More Summer Jobs

My summer jobs in 1962, 63 and 64 were arranged through my Dad. Mobil Chemical, where daddy worked, agreed to provide contract work for employees’ sons during the summer break. I think there were two purposes behind this program. One was to subsidize employees whose sons were college bound. The second was to show those young men what crappy jobs were like for those without college degrees.

Side trip: This shows how sexist our society was even as late as the late 50’s. There were, to my knowledge, no jobs provided for college bound girls. Yuck!!

There were about 12 of us and we worked for a labor contractor, Fluor Construction. We worked for the painter group and our job was to scrape the rust and corrosion off of pipes and then clean them up for the painters.

There was a lot of horsing around and that did not please the paint foreman or the Mobil dads.

We typically showed up before 8 am and clocked in at 8. We wandered over to the paint shack and waited to figure out if we were going to work that day. The issue was humidity. If it was too high they could not paint and the paint foreman sent us home.

So, if it was raining when we were at the time clock, they sent us home with no pay. If we clocked in, but the humidity was too high, they sent us home and paid us for two hours. If we went to the job site and started working and then the rain came, we got paid for half a day if we left before noon or for a full day if we left after noon. Clearly, we prayed for a 1 PM rain storm.

Most of this summer we worked about 10-15 feet above ground on overhead pipe racks. The pipes were anywhere from a foot to three feet in diameter and we just straddled them and started scraping, wire brushing and sanding. It was hard, dirty work, but it paid well. We also got to wear hard hats which I put in the on the back seat shelf of my 55 Ford Victoria. I though it looked cool back there.

Interestingly, before lunch and at the end of the day, we went to a faucet in the plant to wash our hands. It turns out we were washing our hands in toluene, a carcinogen. No wonder the cancer rate is so high in the Golden Triangle (Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange).

One of my coworkers was Brian Lietzke, the older brother of Bruce LIetzke. Bruce played professional golf.

This job wound up around labor day. The summer of my junior year the same program was available and I showed up again. This time we were assigned as laborers and we cut the grass and weeds under low pipe racks and in drainage ditches. We used sickles. We actually worked anywhere the tractors could not go. This was brutal work in the Beaumont heat and humidity.

We paced ourselves and did not work too hard. We were careful to hydrate. When we were working our way down a ditch, occasionally we would scare out a snake or animal and go in to high gear with our sickles chasing the poor creature. We rarely caught them.

Each morning we used files to sharpen the sickles and more of us got cut sharpening than doing the work.

The summer after my senior year, when I showed up, they asked who among us had taken mechanical drawing in high school. One other guy, Reagan Newton, and I had and we were chosen for a special assignment. We were to work in the office building making small scale drawings of every vessel with ‘as build’ locations of all connections. This entailed getting the ‘as designed’ drawing, making a copy on the Xerox machine (a brand new invention at that time), taking this drawing into the plant, finding the real vessel and making notations on the photocopy. Then we would go back to the office (air conditioned) and make the ‘as build’ drawings.

I also went to the ethylene cracking furnaces and recorded the firebox temperatures for each furnace and plotted them on a graph for the operations guys.

This was a pretty good job and when Reagan and I went to the time shack to clock out, we were still pretty clean while our colleagues were filthy having been cutting grass in the ditches all day.

This third summer there were so many of us that Mobil split us into two groups – one group got the first six weeks and the other group got the second six weeks. I was in the first group and when my time was up, Dad pulled some strings and got me on with a construction company as a construction clerk.

I ordered materials, balanced books, wrote checks, did payroll and stuff like that. The interesting thing that happened on this job was that Mobil was pushing the company to finish the project early and Mobil was willing to pay overtime to get the job done.

The pipe fitter foreman was a pleasant young man about 7 years older than me. He got foreman differential and overtime pay and his weekly checks were on the order of $600 for a monthly total of about $2500. This was in 1964. I was about to go to Rice University for five years and come out with a degree that would get me a job making $1000/month.

Should I consider becoming a pipe fitter?

I spoke with him a little about this and he explained that he was raking it in for now, but when the project was finished, he would be getting $0/month until he found another job. So he said he lived in a ‘feast or famine’ mode.

Part of the company’s rationale for giving this kind of work to us was to reinforce the idea of college. ‘See, here’s the kind of work you get without a degree.’

The second summer in this job we were sent up one of the tall towers in the plant to scrape the rust off the platforms in preparation for painting. Someone brought a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco. The guys on the upper platforms made it a game to hit guys below with tobacco spit. It was mighty disgusting and led to a competition to be on an upper platform.

We had safety harnesses but did not have instructions on how to use them. So we put on the harness, tied it off on the platform rails and hung by the harness to scrape the outsides and bottoms of the platforms. Absolutely stupid! And a misuse of the harness.

One day my dad walked out of the control room, looked up and saw us hanging by a single rope. I never saw him move so fast. There was a thunderclap as the air filled in behind him.

He was up the tower like a flash. We were told in no uncertain terms to safely get down to the ground. Then dad ‘tore a strip’ off the guy who ran our crew.

I was pretty impressed. Clearly, dad understood the massive implications of something untoward happening to one of these kids.

I also tried selling vacuum cleaners and Fuller Brushes (google Fuller Brush). I could not sell water to people in the Sahara desert.