I wasn't union but I worked permit. I think it was local 103 or maybe 93 or 98. I had a heat incident almost a year ago my temperature got above 106F. Don't know how hot I did get but it scraped a lot out of the memory banks. Sometimes stuff comes back in, sometimes it doesn't.
I probably considered the job in Wyoming, funny several people I knew well later worked it. I considered it but it was still getting down below freezing every night at the end of may. Another killer, 150 miles to the nearest place to stay. No camper on my truck, seven twelves and 300 miles a day. That might leave six hours to eat, sleep, take care of any other business I needed to. Didn't sound like fun. I passed.
A funny, the secretary for the union office was also the community chest for seemed like half of Baton Rouge. My working partner Jerry was tagging her regularly and we got out to work a lot. One night he was on a date with her in a bar. Saw something he liked better on the other side of the room and dumped the secretary on the spot. Didn't even tell her, just walked over and picked up the other girl and never came back to his table. It was two years before I went out the hall again. I was just as happy working rat so no big deal except when work was tight. That was the way it went petro-chem, nobody had any work then a dozen companies were calling you.
102 was the teamsters union, I think I would remember if we were 103 so probably ninety something. I don't remember. I mostly worked the lower Mississippi but I went up to Terre Haute and another fairly nearby job, blanking on the city. Maybe around Bowling Green? We stayed four to six months, made a little stake, and headed home.
The job in Terre Haute was a power plant on the Wabash River, as in right on it for cooling water. We were on the high bank, maybe forty feet above the water that was undercutting the indoor plant. All the outhouses, six or eight, were right on the edge of the bluff too as in the back of the skids of some of them hanging in the air for up to a foot.
I noticed this one guy that would sit and squirm like a second grader after eating. He wasn't crapping on his own time no matter what. He always took the very first can too. One day I eased up to the can. I had watched him walk in and gave him a couple minutes to get settled first. Then I gave the can a mighty slam like I was tumbling it over into the river forty feet below! He went to hollering, "there is somebody in this one! No, No, wait! I forget what all he hollered and I guarantee he was through taking a dump ten seconds after I slammed my hands into that plastic can. After that he always used the can on the far end!
Always tried to make my own fun.
Hu
