 25, 2009.
June 25 exactly 10 years to the day before my son was born, I have a very vivid memory of the events that took place that day. Because the events of this day are often in my mind, I will share them with you. It was a day where I spent some time with a True Power Plant Man, met a true hero and dealt with the emotions of two great tragedies. The day was June 25, 1985.
I had been an electrician at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma for a little over a year and a half, which still made me an electrical apprentice at the time. Surprisingly, that morning Bill Bennett told me that he wanted me to go with Ben Davis to Enid to find a grounded circuit. He said that it would be a good opportunity to learn more about the auxiliary generators that were in Enid Oklahoma. They were peaking units that we would use only during high demand days during the summer.
The reason I was surprised was because I didn’t normally get to work with Ben. I had worked with him the previous fall at the Muskogee Power Plant when we were on “Overhaul”. You can read about that “adventure” in the post: “Lap O’ Luxury at the Muskogee Power Plant“. Ben wasn’t on my crew in the electric shop, so we rarely ever worked with each other.
Ben Davis
Ben and I loaded some equipment into the back of the Ford Pickup and climbed into the truck. Ben was driving. The normal route to take to Enid would be to go south on Highway 177 and then go west on the turnpike straight to Enid. Ben had worked at Enid a lot in the past, and over the years, had taken different routes for a change of scenery, so he asked me if I would mind if we took a different route through the countryside. It was a nice sunny morning and it was early enough that the heat hadn’t kicked in, so we took the scenic route to Enid that morning.
I remember going by an old farmhouse that over 12 years later, Ray Eberle shared a horror story about. I remember the drive. We were pretty quiet on the way. We didn’t talk much. Ben was usually a quiet person, and I didn’t think he would appreciate my tendency to ramble, so I just smiled and looked out the window. I was glad that I was with Ben and that I was given the opportunity to work with him. I looked up to him. To me he was one of the True Power Plant Men that gave you the confidence that no matter how bad things may become… everything would be all right, because men like Ben were there to pull you out of the fire when you needed a helping hand.
When we arrived in Enid, it was nearing the time that we would normally take a break. Ben asked if I minded if we stopped by Braum’s to get something for breakfast. Of course, I didn’t mind. I have always had a special affinity for food of any kind. Braum’s has an especially good assortment of delicious meals…. and deserts.
Braum’s is a great place to go for a Chocolate Malt and a Burger. It is only found around Oklahoma and the surrounding states not too far from the Oklahoma border.
We pulled into the Braum’s Parking lot and Ben parked the pickup toward the far end away from any other cars. Somewhere where we could watch it as we ate. I climbed out of the truck and walked toward the entrance. As I passed the handicap parking space next to the front door, I noticed a white Lincoln parked there with a license plate embossed with a Purple Heart.
One like this, only this one didn’t belong to Sam
When I saw this license plate, I wondered who it belonged to in the in restaurant. When I walked in, I immediately knew. There was the hero sitting in the corner booth. There were two elderly men sitting there drinking their coffee. I had wanted to buy them breakfast, but it looked like they had already eaten. I went up to the counter and ordered a sausage biscuit and a drink. Then I walked back around by their table. I paused and looked at them. I smiled….
I wanted to say, “Is that your white car parked right out there?” After one of them said yes, I wanted to say, “Thank you for serving our country.” For some reason I didn’t say anything. I just smiled at the two of them and sat down two booths down the row from them. I’m not usually one for keeping my mouth shut when something comes to mind, but that morning, I kept quiet. This is one of the reasons I think about this day often. Whenever I see a purple heart on a license plate, I think of the two elderly heroes sitting in Braum’s that morning on June 25, 1985.
After eating our breakfast we left Braum’s at 9:30 and Ben drove us to the Auxiliary Generators so that we could find the grounded circuit and repair it. There were some other chores we were going to work on, but that was the most interesting one. Ben had worked on enough grounded circuits in this mini-power plant to know that the first place to look was in a multi-connector, where cables came into the control room and connected to the cables that led to the control panels.
a multi-pole connector like this only bigger.
Ben was right. We quickly found the grounded wire in the connector and did what we could to clear it. As we were finishing this up, the phone rang. The phone was in the garage, and we were in a control room that was like a long trailer parked out back. A bell had been placed outside of the garage so that people working on the generators or in the control room could hear the phone ringing. Ben went to answer it while I finished insulating the connector and reconnecting the circuit.
After a few minutes, Ben came back into the control room and told me that we needed to go back to the plant. He explained that on June 25, 1985 at 9:30 his father had a heart attack in Shidler, Oklahoma. They weren’t sure of his condition, but it didn’t look good. They were going to life-flight him to Tulsa. I immediately knew how he felt.
Life Flight from Tulsa
I remember the morning in my dorm room in college in Columbia Missouri when my mother called me to tell me that my own father had a heart attack and that he was in the hospital in Stillwater, Oklahoma and was being life-flighted to Tulsa. I called up one of my professors at the College of Psychology, Dr. Wright who had called me a month earlier to tell me about the Dean at the Veterinary College a the University that had been fired, (see the post: “Power Plant Snitch“) and told him that I wouldn’t be attending class that morning. He told me he would pass it on to the other professors. Later, when I was in Tulsa, many professors from the University of Missouri in Columbia sent flowers to him in the hospital in Tulsa. My dad used to teach at the University of Missouri.
I remember grabbing a small suitcase, throwing some clothes in it and going straight to my car and driving the 345 miles to Tulsa. It is a long drive. It becomes an even longer drive under these circumstances. That is why as we were driving back to the plant, and Ben was going faster and faster down the highway, I understood him completely. I was praying for the safety of his father and the safety of the two of us.
Ben had expected that by the time we made it back to the plant that his father would be on his way to Tulsa. I suppose he figured that he would go to Shidler and pick up his mother and any other family members and would head to Tulsa. Unfortunately, when we walked into the electric shop, he found out that his father was still in Shidler. No Life Flight would be coming for him. Not for a while at least.
You see, another event had taken place at 9:30 on June 25, 1985. Let me explain it to you like this….. When Ben and I walked out of the Braum’s in Enid, Oklahoma that morning, directly down the road from this Braum’s 100 miles east, just outside of a town named Hallett, an electrical supplies salesman was driving from Tulsa to our power plant in North Central Oklahoma. He was on the Cimarron Turnpike going west.
The salesman looked to the south and he saw something that was so bizarre that it didn’t register. It made no sense. There was a herd of cattle grazing out in a pasture, and while he was watching them, they began tumbling over and flying toward him. He said it was so unreal his mind couldn’t make any sense out of it. Suddenly his car went skidding sideways off the road as a deafening roar blasted his car. He came safely to a stop and just sat there stunned by what had just happened.
Looking to the south, the salesman could see a large mushroom cloud rising in the distance. Something that looked like a nuclear explosion. After composing himself for a few minutes, he drove back onto the road and continued on his way to the plant, not sure what had happened. Upon arriving at the plant, he learned (as did the rest of the employees at the plant) that a fireworks plant had exploded in Hallett, Oklahoma. Here is an article about the explosion: “Fireworks Plant Explosion Kills 21 in Oklahoma“. This was a tragedy much like the West Texas Fertilizer explosion on April 17, 2013 at 8 pm.
What this tragedy meant for Ben was that there wasn’t going to be a Life Flight from Tulsa for his father. They had all been called to Hallett for the tragedy that had occurred there. I believe that Ben’s father survived the heart attack from that day. It seemed like he was taken by ambulance instead.
The timing of these events made me think about Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.
Obi Wan Kenobi
When Darth Vader was trying to persuade Princess Leia to tell him where the rebel base was hidden he blew up her home planet. When this happened Obi Wan Kenobi was on the Millennium Falcon with Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Obi Wan felt the sudden loss of life in the universe when the planet exploded.
This made me wonder….. what about Ben’s father? Had Ben’s father experienced some hidden distress from the sudden tragedy of what happened 60 miles almost directly south of Shidler? The timing and location is interesting. Ben and I were almost due west, and Ben’s Father was almost due North of Hallett that morning when the explosion took place.
Even if it was all coincidental, I have made it into something that is important to me. Don’t most of us do that? Where were you when the Murrah Building was bombed on April 19, 1995 at 9:02 am? What were you doing that morning? I will write about that morning much later. Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001 at 8:46 am? I remember where I was sitting and what I was doing at that moment. On June 25, 1985 at 9:30 am. I know what I was doing at that moment. Our break was over. Ben and I walked out of Braum’s, climbed into the Pickup truck and made our way to the Auxiliary Generators.
That one day, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a True Power Plant Man, Ben Davis. I spent some time sharing his grief for his father and his mother. I met an elderly hero that had been wounded while serving his country. We all grieved for the loss of young lives from the explosion at the fireworks plant in Hallett. June 25, 1985.
Power Plant Safety is Job Number One
Originally posted September 14, 2012:
I found out soon after I arrived at the Coal-fired power plant in Oklahoma the first summer I worked as a summer help that Safety was Job Number One. I was given a hard hat and safety glasses the first day I was there, and I watched a safety film on how to lift with my legs and not with my back. I thought the hard hat made me look really cool. Especially with the safety glasses that looked like someone wore as a scientist during the 1950s. Dark and square.
The first safety glasses we had didn’t have side shields
I used to keep a pair with me when I went back to school. When I was a senior at the University of Missouri, Columbia, while working at the Bakery on Broadway, I kept a pair with me at all times, along with a hat that I had stol…um…. borrowed from my dad and always forgot to return. (In fact, I still have that hat to this day).
A hat just like this. An Inspector Clouseau hat.
That way, whenever someone suspected who I was, I would put on my glasses and hat and people would think I was Clark Kent. Anyway…. I diverse. I never thought about it being an Inspector Clouseau hat until one winter morning in the parking lot at the plant Louise Gates (later Louise Kalicki) called me Inspector Clouseau.
