Interestingly, before lunch and at the end of the day, we we

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.