Humility Are Us

I am often amazed by smart people who think themselves nearly infallible because they know so much and try so hard. They are earnest. They are leaders. They believe very strongly in themselves and their judgment. I'm glad such people exist. Society needs people who take things seriously, work hard and think positively about themselves. My own personal inquiry about such people is, are they humble? The word humble is derived from humility, which is achieved through humiliation. That is, until you are personally humiliated and know what that feels like, you often lack humility and are therefore not at all humble. I can deal with smart, aggressive people who want to lead as long as there is an underlying element of humility. Makes them human. Some of it is also about empathy, of course. Putting yourself in the place of the followers. Again, being a good leader is often defined by how good a follower you were. You can empathize with those who must follow because you were once where they are and know how it feels. Those who would lead but have not followed and who would give orders to others but lack humility, make me very nervous. If you feel the same, read on.

I am an outstanding example of someone who has felt humiliation, early and often. My friends in grammar school held me up to a mirror whenever I would get so full of myself that I forgot to think about others. My parents didn't know they were suppose to make me feel special, so they often showed me how stupid I was acting. So that's probably where my humility comes from. I guess now you can say I want others to feel my pain. I have hundreds of examples of my own stupidity or ignorance running rampant but I want to share a particularly egregious example of ignorance rearing it's homely persona at a critical moment in my past. It's also funny.

I joined the Air Force in 1970. Went to Lackland AFB for basic training. Like every other budding airman there, I was challenged by the "confidence course." It was what used to be called an obstacle course but renamed after what it was supposed to instill in it's participants. The first week or two in, you went out to do the course and well, with little PT behind you, you struggled to complete the course and once in a while didn't finish a particular obstacle. After a few weeks of PT and running, you got in better shape and most everybody did much better on the second go round and did it much faster. It was a requirement to finish basic. You had to finish the course. Now to set up my personal challenge. Also at Lackland we enjoyed pretty decent chow at the chow hall (cafeteria style) and breakfast was always filled with a lot of choices. What we lacked was very long to eat but you learned to rush if you expected to eat very much. The morning of our second try at the confidence course, we were filled with eager anticipation. Most of my flight felt in much better shape and we knew the course better. Every morning after my first two weeks of acclimation, I had tried to take at least something different to try at the chow hall. Keep it interesting. This morning I selected a nice bowl of warm prunes to go with my eggs and toast. They were a bit weird but also kinda sweet and overall I liked them and ate them all and drank the juice. I had never experienced warm prunes before but my knowledge of the fruit was soon to be expanded. Before breakfast, we had been up since dawn, had done morning PT and were scheduled to arrive at the confidence course a little before 10:30AM. "Hurry up and wait" is the motto of the military and we marched quick time across base and out to the woods where the course was located to stand and wait. It was a decent march and got us quite warmed up. In prior summers at Lackland, they had killed a few recruits and we were wearing pith topis and carrying a canteen of water wherever we went. Lord knows what it cost the government when one of us died so we had to do our best to protect our benefactor whenever we could. Our road guards carried an extra canteen of salt tablets and passed them out twice a day. Once in a while somebody collapsed from the heat but it wasn't fatal, just life threatening. It was more an inconvenience, which they could tolerate. Screaming often ensued but that was clearly out of love. We stood at parade rest for a half hour because the schedule was falling behind. Perhaps some airman had to be hospitalized because they were allergic to tear gas. Who knows? What I did know, however, was the first rumblings of my bowels was occurring around the time we were originally due to take the course. After waiting another 15 minutes, I knew I was in serious, serious trouble. I wasn't able to stand still any longer, parade rest or no. Something was coming down the old alimentary canal and there was no stopping it. We were told to get ready as we were going to go on the course at any time. I was not going to be able to run and jump and scale anything with the explosive gas I was experiencing and there was no point in telling anybody, they'd just scream at me. I just took off toward the nearest stand of trees to let nature take it's course and miracle of miracles there was an old bathroom no longer in use, just behind the trees. It was made of concrete blocks with two stalls, still with conveniences. It was overgrown, foul and dirty and awful but it looked like a little bit of heaven to me. I exploded into the old john and sacrificed a handkerchief and ran like a fool back to where my flight had been and found they had moved up significantly and was now queued up to be next in line to tackle the course. At that moment I realized I had made a very stupid mistake to sample a completely new food before taking on a difficult course. If I couldn't complete it, at a minimum it would set me back a week in training. Luck had seen me through it. It was, however, yet another reason to be humble. I didn't embrace the experience but I learned from it. And sometime in the future, if you grow tired of a co-worker who can't seem to empathize with others or manage to show any humility, try to encourage them to have a large, warm bowl of prunes the morning before your next important meeting. Worked for me.