The yellow hard hat made me confident that I was part of the blue collar working class. Hard hats have a suspension system in them that make them look like it is riding too high on your head. You soon get used to it, but for the first couple of weeks I kept bumping into things because my hardhat made me taller than I was used to being.
See? The hardhat looks like it is floating above this man’s head
This is this because of this great suspension system that causes the hat to ride so high on someone’s head. I learned about this not long after I arrived and Marlin McDaniel the A Foreman at the time told me to sort out of bunch of large steel chokers (or slings) in a wooden shack just inside the Maintenance shop by the door to the office elevator.
Ok. Not this big, but pretty large
While I was bending over picking up the chokers (I mean…. While I was lifting with my legs and not my back…) and hanging them on pegs I suddenly found myself laying on the ground. At first I wasn’t sure what had happened because I hadn’t felt anything and it happened so fast. It seemed that my legs had just buckled under me.
I soon realized that one of the large chokers that I had just hung on a peg a couple of feet above my head had fallen off and struck me square in the middle of the hard hat. I was surprised by the force of the cable and how little I had felt. I became a true believer in wearing my hardhat whenever I was working. The steel rope had left a small gash across the hardhat that remained as a reminder to me of the importance of wearing my hardhat at all times.
Larry Riley used to comment to me that I didn’t need to wear it when we were in the truck driving somewhere. Especially when I was sitting in the middle in the back seat of the crew cab and it made it hard for him to see anything through the rear view mirror other than a yellow hard hat sticking up to the top of the cab.
During my first summer at the plant (1979), I did witness how easy it was for someone to hurt their back. I mean… really hurt their back. I was helping to carry a very large 30 foot long section of a wooden extension ladder. There were four of us. Each on one corner. I know that Tom Dean was behind me carrying one side of the back end. I believe that Ben Hutchinson and Aubrey Cargill were on the other side of the ladder.
As we were walking through the shop, Tom stepped on the floor drain just outside of the A Foreman’s office. The drain cover was missing and a wooden piece of plywood had been put in its place to cover the hole.
A Cast Iron Floor drain cover similar to this was missing
Large equipment had driven over the plywood and it was smashed down into the drain making a slight indention in the middle of the floor.
When Tom stepped on the piece of wood, he lost his balance, and ended up spinning himself around as he tried to remain holding onto the ladder. By doing this, he became slightly twisted, and at once he was in terrible pain. Back pain. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this one event was a critical turning point in Tom Dean’s career at the power plant. He was pretty well out the rest of the summer recuperating from the back injury.
The next summer when I returned to the plant, Tom was working in the tool room. Obviously a step down from being a mechanic. He was also very unhappy. You could tell by looking at him that he had lost the proud expression that he had wore the summer before.
I don’t remember how long Tom worked at the plant after that. I just know that it really made me sad to see someone’s life deteriorate during the snapshots that I had in my mind from the summer before to when I returned to see a man tortured not only by back pain, but by a feeling of inadequate self worth. Hurting your back is one of the most common and most serious injuries in an industrial setting. It is definitely a life changing event.
There were other tragedies during my time as a summer help and they didn’t necessarily have to do with something dangerous at work. One summer there was a young man working in the warehouse and tool room. His name was Bill Engleking (thanks Fred. I didn’t remember his name in the original post). The next summer I asked where he had gone, and I learned that one morning he had woke up and found that he had become completely blind. It turned out that he had a very serious case of diabetes. The sugar levels in his blood had reached such dangerous levels that it destroyed his optic nerves overnight.
Then there was one of the Electricians, Bill Ennis. He would say that he was “Blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other one.” He was actually blind in one eye completely, and the other eye he was color blind. So, what he said was actually true.
It happened on occasion that people visiting the plant would be seriously hurt. Everyone at the plant was trained in first aid, and Power Plant Men, being the way that they are, are always willing to do whatever it takes to help someone out in time of trouble.
One day during lunch, a man came to the plant to fill the unleaded gas tank on the side of the garage in front of the warehouse. While he was reaching over the PTO (Power Take Off), His shirt sleeve caught in the spinning PTO shaft and broke his arm.
An example of a PTO shaft on a brush hog
I remember Mickey Postman explaining what happened. His crew was eating lunch in the garage when they heard someone yelling for help. When they ran out to see what had happened, they found the man tied up in the PTO with one bone from his arm sticking straight out in the air. They quickly took care of him and treated him for shock as they waited for the Ambulance from Ponca City to arrive.
It is times like this that you wish would never happen, but you are glad that you had first aid training and you know what to do. This person could easily have died from this injury if not for the quick action of Mickey Postman and the rest of his crew. I believe other Power Plant Men that were there to help was Dale Mitchell, George Alley, Don Timmons and Preston Jenkins. Mickey would know for sure. I’ll leave it up to him to remind me.
Mickey Postman
I have illustrated these tragic events to demonstrate the importance of making Safety Job Number One. The Power Plant Men didn’t have to be told by a safety video to know how important it was. They all knew examples of tragedies such as these.
Each month the plant would have the Monthly Safety Meeting, and every Monday morning each crew would have their own safety meeting. Safety pamphlets would be read, safety videos would be watched. Campaigns would be waged to re-emphasize the importance of proper lifting techniques. Everyone in the plant had to take the Defensive Driving course.
The last summer I worked as a summer help in 1982 was the first summer that everyone was required to take the Defensive Driving course. The course was being given by Nancy Brien, Nick Gleason and Ken Couri. We learned a lot of defensive driving slogans like, “Is the Pass really necessary?” “Slow down, ride to the right, ride off the road” (when an emergency vehicle is approaching), “Use the Two Second Rule” (Only, I think it was 3 seconds at that time). “Do a Circle For Safety” etc….
The Defensive Driving Course we took when I was a summer help
My friend Tim Flowers and another summer help were carpooling during that time and we made signs with those slogans on them. Then when we were driving home in my little Honda Civic, we would hold one of those signs up in the back window so that the Power Plant person that was following us home (Usually Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs) would wonder what it said, and would pull up closer to read the sign, and it would say, “Use the 3 second rule”, or “If you can read this, you are too close”.
That was when I began wearing my seat belt all the time. Before that, it was not common for people to wear seat belts. They only had the lap belt before that, and those weren’t the safest things in the world. Especially since they would get lost inside the seat. I attribute the Defensive Driving Course that I took while I was a summer help at the plant for my safe record as a driver. There were a number of tips that I learned then, that I still use all the time today.
There is one advantage to wearing a hardhat that I didn’t realize until I left the power plant in 2001. It is that you never have to worry about hair loss on the top of your head. Whenever you are outside at the plant, you always wear your hardhat and safety glasses. When I changed jobs to become a software developer at Dell, I would find that just by walking down the street in the neighborhood in Texas, I would quickly develop a sunburn on the top of my head.
During the years of wearing a hardhat, I may have been losing my hair, but it never occurred to me. Not until I had a sunburn on the top of my head. I wondered at times if people would look at me funny if I showed up for work in my cubicle at Dell (when we had cubicles) wearing a yellow hardhat. Oh, and a pair of super stylish safety glasses like those shown at the top of this post.
You know when you are young, and I’m sure this has happened to all of you at one point in your life, you dream that you get off of the school bus at your school in the morning only to find that you are still wearing your pajamas. — Yeah. I thought you would remember that one. Well. I still have dreams of showing up at my desk job wearing a hardhat and safety glasses. I don’t realize it until I lift my hardhat up to wipe the sweat off of my brow, then I quickly look around to see if anyone noticed as I stuff the hardhat under the desk.
Comment from previous post:
Jack Curtis January 22, 2014:
The safety meetings, Defensive Driving, safety glasses… it was the same way for telephone men, too. And they jumped in whenever there were problems as well. It is striking to me, to see the differences in attitudes from one generation to another…
How Many Power Plant Men Can You Put in a 1982 Honda Civic?
Originally Posted on September 21, 2012:
Not long after I became a full time Power Plant employee after I had moved from being a janitor to the labor crew in 1983, I began carpooling with 3 other Power Plant employees. An Electrician, Bill Rivers. A Chemist, Yvonne Taylor, and one of the new members of the Testing team, Rich Litzer. With such a diverse group, you can only imagine the types of topics that were discussed driving to and from work each day.
Bill Rivers usually talked about different absurdities that he encountered during his day as an electrician. How one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, leading sometimes to very funny results. Yvonne Taylor would talk about her farm and something called School Land Lease that she farmed, and how she had to deal with the bureaucracy and the constantly changing laws. Rich Litzer would discuss how their newly formed team were learning new things at the plant and often had funny things to say about his encounters during the day.
Me? Occasionally I would lift up my head from the book I was reading (if I wasn’t the driver), and ask, “Would anyone like to hear about the training that we received from Johnson & Johnson about how to properly wax a floor using their top of the line wax, ShowPlace?” that didn’t usually jump to the top of the list of most interesting stories.
The Best Floor Wax money can buy!
We did use ShowPlace wax by Johnson and Johnson, and they did send a representative to our plant to teach us backward Oklahoma hick janitors how to properly care for our plain tile hallways and offices. Not the fancy tile like they have these days. If you are over 50 years old, then it is probably the same type of tile that you had on the floors of your school if you went to the standard brick public elementary school like the one I used to attend.
The office area floors were sure shiny after we applied a healthy dose of ShowPlace on them. The Johnson and Johnson rep. taught us how to properly buff the floor and showed us how a properly buffed floor that was really shiny was actually less slick than a badly waxed floor.
Anyway, I digress. Waxing floors is usually something that I tend to ramble about when I have an audience that shows interest in it (which I’m still trying to find). Since I can’t see your expression, I can only suspect that you would like to hear more about Power Plant floor waxing techniques, so I just might indulge you later on in this post after I have talked about the three other people in the car.
When it was my turn to drive to work, everyone had to climb into my 1982 Honda Civic:
A 1982 Honda Civic
Bill Rivers was about 10 years younger than my father and I know he had at least 6 children (I think). Maybe more. He told me once that even he lost count. Before he came to work at the Power Plant, he lived in Columbia, Missouri (while I had lived there, coincidentally), and worked at a Tool and Die manufacturing plant.
He worked so much overtime that one day he came home and sat down to eat dinner and sitting across from him at the table was a young boy that he didn’t recognize. He figured that he was a friend one of his own kids had invited to supper, so he asked him, “What’s your name?” Come to find out, it was one of his own children.
Bill had spent so little time at home that he didn’t even recognize his own child because his children were growing up and he was missing it. Mainly because he worked so much overtime. That was when Bill decided to move to Oklahoma and go to work at the power plant. Probably at the same time when I had moved to work there also, and was still going back to Columbia to finish college before becoming a full fledged bona-fide Power plant Janitor.
Bill Rivers always seemed to be having fun, and usually at the expense of someone else. He was constantly playing jokes on someone, and his most common target was Sonny Kendrick, the Electrical Specialist. Sonny was somewhat gullible, and so, Bill would weave some very complicated stories together to draw Sonny’s attention and string it along until Sonny was totally believing something preposterous.
Sonny Kendrick
Sonny wasn’t gullible like Curtis Love was gullible. Sonny knew that Bill Rivers was always trying to pull something over on him. So, Bill would just see how far along he could string Sonny until Sonny realized that everything Bill was saying was just made up in his head. — Then Bill Rivers would spend the rest of the week chuckling about it. Which usually aggravated Sonny to no end.
Sonny Kendrick was the only Electrical Specialist at the plant. I suppose he had some electronics training that allowed him to hold that honored position. His real name is Franklin Floyd Kendrick. I first met Sonny when I was the janitor for the Electric Shop.
People would call him “Baby Huey”. Since I didn’t know who Baby Huey was, I just figured that it was some character that reminded them of Sonny. So, when I had the opportunity, I looked up Baby Huey (this was a number of years before the Internet). I still wasn’t sure why, unless they were talking about a different Baby Huey:
I didn’t really get the connection, unless it had something to do with the diaper or the facial expression
Bill Rivers had a son that was in High School at the time, and he had the same Algebra teacher that my brother Greg had when he was trying to learn Algebra. The teacher had a real problem teaching algebra to high school students, and Bill asked me if I would tutor his son in Algebra.
When I first met Bill’s son, (I think his name was either Jerard or Bryan, I don’t remember now – well, that’s not too surprising considering even Bill Rivers forgot his name once), his life ambition was to graduate from High School and work as a mechanic in an auto garage and drive motorcycles. I tried to show him how interesting and fun Algebra and Math in general could be, so each time I went to meet with him, I would bring him either a math puzzle or a book with a story about a mathematician, or a neat Mathematical oddity… such as imaginary numbers, and things like that.
Later, long after Bill had moved to another Power Plant in Konawa, Oklahoma, I saw Bill, and he told me that he his son was working toward becoming a dentist. I don’t know if he was ever able to fulfill his dream, but when I visit Oklahoma, I keep my eye out for a guy on a motorcycle with a Dentist symbol on the back of his Harley Davidson jacket. Because that would probably be him.
The Dental Symbol. it would probably look good on a Harley Jacket, don’t you think?
Anyway, while the four of us were carpooling together, the person that did the most talking was Yvonne Taylor. Now, I like Yvonne Taylor. I liked her a lot. But she was the main reason why I was never able to practice my Ramblin’ Ann rambles (See the post “Ed Shiever Trapped in a Confined Space With a Disciple of Ramblin’ Ann“) because she was usually in the midst of exercising her right to ramble as well.
Since she was my elder, (almost my mother’s age), I always let her go first, which usually meant there wasn’t much of a chance for anyone to go second. I finally just decided this would be a great time to read. So I started reading books about different sorts of religions around the world. With the Bhagavad Gita being one of my favorite ones.
I always had a certain attraction to Yvonne, because she had a son named Kevin (which is my name), and a daughter named Kelley (My girlfirend’s name at the time was Kelly, now she is my wife). And her son and daughter were about the same age as my future wife and I were.
In the midst of rambles emanating from Yvonne, I would look up every time I would hear, “Kelley said this, or Kevin said that….” She did say one thing one time that I have always remembered and I have tried to follow. Yvonne said that you never want to buy a house that is West of the place where you work. Especially if it is any distance away.
I believe it was when she lived in Michigan, she had to drive a long way East every day, and the sun was glaring in her eyes all the way to work. Then when she had to drive home going West in the evening, the sun was glaring in her eyes as it was going down. So, when you live West of your workplace, you have to drive with the sun in your eyes every day, both ways, and you just pray and pray for rain or at least a cloudy day.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Yvonne’s husband, Pat, had a dad with last name Taylor (obviously), and his mom’s Maiden Name was Songer. My Grandmother’s last name is Taylor (by marriage), and my wife Kelly has a Grandmother who’s maiden name was Songer. So there was that as well.
Unfortunately for Yvonne, was that by the time we arrived at the plant in the morning, she was usually slightly hoarse. I don’t know if it was the morning air… or maybe… it could have possibly been the rambling…. So, when she would have to page someone on the PA system (The Gaitronics Gray Phone), she sounded a little bit like the wicked witch. Just like some clothes can cause someone to look fatter than other clothes, the Gray Phone system had a tendency to make one’s voice more “tinny” than it actually is. Especially if your voice is hoarse, and high pitched already.
Gaitronics Gray Phone
So, whenever I heard Yvonne paging someone and I was in the Electric shop or with the janitor crew, I would say, “Yvonne just has the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard. I can’t hardly Stand it!!” Those who were hearing me for the first time would give me a look like I must be crazy. And Well… who knows for sure. I think the Electricians knew for sure.
Rich Litzer lived just up the street from me, so I would drive by his house and pick him up, or I would park my car at his house and we would take his car, and we would meet Bill Rivers and Yvonne Taylor at the local Bowling Alley, since it was on the main drag out of town on Washington Street in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Rich was a great guy to carpool with because he usually had a lighthearted story to tell about something that happened at home, or we would talk about something else equally not serious. Later he was relocated downtown in Corporate Headquarters, and I didn’t see him for a long time.
Then one day, Rich and Ron Madron came down to Austin, Texas (where I live now) after I had moved down to work for Dell, to go to a school or conference, and I was able to meet them for dinner. That was the last time I saw Rich or Ron, and that was about 9 or 10 years ago (now 16 years).
At this point I was going to rambl… I mean…. talk more about how we used to wax the floor when I was a janitor, however, I have decided to leave that for another post “Wax On, Wax Off and other Power Plant Janitorial Secrets“.
Today when I finally found out that the post I was going to write was about my carpooling with Bill Rivers, Yvonne Taylor and Rich Litzer, I went to the Internet and looked up the latest news on my old friends. To my surprise, I found that Yvonne’s husband Patrick, died on September 12, just 9 days ago.
I don’t think I ever met Patrick in person, however, I used to hear about his daily activities for the 2 1/2 years from October 1982 through December 1985 when I used to carpool with Yvonne. Learning about Patrick’s death has saddened me because I know how much Yvonne loved and cared for Patrick. I know she has four sons and two daughters that are there to comfort her. I offer Yvonne my condolences and I wish her all the best.
Yvonne Taylor’s husband the past 52 years, Patrick Taylor
Comment from Previous Post:
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Great story, Kevin! I’ll bet you didn’t know I used to run a floor scrubber-/polisher. Yep – at the big TG&Y store in Shepherd Mall (OKC). I helped in opening the store in 1964 and continued working there for a couple of years as a “Stock Boy”.
A Power Plant Day to Remember
Originally posted June 1, 2013:
There seem to be some days of the year where every few years, I am not surprised to learn something out of the ordinary has happened. Almost as if it was a personal holiday or anniversary for some unknown reason. One of those days of the year for me is June 25. It is 2 days before my sister’s birthday and another grade school friend of mine…. It is a few days after the beginning of summer…. It is exactly 6 months or 1/2 year from Christmas. We sometimes jokingly refer to June 25 as the “anti-Christmas”.
June 25 was the date my son was born. Exactly 14 years later to the day, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died on the same day, as well as a relative of mine.
Farrah Fawcett
Michael Jackson
A day my son remembers well. He told me that we went out to eat at Logan’s Roadhouse for dinner, and reminds me of the people that died on that day. He has a detailed memory of his 14th birthday and what we did during the day on June 25, 2009.
June 25 exactly 10 years to the day before my son was born, I have a very vivid memory of the events that took place that day. Because the events of this day are often in my mind, I will share them with you. It was a day where I spent some time with a True Power Plant Man, met a true hero and dealt with the emotions of two great tragedies. The day was June 25, 1985.
I had been an electrician at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma for a little over a year and a half, which still made me an electrical apprentice at the time. Surprisingly, that morning Bill Bennett told me that he wanted me to go with Ben Davis to Enid to find a grounded circuit. He said that it would be a good opportunity to learn more about the auxiliary generators that were in Enid Oklahoma. They were peaking units that we would use only during high demand days during the summer.
The reason I was surprised was because I didn’t normally get to work with Ben. I had worked with him the previous fall at the Muskogee Power Plant when we were on “Overhaul”. You can read about that “adventure” in the post: “Lap O’ Luxury at the Muskogee Power Plant“. Ben wasn’t on my crew in the electric shop, so we rarely ever worked with each other.
Ben Davis
Ben and I loaded some equipment into the back of the Ford Pickup and climbed into the truck. Ben was driving. The normal route to take to Enid would be to go south on Highway 177 and then go west on the turnpike straight to Enid. Ben had worked at Enid a lot in the past, and over the years, had taken different routes for a change of scenery, so he asked me if I would mind if we took a different route through the countryside. It was a nice sunny morning and it was early enough that the heat hadn’t kicked in, so we took the scenic route to Enid that morning.