Be careful or grateful what you wish for

The old Chinese proverb is "be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." That, and "may you live in interesting times." These are sardonic sayings because life is full of irony. There are a lot of Chinese and irony isn't lost on a population of 2,000,000,000. I can agree that in some instances what you initially wish for isn't always what you thought it would be. In the late 70s, early 80s, I got to attend various training seminars and meetings related to public transit. I was located in greater New Orleans and flew to Texas quite a lot. I have fond memories of flying in those decades. Lots of airlines. Lots of choices. Free meals. Friendly, accommodating flight attendants who were often attractive women. Fewer cavity searches. To Texas you had TTA (tree top airlines or Trans Texas), Southwest (hasn't changed much in decades and much the model of the industry now) and Braniff. Southwest was also called cattle car airlines for obvious reasons, which you'll appreciate if you've flown with them. They were great for being on time (the cattle car concept worked for that), had an excellent safety record and were friendly and a little weird. I liked that. As I recall, I was flying on a Sunday afternoon in the spring. I often chose Braniff over Southwest because they fed you more than peanuts (another staple of Southwest), gave you a seat assignment, in advance and flew decent jets with leather seats. The kicker was they were about the same cost on many flights as their competition and you got the frills for almost nothing. Probably why they no longer exist. 

I was looking forward to a leisurely flight and evening in Houston. I liked to show up early in case I had transportation trouble and that day had none and was quite early, nearly as early as you must show up today. As I approached Braniff's counter, I was greeted by the friendly faces of the airline's staff with a smile. Things were pretty sweet. When the ticket agent looked at my ticket and flight she frowned and said, "you know there's a big storm rolling in and I seriously doubt your flight will take off." Wow, talk about ruin your plans. Then she said, "you know you're early enough and we have a flight due to take off in just about five minutes. It should beat the storm. I can switch your ticket out and if you run, you can just make the door closure." That brought a big smile to my face. I was going to get what I wished for. "Fabulous, let's do it." I love to quote Gary Gilmore.