I remember going by an old farmhouse that over 12 years later, Ray Eberle shared a horror story about. I remember the drive. We were pretty quiet on the way. We didn’t talk much. Ben was usually a quiet person, and I didn’t think he would appreciate my tendency to ramble, so I just smiled and looked out the window. I was glad that I was with Ben and that I was given the opportunity to work with him. I looked up to him. To me he was one of the True Power Plant Men that gave you the confidence that no matter how bad things may become… everything would be all right, because men like Ben were there to pull you out of the fire when you needed a helping hand.
When we arrived in Enid, it was nearing the time that we would normally take a break. Ben asked if I minded if we stopped by Braum’s to get something for breakfast. Of course, I didn’t mind. I have always had a special affinity for food of any kind. Braum’s has an especially good assortment of delicious meals…. and deserts.
Braum’s is a great place to go for a Chocolate Malt and a Burger. It is only found around Oklahoma and the surrounding states not too far from the Oklahoma border.
We pulled into the Braum’s Parking lot and Ben parked the pickup toward the far end away from any other cars. Somewhere where we could watch it as we ate. I climbed out of the truck and walked toward the entrance. As I passed the handicap parking space next to the front door, I noticed a white Lincoln parked there with a license plate embossed with a Purple Heart.
One like this, only this one didn’t belong to Sam
When I saw this license plate, I wondered who it belonged to in the in restaurant. When I walked in, I immediately knew. There was the hero sitting in the corner booth. There were two elderly men sitting there drinking their coffee. I had wanted to buy them breakfast, but it looked like they had already eaten. I went up to the counter and ordered a sausage biscuit and a drink. Then I walked back around by their table. I paused and looked at them. I smiled….
I wanted to say, “Is that your white car parked right out there?” After one of them said yes, I wanted to say, “Thank you for serving our country.” For some reason I didn’t say anything. I just smiled at the two of them and sat down two booths down the row from them. I’m not usually one for keeping my mouth shut when something comes to mind, but that morning, I kept quiet. This is one of the reasons I think about this day often. Whenever I see a purple heart on a license plate, I think of the two elderly heroes sitting in Braum’s that morning on June 25, 1985.
After eating our breakfast we left Braum’s at 9:30 and Ben drove us to the Auxiliary Generators so that we could find the grounded circuit and repair it. There were some other chores we were going to work on, but that was the most interesting one. Ben had worked on enough grounded circuits in this mini-power plant to know that the first place to look was in a mult-connector, where cables came into the control room and connected to the cables that led to the control panels.
a multi-pole connector like this only bigger.
Ben was right. We quickly found the grounded wire in the connector and did what we could to clear it. As we were finishing this up, the phone rang. The phone was in the garage, and we were in a control room that was like a long trailer parked out back. A bell had been placed outside of the garage so that people working on the generators or in the control room could hear the phone ringing. Ben went to answer it while I finished insulating the connector and connecting the circuit back up.
After a few minutes, Ben came back into the control room and told me that we needed to go back to the plant. He explained that on June 25, 1985 at 9:30 his father had a heart attack in Shidler, Oklahoma. They weren’t sure of his condition, but it didn’t look good. They were going to life-flight him to Tulsa. I immediately knew how he felt.
Life Flight from Tulsa
I remember the morning in my dorm room in college in Columbia Missouri when my mother called me to tell me that my own father had a heart attack and that he was in the hospital in Stillwater, Oklahoma and was being life-flighted to Tulsa. I called up one of my professors at the College of Psychology and told him that I wouldn’t be attending class that morning. He told me he would pass it on to the other professors. Later, when I was in Tulsa, many professors from the University of Missouri in Columbia sent flowers to him in the hospital in Tulsa. My dad used to teach at the University of Missouri.
I remember grabbing a small suitcase, throwing some clothes in it and going straight to my car and driving the 345 miles to Tulsa. It is a long drive. It becomes an even longer drive under these circumstances. That is why as we were driving back to the plant, and Ben was going faster and faster down the highway, I understood him completely. I was praying for the safety of his father and the safety of the two of us.
Ben had expected that by the time we made it back to the plant that his father would be on his way to Tulsa. I suppose he figured that he would go to Shidler and pick up his mother and any other family members and would head to Tulsa. Unfortunately, when we walked into the electric shop, he found out that his father was still in Shidler. No Life Flight would be coming for him. Not for a while at least.
You see, another event had taken place at 9:30 on June 25, 1985. Let me explain it to you like this….. When Ben and I walked out of the Braum’s in Enid, Oklahoma that morning, directly down the road from this Braum’s 100 miles east, just outside of a town named Hallett, an electrical supplies salesman was driving from Tulsa to our power plant in North Central Oklahoma. He was on the Cimarron Turnpike going west.
The salesman looked to the south and he saw something that was so bizarre that it didn’t register. It made no sense. There was a herd of cattle grazing out in a pasture, and while he was watching them, they began tumbling over and flying toward him. He said it was so unreal his mind couldn’t make any sense out of it. Suddenly his car went skidding sideways off the road as a deafening roar blasted his car. He came safely to a stop and just sat there stunned by what had just happened.
Looking to the south, the salesman could see a large mushroom cloud rising in the distance. Something that looked like a nuclear explosion. After composing himself for a few minutes, he drove back onto the road and continued on his way to the plant, not sure what had happened. Upon arriving at the plant, he learned (as did the rest of the employees at the plant) that a fireworks plant had exploded in Hallett, Oklahoma. Here is an article about the explosion: “Fireworks Plant Explosion Kills 21 in Oklahoma“. This was a tragedy much like the West Texas Fertilizer explosion on April 17, 2013 at 8 pm.
What this tragedy meant for Ben was that there wasn’t going to be a Life Flight from Tulsa for his father. They had all been called to Hallett for the tragedy that had occurred there. I believe that Ben’s father survived the heart attack from that day. It seemed like he was taken by ambulance instead.
The timing of these events made me think about Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.
Obi Wan Kenobi
When Darth Vader was trying to persuade Princess Leia to tell him where the rebel base was hidden he blew up her home planet. When this happened Obi Wan Kenobi was on the Millennium Falcon with Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Obi Wan felt the sudden loss of life in the universe when the planet exploded.
This made me wonder….. what about Ben’s father? Had Ben’s father experienced some hidden distress from the sudden tragedy of what happened 60 miles almost directly south of Shidler? The timing and location is interesting. Ben and I were almost due west, and Ben’s Father was almost due North of Hallett that morning when the explosion took place.
Even if it was all coincidental, I have made it into something that is important to me. Don’t most of us do that? Where were you when the Murrah Building was bombed on April 19, 1995 at 9:02 am? What were you doing that morning? I will write about that morning much later. Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001 at 8:46 am? I remember where I was sitting and what I was doing at that moment. On June 25, 1985 at 9:30 am. I know what I was doing at that moment. Our break was over. Ben and I walked out of Braum’s, climbed into the Pickup truck and made our way to the Auxiliary Generators.
That one day, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a True Power Plant Man, Ben Davis. I spent some time sharing his grief for his father and his mother. I met an elderly hero that had been wounded while serving his country. We all grieved for the loss of young lives from the explosion at the fireworks plant in Hallett. June 25, 1985.
Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis
Originally posted January 24, 2014:
Reorganizations naturally shuffle things around. People are generally resistant to change and don’t like to find that their routine has been changed without having their input on how to make things better. When the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma went through a downsizing and reorganization in the latter part of 1987, my job changed slightly. Personally, I was grateful for the changes.
Before the reorganization, I had inherited both the precipitators (the large boxes at a power plant that take the ash out of the exhaust from the boiler). This meant that every overhaul, I knew what I was doing. I was working on and in the precipitator. This was generally a dirty and thankless job.
The plant has a similar electrostatic precipitator, only it is twice as long
After the reorganization, however, Terry Blevins was assigned to work on the Unit 2 precipitator, while I worked on Unit 1. I will go into this in more detail later, but for this post, I’ll just point out that this meant that when Unit 2 was on an overhaul (that means the unit is taken offline for one to three months in order to fix and repair things that can only be done while it is offline) I wasn’t automatically assigned to the precipitator. So, I could work on other things.
Before the reorganization, Sonny Kendrick had the title “Electric Specialist”. After the reorganization we no longer had a specialist. I’m not sure exactly why. I know that at Muskogee, they still had a specialist in the electric shop. — I will talk about him next year (the specialist at Muskogee). Anyway, I know that Sonny, at the time, was not too happy about his change in job title. I don’t blame him. I would be too.
One of the things that the Electric Specialist did during overhauls was test tripping relays. Now that we no longer had a specialist, that was left up to whomever…. The first electricians, besides Sonny, that were assigned to relay testing was Ben Davis and myself. I had started doing it on my own and after about a week, Ben Davis was assigned to help me out.
Ben Davis
We were on a major overhaul on Unit 2 and it had been decided that we were not only going to test the regular super-high voltage breaker relays, we were also going to test all the 480 volt switchgear relays for Unit 2, as well as the intake and coalyard switchgears. I don’t remember if we made it to the river pump switchgear, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Once we started, there was no stopping us.
When I first was told to test the relays, Bill Bennett (our A foreman) told me to have Sonny tell me how to do them. So, I walked into the lab and told Sonny that Bill had told me to ask him to help me learn how to test the protective relays on the switchgear. Sonny, not looking too happy, grabbed a small stack of manuals, walked out into the main switchgear with me, and said, “Here is the relay test set. Here are the manuals that tell you how to hook up the test set and test them.” He turned and walked away…. I was sort of hoping for a more intimate lesson…
I knew the reason Sonny was so upset. Later I learned why he would be as upset as he was to not be able to test the protective relays. It was because when you test, clean and adjust protective relays you have an immediate rush of satisfaction that you have just done something very important. Let me just say quickly (because in another post I will expound upon this), a protective relay is what keeps motors from blowing up. It is what prevents blackouts from happening across the nation. Without properly calibrated protective relays, a power company is just asking for a disaster (or… well….. their insurance company is, because they are the ones that usually end up paying for the damage — which I will also talk about in a later post).
I thought the relay test set that Sonny showed me was the neatest thing I had seen so far in the electric shop. There were two boxes that hooked together with an umbilical cord. They had dials, switches, connectors, meters and a digital readout down to the millisecond. That is, you can read the time to trip a relay down to the one thousandth of a second.
AVO Multi-Amp SR-76 Relay Test Set
I only wish that I had a bigger picture of this relay test set so that you could admire it as much as I did. Even today it gives me goosebumps! Ok. I can imagine those relay technicians that read this blog are looking at this and thinking…. “What kind of piece of junk is this?” Hey (as Mark Fielder used to say), this was my “baby” (only he was referring to the precipitator).
So, back to the story at hand…
Even though I was having a heck of a fun time trying to figure out how to perform these relay tests by reading these manuals about the different kinds of relays, I was glad when Ben Davis was assigned to work with me. I don’t know if he had worked on relays before, but he seemed to know just what to do to hook up the test set and make things easier.
A panel of Protective Relays
The best suggestion that Ben had right off the bat was that we should be listening to the radio while we were working. This might have been a preventative measure after the first couple of days to prevent the same situation from occurring that happened to Ed Shiever when he and I were trapped inside a confined space for a couple of weeks (See the post: “Ed Shiever Trapped in a Confined Space with a disciple of Ramblin’ Ann“). Either way, it was a great idea.
You wouldn’t think that inside a switchgear 20 miles from the nearest town with a radio station, that we would have any reception on a little transistor radio, but we were able to manage. It seemed that we had to be a little creative at times with the antenna in certain locations, but, like I said. We managed.
My perception of Ben Davis up to this point was that he was a “Good-ol’ boy”. That is, a country music type Oklahoman that had grown up in Shidler, Oklahoma where the major attraction in the town was the High School. To my surprise, I quickly found out that he was a connoisseur of Rock and Roll.
It wasn’t until I was in college before I realized that the easy listening station I had been listening to on our family radio at home while I was growing up was playing rock and roll songs using an orchestra with violins and clarinets instead of electric guitars. I learned from my dorm mates all about groups like Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles (yeah… can you believe it? I mean. I knew “Hey Jude”, “Let it Be” and a few others, but most of the Beatles I thought were instrumentals normally played on violins with a man waving a wand) and many others. When I found out about “Rock and Roll”, I had to go out and buy dozens of 8-track tapes, as fast as I could find them.
A stack of 8 Track Tapes
So, here was Ben Davis. Even better than the “Good Ol’ Boy” that I already thought he was. And he loved classical rock and roll. I can only say that the next month and a half while we tested relays all over the plant, were one of the best times I have ever spent in my life! He knew all the 60’s and 70’s rock and roll bands.
As each song would come on the radio, we would guess (well, I was guessing most of the time…. most of the time Ben already knew), what the name of the song was and the name of the band. So, not only were we doing one of the most satisfying jobs at a power plant, but I was also have a lot of fun with Ben listening to the radio! Who would have thought it? No wonder Sonny was upset he wasn’t testing relays this overhaul.
I could go on about all the different bands and their backgrounds that I learned from Ben during that overhaul, but (unlike me), you probably already know all that stuff. It never ceases to amaze me how many holes I have in my education until one is staring at me in the face.
This reminds me of a side story, and I apologize if I have told this before…. I don’t think I have….
After the Reorganization, and after I moved to Stillwater from Ponca City, Scott Hubbard (and Toby O’Brien) and I began carpooling. One morning as we were listening to NPR, Scott Hubbard mentioned something about a “cur”. I asked him, “What’s a cur?” Well, he had the exact same reaction when 11 years earlier I had asked my friends in college at Oklahoma University, Tim Flowers and Kirby Davis, “What’s an orgasm?” — See how little holes in your education can make a big impact?
Just so you don’t get caught in the same predicament… A “Cur” is a mongrel dog. Scott Hubbard couldn’t believe that someone that read the dictionary for fun wouldn’t know what a “cur” was. What the heck? I didn’t grow up in Oklahoma! — end of side story… which really isn’t a side story, since it was about a Power Plant Man — Scott Hubbard. He probably knew what a “cur” was before he could walk. — I know I haven’t told that story before! I would have remembered that.
I’m not going to go on about all the fun that I had with Ben Davis testing protective relays. I enjoy my memories, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear all about how much I looked up to this Power Plant Hero. The only thing I will add is that the time I spent with Ben during that overhaul has been etched into my memory as one of the most enjoyable times of my life. So, I’ll go onto the next step in our Protective Relay story….
A few years later, in 1993, Sonny Kendrick and Ben Davis and I were sent to “Advanced Protective Relay Maintenance” training in Dallas, Texas. I remember this time so well, I remember the address where we were went. It was at 4271 Bronze Way, Dallas, Texas. It was hosted by the same company that made that wonderful test set I pictured above. The AVO Multi-Amp Corporation.
I brought my wife Kelly and my three year old daughter Elizabeth with me. They stayed at the hotel during the day and played in the swimming pool, while I went to class.
The classes lasted four days, Monday through Thursday. That was where I learned that even though I thought our relay test set was the coolest piece of equipment in the electric shop, it turned out to be archaic by “Protective Relay Maintenance” standards. Not that it didn’t do the job…. So, in order to train us properly, they let us use our own old test set during the training so that we could see how to properly test really advanced relays such as Distant Relays, Syncro-verifier relays, Negative Sequence Relays,directional distance relays and Pilot Wire relays. — These are relays that are found in a large substation that trips high voltage lines that run long distances across the country. — I can tell you’re jealous. — Well.. I imagine it anyway. Knowing what I know now.
This is the book we used in class
So, why drag you all the way to Dallas for this story? There’s a reason.
time for a second side story:
You see. Tim Flowers, whom I mentioned above, knew not too long after he met me that I have the knack of running into people that I know (or should have known in this case), would love this story. You see, I met Tim and Kirby at Oklahoma University and they drove with me to Columbia Missouri in 1979 (along with my brother Greg) when I went to register for classes at Missouri University when I decided to go back to school in my home town.
When we arrived in the town, we were hungry after driving for 8 hours straight from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Columbia, Missouri… so we stopped at Godfather’s Pizza. As we walked in, there was a girl and a guy standing at the counter ordering a pizza. The pretty girl (Pamela Ramsey) with long red hair turned and saw me. She immediately came toward me saying “Kevin Breazile!!!! You owe Me!!! Slightly shocked and pleased, I said, “What for?” She reminded me that I never gave her the pictures that were taken during the Senior Prom. You see. I had taken her to the Senior Prom.
Later I explained that this happens to me a lot. I meet people that I know in the oddest places (even though this wasn’t so odd, since I had grown up in Columbia). It was just that this was the first person we had seen since we entered town. From that point on, Tim (who later worked as a summer help at the power plant) expected that everywhere we went we would run into someone I knew….
End of the second side story. I’m sorry that this is making the post a little longer than usual. I know you have to get back to work….
So, back to the relay training course in 1993 that Ben Davis, Sonny Kendrick and I were taking in Dallas…. On Wednesday night during the training there was a dinner held in a small banquet room in the hotel. Well… of course I had to take my wife and my daughter. So here we were sitting around this table at dinner with the rest of the class of about 10 other non-Sooner Plant employees….
I decided to talk to the guy next to me. He said something back and my wife Kelly asked him, “Where in New Jersey are you from?” She had picked up on a New Jersey accent. He said, Well.. I work in the east for a company called Ebasco, but I’m really from the Midwest. (oh. That was my territory). So I asked a follow-up question. “Where in the Midwest are you from?” He said, “From Missouri.” — Oh. I thought. This is interesting. So was I.
I asked a follow-up question. “Where in Missouri are you from?” He answered…. “Columbia, Missouri.” (What? Where I had grown up?)…. So, I asked a second follow-up Question…. “What High School did you go to?” With a curious look the man answered….. “Rockbridge High School…” (Man!!! the same one as me!!!)…. The third follow-up question….. “What year did you graduate?” Now, looking really suspicious… he said, “1978”. Trying to contain my excitement… I replied….. “Oh… so, you graduated from Rockbridge High School the same year I did….”
What are the odds? There were 254 students in our graduating class. This guy who currently lived somewhere in the east is sitting next to me at a dinner of about 10 people attending Advanced Protective Relay Training in Dallas, Texas where neither of us are from, and we both graduated from the same school back in Columbia, Missouri 15 years earlier! His name is Randy Loesing. He was working for a company called Ebasco at the time. He said, “I thought I recognized you! I just wasn’t sure.” I didn’t recognize him at all until I went back home and looked in my yearbook.
It turned out that he kept in touch with two of my oldest friends from the second grade, Mark Schlemper and Brent Stewart. So we talked about them. What an incredible coincidence. Like I may have mentioned before. It happens to me all the time. It turns out that an old friend of mine from the 3rd grade in Columbia, Missouri that I used to go to his house when we were stamp collectors and had a stamp collecting club, lives 5 miles south of me today in Round Rock Texas (He’s in Pflugerville).
Russell Somers lives in the same direction and just about the same number of miles as when we were kids. Not only that, but he worked at Dell while I was working at Dell (though I didn’t know it at the time). He has an older daughter and a younger son, just like me only younger. The same is true for another 3rd grade friend that I graduated from Rockbridge Highschool and the University of Missouri with, Caryn Lile (now Caryn Iber) who lives in Wisconsin. She has a daughter and a son the same age as my kids. She was living in Tulsa when I was living in Stillwater, Oklahoma. — Like I said… happens to me all the time.
Tim Flowers realized this odd phenomenon in college. I had told him earlier that my father told me that if I was every stranded somewhere that I could look up the local Veterinarian and tell him that I was the son of Dr. James Edward Breazile, and they would help me. So, when we were hiking in the mountains in Colorado and we met a man walking along a trail in the middle of nowhere above Estes Park near the Great Divide, when I told him who I was, he gave us a curious look…. then divulged his most intimate secrets of his life and where he had stashed his most values possessions, Tim told me later. “I really thought he was going to know who you were when he gave us that funny look.” I replied. “I think he did..”