I grabbed my carry-on and altered ticket and ran down the concourse. If you're old enough you can remember the commercial with OJ running through airports jumping over seats and sprinting. Better times for all, especially OJ. I ran. I jumped. I sprinted. I just made it in time for the doors to be sealed behind me. I even got an aisle seat. What transpired that day can't happen now. We understand the forces of downdrafts, micro-bursts, wind shear and there are detectors at the end of each runway. Not so this day, however. We took off as the skies darkened, as I recall, on the east-west runway, heading east. Normally storms came at us from the west, northwest but I don't know from which direction the storm was coming that day. The reason I say we took off going east is as the pilot climbed and slightly banked starboard, I could see Kenner outside the plane windows below me and if you go west, you only see swamp, north you get the lake. I was on the right side of the plane. As an aside, much of north Kenner hadn't been developed yet. The airport, which was then Moisant Field and is now Louis Armstrong International, is located in the midst of Kenner, which grew up around the airport. The airport was located well out of town when it was built but back then zoning didn't preclude building a house in close proximity. That would change, of course, in time, although the houses in Kenner are still there, at least most of them are. Within a year or so later than my Sunday flight to Houston, PanAm flight 759 would crash into the same Kenner neighborhood, demolishing six houses, killing all 145 people on board and another 6 who were on the ground. It was one of those tragedies that the FAA learned a lot from. Knowledge, however, isn't retro-active and on this Sunday, what became immediately obvious was we weren't going to be doing any noise abatement even though we were flying over a residential neighborhood. The Captain pushed us up into the sky with all the throttle he had but we weren't climbing very well at all. The bumping and jumping began as the plane strained and made funny noises and the lights on the plane were having a hard time staying lit and were flickering and eventually would go out. We were sort of suspended in air with the engines at full throttle and the storm was shaking us like a rag doll and we weren't climbing, we were bouncing. We were moving forward but I felt we were approaching a stall. I could almost feel the back end of the plane begin to pull us down and we didn't have far to go to the ground. I do not ever want to feel that sensation again. The pilot had to give up on the climb and just try to regain air speed. There was a moment of clarity when I realized we were pretty much going to crash. It was imminent. You can't stall a commercial jet like that at low altitude and expect much else. There was really no other conclusion to be had from the events. We weren't going to make it because we didn't have enough air speed. The storm was pushing us down toward the ground and we never should have tried to take off in the first place. It seemed like it went on for several minutes but I know it was only a matter of a minute. A minute's a long time when you're in a commercial jet that can't maintain airspeed and is drifting downward. There was the smell of panic in the cabin. I noticed people's faces were pale with flecks of white on the their skin. I saw a dozen or so people vomiting in bags. To this day, I had never witnessed anybody throwing up in those little bags. There was general crying and sobbing. That, and the throwing-up was epidemic. I was in my 30s and felt I had achieved a lot in my life. I always thought when my time came, I'd be okay with it, as I was satisfied with my life's achievements. This one moment put that to lie. In no way was I ready to die. It was the farthest thing from the truth. I wanted another second, another minute, any chance to survive at all, was acceptable to me. The plane shuddered over and over and just as it seemed we would not stop drifting backwards, the pilot dropped more altitude and brought the nose down and managed to arrest the stall. We had also moved southeast far enough to start to clear some of the wind sheer that was pushing down on us. The plane began to level a bit and we simply flew low until he could use his gradually increasing airspeed to start climbing. In another moment, there was palpable relief on board. The lights came back on. We were climbing toward cruise altitude and sunshine. We weren't going to die after all. I had been on a rough flight where we should have diverted but didn't and laded in a snow storm in Omaha. It was terrible and bumpy and when we landed everybody burst out in applause. There was no applause or jubilation this day. Just embarrassment and relief. In 1982, Flight 759 hit a tree while trying to regain airspeed while being forced down by wind sheer and cold, rapid down drafts. PanAm had had no luck that day. Braniff must have had a horseshoe aboard for this day because we managed to regain our airspeed and climb back up into the sky without hitting anything. In retrospect, I know it was foolish to run to get on a plane taking off into an approaching storm. But in experiencing an event that made me think I was to die, I learned something. I'm better prepared to ask for another minute of life and always willing to wish for it. The Chinese aren't right about everything.

Why I was always a band rat

I'm from New Orleans. It will always be my home even though I haven't technically lived in the city since 1958. My parents and I lived in Ruston, Louisiana and then Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans between 1959 and 1970. I attended LSUNO/UNO for four years to maintain my draft deferment and to try to figure who I was and what I should be doing. I wasn't ready for much else at 17. 

By late 1969 I was out of school, better educated but not altogether sure who I was. The good news was I was no longer 17 and was not an immediate hazard to myself or others (when I wasn't drinking). What wise professors did teach me, however, was how little I knew and how far I was from achieving it. What I would be doing was then decided by outside forces. Leaving school meant I was no longer draft deferred but rather I was draft bait. When my draft number for 1970 was announced as 65, I either had to join the military or be drafted by late winter.

The Air Force seemed like a good place to receive training and avoid being a foot soldier. Men, boys?, drafted in Louisiana went straight to Fort Polk (Tiger town) and a lot of them became reluctant 11-Bravos in Southeast Asia. It's not like I didn't want to lose a leg or a foot, it was more like if I had a choice in the matter, getting a better deal with the Air Force was a practical decision. For the record, I could have gone Army and I could have and would have fought.

Like most of my life I would have approached it as a challenge and tried my best to be a razor sharp killer. There are those who think I was a draft dodger who joined to avoid a fight. There is a grain of truth to that, certainly since I was attempting to avoid getting killed or maimed. But the other truth is I simply made a tactical decision to improve myself and avoid death. I understand those who don't want to fight or kill. I respect their decision but it just isn't me. I studied history for four years in college and those unwilling to fight, pave the way for slavery.

When the O'Jays' sang "War, what is it good for, huh, absolutely nothing" seem to overlook the words and deeds of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who could have avoided killing in the Civil War, as he had both status and position but stated, "I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery."