I again apologize for the length of this post. It is rare that I ramble on this long. I can thank Ramblin’ Ann for the ability to Ramble so well. I can thank Ben Davis for recognizing a rambling situation and replacing it with a rock and roll learning opportunity. As I said earlier. One of the most enjoyable times I have spent in my entire life is the time I spent with Ben Davis testing Protective Relays! Bless you Ben and I pray for you, your wife, your son and your daughter on the way to work each morning.
Today when I hear any of the hundreds of rock and roll songs come on the radio that we listened to that month and a half, I can see us testing the relays, looking off into space saying, “Rolling Stones?” “No. Steve Miller Band?” Really? I thought Browneyed Girl was sung by the Rolling Stone! It turned out that the version that we listened to was from the creator of the song, Van Morrison. Who would have thought that he would sound so much like Mick Jagger. I can see Ben saying… I see what you mean… it kind of sounds like Mick Jagger.
As an add on to this story…
I now work at General Motors in Austin Texas. My best friend in High School was a guy named Jesse Cheng (I have mentioned him in other posts, especially in reference to the phrase “Jesse! Come get your Chili!). He was two years older than me, and throughout the years we would lose track of each other and then reconnect. He went to Yale to become an Engineer, then to the University of Missouri to become a Medical Doctor, then to Harvard to earn a Masters in Public Health and Epidemiology.
It turns out that we both now work at General Motors where he works in Arlington Texas as a Medical Director and I work in IT in Austin. We can IM (Instant Message) each other whenever we want, and we talk now at least once every week.
Lizzie Borden meets Power Plant Man
Originally posted March 8, 2014. Added comments from the original post:
I have many stories that I am going to write about the extraordinary Power Plant Men in North Central Oklahoma from 1988 to 1994 this year, but it happened that I was watching a recorded episode of Forensic Files (otherwise known as Mystery Detectives) on TV tonight and it made me remember…. The story I was watching was about a women that was kidnapped in Pennsylvania June 1988 and murdered in order to draw the husband to a location where the kidnapper could collect the ransom and murder the husband. The man guilty of the crime was found to be a person that shared a pew in the Presbyterian Church with the couple but held a grudge against the husband for turning him down for a loan at the bank a few months earlier.
While I watched this show, I flashed back to June 9, 1988 and suddenly remembered the moment I was standing in the parts cage in the back of the electric shop in the main switchgear at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Okahoma when I heard about the murder of Mark Stepp.
Mark Stepp (left) standing next to Alan Kramer back in 1982
Mark Stepp was an Instrument and Controls employee at our plant. Both he and his wife had been brutally murdered while they slept in their home in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Mark Stepp had been shot once and stabbed many times. His wife Delores had been stabbed to death an excessive amount of times until she was passed dead. I cringe to think about it to this day.
The next thing that entered my mind while watching this video was one month earlier on May 6, 1988. We had a new Electrical Supervisor, Tom Gibson, and he had sent Terry Blevins and I with two of the Instrument and Controls men to Tulsa to a class at Nelson Electric to learn how to program an Allen Bradley PLC (programmable Logic controller).
PLC Training Certificate
When I think about this instance, I remember Ron Madron driving us to Tulsa in a company vehicle to the training (Ron. I know you read this post, so you an correct me if I’m wrong). It could have been Glenn Morgan. One thing I definitely remember is that Mark Stepp was with us that day.
My dear friend Terry Blevins
The reason I remember that Mark was with us that day, was because when the training was over around 1:30 or 2:00 pm. Mark didn’t want to go directly back to the plant. He wanted to go for a ride around Tulsa. This wouldn’t be so peculiar, except that a little more than a month later, Mark Stepp was brutally shot and stabbed to death while he slept in his bed along with his wife.
Somehow I always felt that Mark’s behavior the day when we went to learn how to program Allen Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers was somehow related to his death. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. I’ll let you decide.
So, let me describe what happened early morning on June 8, 1988 (or 6/8/88 for those of you who are fascinated with numbers like I am). In the middle of the night, someone walked into Mark Stepp and his wife’s Dolore’s bedroom, and shot Mark Stepp in the neck. Then proceeded to stab Mark Stepp and his wife an excessive amount of times until they were surely dead. I don’t remember the number of stab wounds. They were stabbed so many times.
I remember first hearing about this when I had walked into the electric shop parts cage when I had gone there to look for some receptacle boxes. Andy Tubbs came into the cage and told me about the murder. The entire Instrument and Control Shop was on “high alert”. Suppose this person was murdering Instrument and Controls Power Plant Men at our plant! That day, no one really knew the motive.
I think some people from our plant were interviewed about the murder. I don’t know. I do know that Francine Stepp, their daughter was often mentioned in the discussion. She was on the same Softball team with her mother and father and many people at the plant were on this same softball team. They were all concerned with her well-being since after spending the night at her friend’s house, she came home and found her parents murdered in their bed.
During the next month while the police were investigating the crime, many revelations came out about Mark Stepp and his wife Dolores. None of which surprised me, though, it may have surprised those that worked more closely with Mark. You see, Mark has showed his true colors that day when we had all driven together to Tulsa to go to training.
When training had finished for the day, Terry Blevins and I (and Ron Madron, if he was the person driving) had counted on getting back to the plant in time to go home at a decent time. Mark Stepp, on the other hand had something else in mind. He wanted to go for a drive through Tulsa.
This didn’t make much sense to me at first, since I couldn’t figure out why someone wouldn’t want to return to the plant in plenty of time to fill out our time cards and get ready to go home to our wives and children (well… I didn’t have any children at the time, but I do remember wanting to go home at the regular time). We were on the clock and we were paid by the hour.
It didn’t make sense to me until we were driving down what seemed to be the frontage road of I-44 at the time and we came up to 6410 E. 11th Street. A similar thing happened to me just last week when a friend of mine was celebrating his 20th year at Dell and a person from Security who was playing a joke on my friend pulled into a location at 6528 North Lamar in Austin Texas. My gut sucked up like I was going to be sick as his friend pulled up to the entrance and proclaimed that this was the second part of his 20 year anniversary present. Well. my friend happened to be in like mind with me, which felt a sudden urge of betrayal and confusion. I’ll let you do your own homework at this point.
Mark Stepp asked us if we wanted to stop at a “Gentleman’s Club”. Really? With three die-hard Power Plant Men in a company car? The rest of us unanimously voted to go back to the plant. Ok. That was an indicator that Mark had something going on with his life that was not quite wholesome. What made this seem surreal was that I was the youngest at 27 years old, Mark was 40 years old and the other two in the car were in their 30s. It wasn’t like we were young unmarried irresponsible kids.
I bring this up because later I was not surprised to learn during the investigation of Mark Stepp’s murder that he had been involved with a group that included “Wife Swapping”. I know there were a lot of rumors going around at the time that one of the persons involved in the murder must have been involved in the occult, and that it made sense given the manner of death. None of this surprised me.
At one point we learned that hidden videotapes had been found in the house of their daughter while she thought she had privacy in her bathroom or bedroom. I don’t know if this was true or not, but I wasn’t surprised if it had been true. Actually, after that day in Tulsa, nothing surprised me about Mark Stepp anymore.
I don’t mean to sound cruel. I grieved when I learned about Mark and his wife’s death as much as many other Power Plant Men. No matter the circumstances. It was a great tragedy. Whatever hatred had been the cause of this murder, it had been caused by tragic events proceeding this murder, I have no doubt.
I say this, because within a month of the murder, the murderer had been located. It turned out to be their own daughter Francine. I didn’t know the family at all, and I have never met Francine. Other Power Plant people knew them much better. As I said, they were on a softball team together. Francine played on a team with her mother and father. This came as a shock to them all.
Many people blamed her accomplice Cindy Sue Wynn. Francine’s parents had told Francine that they didn’t like Cindy and wanted her to stay away from her. The story is that Francine was spending the night at Cindy’s house when they devised a plot to kill Mark and Delores. Francine was 18 years old at the time, and was a Freshman at Oklahoma State University. If you would like to learn more about the murder you can find articles from the Daily Oklahoman here: “Two Stillwater Teens Facing Death Charges” and “Man Says he Heard Death Plot“.
They both pleaded guilty and Cindy was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1990, two years later, Cindy pleaded to be placed on a “pre-parole” program which was denied. Francine was sentenced to life in prison. Since that tragic day, Francine Stepp was eligible for parole in 2003. She was denied parole then, and has since been up for parole in 2006, 2009 and 2012. Francine’s next parole hearing is June 2015.
Francine Stepp
Just like the day that Jim Stevenson walked out of the shop telling Bill Ennis about the Snitch stealing the portable generator (See the post, “Power Plant Snitch“), I sat back and didn’t say anything when I heard about Francine’s conviction. What I had to say really wasn’t relevant. Just because it didn’t shock me that this particular daughter was so easily talked into murdering her parents by her friend, what I knew was no proof that she had been abused as a child.
Francine has now served 26 years in prison for murdering her parents. Her accomplice has been out of jail for at least 16 years. Francine is now over 44 years old. After 25 years, I think someone needs to take a fresh look at the motive as to why she would have wanted to take the life of her parents. Was it really because her parents didn’t want her to “play” with Cindy? Does that make much sense? Especially with all the other possible motives floating around.
I have recently been watching reruns of “Forensic Files” (also known as Mystery Detectives) on Headline News (CNN). I keep waiting for the episode about Francine Stepp running to her neighbor’s house on the morning of June 8, 1988 screaming that her parents have been murdered. Knowing full well that she had murdered them… But what really was the motive?
Was it really that her parents didn’t let this 18 year old girl spend time with her friend? Then how was she spending the night with her on June 7? Which parent hasn’t forbidden their child to play with someone because they were a bad influence? When did that ever do any good or amount to a hill of beans?
The little time I had spent with Mark Stepp a month before his murder gave me a small glimpse into his life, and maybe the life of his daughter. I didn’t really know the guy. I do know, however, that a true Power Plant Man wouldn’t try to drag three other married Power Power Plant Men (though I was only a pseudo-Power Plant Man myself), to an indecent “Gentleman’s Club” (especially while on the clock).
So, I have to wonder. Will anyone go to Francine’s defense in June 2015? Does she even care anymore? I don’t think she even showed up to her own parole hearing in 2012. She has spent many more years in prison than out of it in her life so far. If she was released, what would she do? Can you start your life over again when it came to a halt when you were only 18?
This is a hard post for me to write. I have a daughter who is 24 years old this month. She was born almost 2 years after this tragic event took place, and one year after Francine was convicted of murdering her parents. During my own daughter’s entire life, Francine has been in jail for murdering her parents. Her father worked at the Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.
If Mark Stepp could speak from the grave today at Francine’s next parole hearing, I wonder what he would say? I only know what those at the plant who knew her would say. They all thought she got along with her parents. They thought her parents were proud of her. Billy Joel sang a song called “The Stranger“. It is about looking in the mirror and seeing that other side of you that you don’t let anyone else see. I suppose some people really have one of those lives where they aren’t really honest with the rest of the world. Billy Joel did, evidently. Maybe Mark Stepp did as well.
I have known for a while that I had to write about this story. I have dreaded this post. I am glad to have finally written it. Now I can put it behind me.
Comments from the original Post:
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Wow – I hadn’t thought about Mark’s murder in years. This verse gives me hope: Mark 4:22 For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light.
Thanks for another great story!
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Wow, that’s an intense story. It certainly seems like there was more going on with Francine than anyone knew. Sad all around, but a very interesting post.
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I can only imagine how hard this was to write. Nice job, I hope writing this helps you in some way. It is amazing how friends can detect something below the surface in other friends. I know that feeling, but nothing like this.
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Hard to read, too. But if we are to understand our species, we have to know such things. And we need to understand when we raise kids … and when we vote, too.
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I can’t for the life of me find the person’s name who wrote this, but I wanted to thank them for doing so. I went to school with Francine and had some of the same classes, but we did not know each other well. I always wondered what happened on that night and why she did it. She was very quiet in high school and as the years progressed she seemed to go from being ‘shy quiet’ to ‘angry quiet’ if that makes sense. I knew absolutely nothing about her life whatsoever so this is just an outsider’s observation. Reading the news made one think that she was this monster. I mean who could fathom killing their parents? However, none of us knew what Francine had to deal with in her life. To be able to commit this type of crime possibly points to some deep-seated anger and animosity. Your input gave me a little snippet of another viewpoint and I thank you for that and I’m sure Francine would as well.
You say you dreaded this post and I’m sure it was very difficult for you. I hope it released anything you were carrying within you. Thank you again as it has shed some light for me and hopefully others as well
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I would encourage anyone reading this post (and the author of this post) to read the book “Unlikely Assassins: The Shocking True Story of a Couple Savagely Murdered by Their Own Teenage Daughter”. It is a book about this murder and contains a lot of information that was gathered while interviewing the detectives involved in this case.
I knew Dee at OSU – as a student and as a coworker. She shared stories about her family, and I believed her and Mark to be loving, involved parents. I was saddened and shocked to hear about these deaths, Francine’s involvement and the things they were involved in. It looks like Dee and Mark were not the only victims in this family. It reminds me that we never know everything about our friends and acquaintances, and that we need to remember to pray constantly for others.
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The Heart of a Power Plant
I was considered the one that “got away”. Power Plant Men don’t normally leave the Power Plant to go work somewhere else unless they are retiring, being laid off, or for some other compelling reason. I freely walked away of my own accord August 16, 2001. I left a job where I could have worked until the day I retired to step out into the unknown. But… that was the way I had arrived on May 7, 1979, 22 years earlier.
Just as I had driven onto the plant grounds those many years ago, unsure what I was going to encounter, I was now leaving the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma to change my career and become an IT programmer for Dell Computers in Round Rock Texas. When I arrived my first day at the plant, I had no idea what I was stepping into… The day I left I was in the exact same boat.
The Power Plant
So far, I have gone through my life accepting whatever happens as something that happens for a reason. With that in mind, I have the belief that whatever the future holds, I just need to hang in there and everything will work out for the best, even though it may not seem like it at the time. Let me tell you about this experience….
I had accepted the job offer from Dell early in January. My start date had been set for June 4, 2001. They were giving me $3,000 for moving expenses to move down to Round Rock when I finished college in May. I was being hired as an undergraduate college hire. I would be starting at a slightly smaller salary than my base salary as an electrician.
I was taking a considerable cut in salary when you consider the overtime that a Power Plant electrician racked up in a year. I figured I was starting at the bottom of the ladder in my new job, where I was pretty well topped out at the plant with no opportunity to advance in sight. Maybe in a few years my salary would catch up and surpass what I made as an electrician.
For about 10 weeks, we drove down to the Austin area and look for a house on the weekends. It became apparent soon after our house hunting began that the cost of houses was somewhat higher than they were in Stillwater Oklahoma. We finally had a contract on a house in Round Rock, just 10 minutes away from the main Dell campus.
While we were looking for a house in the Round Rock area, we kept hearing on the radio that Dell was laying off thousands of employees. The Internet bubble had burst and the drop in sales of computers was taking a toll on the company. Every time I called the recruiter, I would find that they had been laid off and I had been assigned a different recruiter. This was disheartening to say the least.
Here I was in a perfectly secure job as an electrician at the Power Plant and I was leaving it to go work for a company that was in the middle of laying off employees. My wife Kelly and I had been saying one Novena after the other that we make the correct decision about what we should do, and we had chosen Dell Computer. It just seemed like the right place to go. So, we decided to just go along with it.
We prayed the Infant Of Prague Novena every day that we made the right choice.
The Infant of Prague is a wax statue of Jesus as a Boy in a Church in Prague, Czech Republic
I gave the plant a 3 month notice that I would be leaving in June. We had timed the purchase of the house in Round Rock for Friday, June 1. I would start work the following Monday. Dell was going to send me my moving expenses on May 4th, one month before my job would begin.
On the morning of Thursday, May 3rd, our realtor in Stillwater called and said she had a contract to sell our home in Stillwater and was going to head out to our house for us to sign. I had stayed home from work that morning for that reason. We were expecting her to arrive at 9:00 am.
At 8:30 I received a call from Dell computers that went something like this….. “Kevin, I am calling to inform you that your offer for employment has changed. Your first day will no longer be June 4, but will be August 20 (2-1/2 months later). The good news is that you still have a job with Dell, it just doesn’t start until August.”
Since I was expecting the moving expenses the following day on May 4, I asked the recruiter about that. He said that since my start date was moved to August, I wouldn’t receive the moving expenses until July. I told him that I was in the middle of buying a house in Round Rock and that I was counting on that money. He said he would see what he could do about that.
I hung up the phone and looked at Kelly who was standing there watching my face go from a normal tan to a red glow, then an ashen color all in the matter of 20 seconds. I explained to her that Dell said I still had a job, but it wouldn’t start until August.
The Realtor was going to be arriving in about 20 minutes for us to sign to sell our house. Everything was in motion. It took Kelly and I about 5 minutes to discuss our options before we decided that since we had been praying to make the right choice, we were going to go with this new development.
I called Louise Kalicki, our HR supervisor at the plant and told her that Dell had moved my start date from June 4 to August 20, and I wondered if I could stay on the extra two and a half months. I was surprised that she had an answer for me so quickly, but here is what she said, “We can keep you on until August 17, but after that date, we will no longer have a job for you.” I thanked her, and hung up the phone.
Our realtor arrived with the contract for us to sign to sell our house with five acres. When she walked in the kitchen, I told her what had just happened 1/2 hour earlier. I could see the sick look on her face after she had worked so hard for so many months to find a buyer for our house. Here I was telling her that Dell was postponing my hire date.
When I came to the part about where we decided to go ahead with our plans and sell the house and move to Round Rock, I could see all the tension that had been building up behind her ever increasing bulging eyes suddenly ease off. We signed the papers and our house was set to be sold on June 29. I had to swing a loan for the month where I bought the house in Round Rock and I sold my house in Stillwater (and hoped that the house was actually sold on time).
A few hours later I received a call from the Dell recruiter saying that he had pulled a few strings and I was going to receive my moving expenses the following day. The following week after that, the recruiter that had helped me had been laid off as well.
When my final day had arrived on August 16 (I was working 4 -10s, and my last work day that week was Thursday), I was given a going away party (see the post “Power Plant Final Presentation“). The party was over around 1:30 and I was free to leave.
I said my goodbye’s to my friends in the office area and went down to the electric shop to gather up the rest of my things and leave. Scott Hubbard asked me if he could trade his Multimeter with me since I had a fancy True RMS Multimeter and he was still using an older version. So, I traded him, and picked up my tool bucket and headed for the parking lot.
Scott Hubbard
As I approached my car, I could see that Diana Brien was out there waiting for me to leave. She gave me a Chocolate Chip Cookie the size of a pizza and said she wanted to say goodbye to me and tell me that she had enjoyed being my bucket buddy all those years. I told her I was going to miss her and everyone else in the shop.
My Bucket Buddy Diana Brien
With that I climbed in my car and drove away.
When I was selling my house outside Stillwater, I thought that the thing I was going to miss the most was the wide open spaces where we lived. Our house was on a hill in the country overlooking the city of Stillwater. We had an Atrium in the living room where you could sit and look at the city lights at night and watch thunderstorms as they blasted transformers around the town.
I was moving into a neighborhood where the house next to ours was no more than 15 feet away. I thought I’m really going to miss this house…. I thought that until the moment I drove out of the parking lot at the Power Plant.
Then it suddenly hit me…. What about my family? What about all those people I have just left behind? When am I ever going to see them? The thought of missing my house never entered my mind from that moment on. It was replaced by the great pain one feels when they pack up and walk away from their family not knowing if you will ever see them again.
My heart was still back there with the Power Plant Men and Women I left behind.
The seven hour drive from the plant to Round Rock Texas was a blur. I knew that I had just closed one door and stepped into an entirely new world. I didn’t even know if I would like being a programmer when it came down to it. I had always just been a hacker and I knew I had a lot of holes in my knowledge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be any good at my job.
To make that long story short, I have never regretted my move to Round Rock Texas. I have just gone with the flow knowing that whatever happens, it happens for a reason. After 12 1/2 years working at Dell, I changed jobs again to work for General Motors in their IT department where I am currently working with the Onstar team (and now working on Kronos).
My friends at Dell asked me the past few years… “Are you going to write about us like you do with the Power Plant Men?” My reply to that question was “I don’t know… Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
That was the same thing I told Sonny Karcher the first day I arrived at the Power Plant and he asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated college. I told him. “I don’t know. I was thinking about becoming a writer.” His next question was, “Are you going to write about us?” I replied, “Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”
Power Plant Safety is Job Number One
Originally posted September 14, 2012:
I found out soon after I arrived at the Coal-fired power plant in Oklahoma the first summer I worked as a summer help that Safety was Job Number One. I was given a hard hat and safety glasses the first day I was there, and I watched a safety film on how to lift with my legs and not with my back. I thought the hard hat made me look really cool. Especially with the safety glasses that looked like someone wore as a scientist during the 1950s. Dark and square.
The first safety glasses we had didn’t have side shields
I used to keep a pair with me when I went back to school. When I was a senior at the University of Missouri, Columbia, while working at the Bakery on Broadway, I kept a pair with me at all times, along with a hat that I had stol…um…. borrowed from my dad and always forgot to return. (In fact, I still have that hat to this day).
A hat just like this. An Inspector Clouseau hat.
That way, whenever someone suspected who I was, I would put on my glasses and hat and people would think I was Clark Kent. Anyway…. I diverse. I never thought about it being an Inspector Clouseau hat until one winter morning in the parking lot at the plant Louise Gates (later Louise Kalicki) called me Inspector Clouseau.
The yellow hard hat made me confident that I was part of the blue collar working class. Hard hats have a suspension system in them that make them look like it is riding too high on your head. You soon get used to it, but for the first couple of weeks I kept bumping into things because my hardhat made me taller than I was used to being.
See? The hardhat looks like it is floating above this man’s head
This is this because of this great suspension system that causes the hat to ride so high on someone’s head. I learned about this not long after I arrived and Marlin McDaniel the A Foreman at the time told me to sort out of bunch of large steel chokers (or slings) in a wooden shack just inside the Maintenance shop by the door to the office elevator.
Ok. Not this big, but pretty large
While I was bending over picking up the chokers (I mean…. While I was lifting with my legs and not my back…) and hanging them on pegs I suddenly found myself laying on the ground. At first I wasn’t sure what had happened because I hadn’t felt anything and it happened so fast. It seemed that my legs had just buckled under me.
I soon realized that one of the large chokers that I had just hung on a peg a couple of feet above my head had fallen off and struck me square in the middle of the hard hat. I was surprised by the force of the cable and how little I had felt. I became a true believer in wearing my hardhat whenever I was working. The steel rope had left a small gash across the hardhat that remained as a reminder to me of the importance of wearing my hardhat at all times.
Larry Riley used to comment to me that I didn’t need to wear it when we were in the truck driving somewhere. Especially when I was sitting in the middle in the back seat of the crew cab and it made it hard for him to see anything through the rear view mirror other than a yellow hard hat sticking up to the top of the cab.
During my first summer at the plant (1979), I did witness how easy it was for someone to hurt their back. I mean… really hurt their back. I was helping to carry a very large 30 foot long section of a wooden extension ladder. There were four of us. Each on one corner. I know that Tom Dean was behind me carrying one side of the back end. I believe that Ben Hutchinson and Aubrey Cargill were on the other side of the ladder.
As we were walking through the shop, Tom stepped on the floor drain just outside of the A Foreman’s office. The drain cover was missing and a wooden piece of plywood had been put in its place to cover the hole.
A Cast Iron Floor drain cover similar to this was missing
Large equipment had driven over the plywood and it was smashed down into the drain making a slight indention in the middle of the floor.
When Tom stepped on the piece of wood, he lost his balance, and ended up spinning himself around as he tried to remain holding onto the ladder. By doing this, he became slightly twisted, and at once he was in terrible pain. Back pain. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this one event was a critical turning point in Tom Dean’s career at the power plant. He was pretty well out the rest of the summer recuperating from the back injury.
The next summer when I returned to the plant, Tom was working in the tool room. Obviously a step down from being a mechanic. He was also very unhappy. You could tell by looking at him that he had lost the proud expression that he had wore the summer before.
I don’t remember how long Tom worked at the plant after that. I just know that it really made me sad to see someone’s life deteriorate during the snapshots that I had in my mind from the summer before to when I returned to see a man tortured not only by back pain, but by a feeling of inadequate self worth. Hurting your back is one of the most common and most serious injuries in an industrial setting. It is definitely a life changing event.
There were other tragedies during my time as a summer help and they didn’t necessarily have to do with something dangerous at work. One summer there was a young man working in the warehouse and tool room. His name was Bill Engleking (thanks Fred. I didn’t remember his name in the original post). The next summer I asked where he had gone, and I learned that one morning he had woke up and found that he had become completely blind. It turned out that he had a very serious case of diabetes. The sugar levels in his blood had reached such dangerous levels that it destroyed his optic nerves overnight.
Then there was one of the Electricians, Bill Ennis. He would say that he was “Blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other one.” He was actually blind in one eye completely, and the other eye he was color blind. So, what he said was actually true.
It happened on occasion that people visiting the plant would be seriously hurt. Everyone at the plant was trained in first aid, and Power Plant Men, being the way that they are, are always willing to do whatever it takes to help someone out in time of trouble.
One day during lunch, a man came to the plant to fill the unleaded gas tank on the side of the garage in front of the warehouse. While he was reaching over the PTO (Power Take Off), His shirt sleeve caught in the spinning PTO shaft and broke his arm.
An example of a PTO shaft on a brush hog
I remember Mickey Postman explaining what happened. His crew was eating lunch in the garage when they heard someone yelling for help. When they ran out to see what had happened, they found the man tied up in the PTO with one bone from his arm sticking straight out in the air. They quickly took care of him and treated him for shock as they waited for the Ambulance from Ponca City to arrive.
It is times like this that you wish would never happen, but you are glad that you had first aid training and you know what to do. This person could easily have died from this injury if not for the quick action of Mickey Postman and the rest of his crew. I believe other Power Plant Men that were there to help was Dale Mitchell, George Alley, Don Timmons and Preston Jenkins. Mickey would know for sure. I’ll leave it up to him to remind me.
Mickey Postman
I have illustrated these tragic events to demonstrate the importance of making Safety Job Number One. The Power Plant Men didn’t have to be told by a safety video to know how important it was. They all knew examples of tragedies such as these.
Each month the plant would have the Monthly Safety Meeting, and every Monday morning each crew would have their own safety meeting. Safety pamphlets would be read, safety videos would be watched. Campaigns would be waged to re-emphasize the importance of proper lifting techniques. Everyone in the plant had to take the Defensive Driving course.
The last summer I worked as a summer help in 1982 was the first summer that everyone was required to take the Defensive Driving course. The course was being given by Nancy Brien, Nick Gleason and Ken Couri. We learned a lot of defensive driving slogans like, “Is the Pass really necessary?” “Slow down, ride to the right, ride off the road” (when an emergency vehicle is approaching), “Use the Two Second Rule” (Only, I think it was 3 seconds at that time). “Do a Circle For Safety” etc….
The Defensive Driving Course we took when I was a summer help
My friend Tim Flowers and another summer help were carpooling during that time and we made signs with those slogans on them. Then when we were driving home in my little Honda Civic, we would hold one of those signs up in the back window so that the Power Plant person that was following us home (Usually Dick Dale and Mike Gibbs) would wonder what it said, and would pull up closer to read the sign, and it would say, “Use the 3 second rule”, or “If you can read this, you are too close”.
That was when I began wearing my seat belt all the time. Before that, it was not common for people to wear seat belts. They only had the lap belt before that, and those weren’t the safest things in the world. Especially since they would get lost inside the seat. I attribute the Defensive Driving Course that I took while I was a summer help at the plant for my safe record as a driver. There were a number of tips that I learned then, that I still use all the time today.
There is one advantage to wearing a hardhat that I didn’t realize until I left the power plant in 2001. It is that you never have to worry about hair loss on the top of your head. Whenever you are outside at the plant, you always wear your hardhat and safety glasses. When I changed jobs to become a software developer at Dell, I would find that just by walking down the street in the neighborhood in Texas, I would quickly develop a sunburn on the top of my head.
During the years of wearing a hardhat, I may have been losing my hair, but it never occurred to me. Not until I had a sunburn on the top of my head. I wondered at times if people would look at me funny if I showed up for work in my cubicle at Dell (when we had cubicles) wearing a yellow hardhat. Oh, and a pair of super stylish safety glasses like those shown at the top of this post.
You know when you are young, and I’m sure this has happened to all of you at one point in your life, you dream that you get off of the school bus at your school in the morning only to find that you are still wearing your pajamas. — Yeah. I thought you would remember that one. Well. I still have dreams of showing up at my desk job wearing a hardhat and safety glasses. I don’t realize it until I lift my hardhat up to wipe the sweat off of my brow, then I quickly look around to see if anyone noticed as I stuff the hardhat under the desk.
Comment from previous post:
Jack Curtis January 22, 2014:
The safety meetings, Defensive Driving, safety glasses… it was the same way for telephone men, too. And they jumped in whenever there were problems as well. It is striking to me, to see the differences in attitudes from one generation to another…
Power Plant Men 
Wow – I hadn’t thought about Mark’s murder in years. This verse gives me hope: Mark 4:22 For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light.
Thanks for another great story!