War is the horrible price men pay for freedom, THAT's what it's good for even for those who fail to recognize it. In any case, I took the oath at the customs house downtown and rode the Airport Downtown Express bus to the airport to board a plane for San Antonio. I knew the bus line well. I rode it every weekday from Metairie Road to Phlox Avenue to attend East Jefferson High School for three years. I also rode it into town on weekends and the summer to see movies and hang out, ala' Petulia Clark's biggest hit. 

Several decades later I would, after working there for over 25 years, be President and General Manager of Louisiana Transit. Transit buses tended to be an artery that fed me throughout my life.  After Air Force basic training at Lackland AFB (San Antonio) I was bussed to Wichita Falls, Texas to Shepard AFB for tech school. Joining the Air Force to fly and then finding myself on a bus riding across Texas from one base to another seemed humiliating at the time but again, buses (I also worked for Trailways for a while) were my conveyor belt. 

Since only college graduates with 20/20 vision were trained to be pilots and navigators and since I hadn't gotten my diploma in four years, what I could do in the Air Force was defined for me in a class we took at Lackland. It was to be a memorable experience. Basic Training is pretty serious with a lot of screaming. But we'd been through a few weeks of it by now and I guess the Sergeant who put on the class for us to fill out our wish list for school assignments decided to give us a little entertainment. 

He came in in uniform but he took on the persona of "Reginald Van Gleason" comedian Jackie Gleason's alter ego that is pretty much Johnny Carson's tea time movie host "Art Fern" or Ernie Kovac's "Percy Dovetonsils." A completely over the top impersonation of a high class, huckster dufus with high tonsil talking and nonsensical attitude. Here's a Youtube sketch of Gleason portraying Reggie:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4VUCZRasLs

You have to wait a minute and fifty for Reggie to appear but I think it's worth it. To this day I think about a third of the class thought the guy was actually like the character he was portraying while he conducted his class. It was a tremendous comedic relief for me and gave me hope that the Air Force did actually have a great sense of humor. You'd never know it from our DIs. 

I filled out my request form for several choices from 1 to 5 or something. Computer Operator was my third choice for duty assignment and what I wound up with. First choice was language school. They said you'd learn languages like Russian. I took the test and didn't feel that I did really well but came within 1 point out of 100 (off by 1%) of making the cut for the school which lasted 10 months. One of my ideas was to select the longest school I could get. Turns out the only language they taught was Vietnamese, which I guess is why it takes 10 months to get fluent. 

Not sure if I would have chosen language school knowing that was the only language they were teaching. Even though my bold words above say 'I'd fight, if asked,' I was still avoiding death and dismemberment rather instinctively because I wasn't looking for overseas assignments.  I wanted to go to the Florida panhandle, not Viet Nam. And yes, I am fluent in hypocrisy. The next longest school was Air Traffic Controller. 

If I joined the Air Force for training, why not go all out and it was the next to longest school after language school. I had to take a flight physical for that school. I technically passed the physical but the doc said he was not going to recommend me for the position because he knew if I flew a lot and couldn't clear my ears well, I didn't handle the altitude changes well, I shouldn't be doing it as my primary MOS. Turns out air traffic controller was to be forward air controller in Viet Nam and they flew you out to call in the strikes. So I got my third choice. 

This triggered my ride to Sheppard on a bus. I also spent a few extra weeks playing in the Lackland Drum and Bugle Corps. I am a band rat. When I hit a base or a campus I seek out musicians and look to join. It is an affliction that came upon me in Junior High. I joined band because my Dad picked me up from first day tryouts for basketball on instructions from my Mother who felt that I was too frail to compete safely. 

I had a heart murmur which was similar to my Dad's. He got rheumatic fever in the navy while training to be a dive bomber in WWII outside Chicago. They ran the trainees out into a wet field at night in the cold and left them out for a few hours for an air raid. He caught pneumonia and got rheumatic fever. It left him with a bad heart. Similarly I was thought to have had rheumatic fever when I was 6 years old. I missed a few months of school. By the time I was 12, I got a clear bill of health but by then it was too late. 

I wasn't running up and down a basketball court, I was marching in a band with a trombone. In junior high, before we chose instruments, they had an expert come in and look at our embouchures (teeth and mouth alignment) to recommend an instrument to match our mouth's foundation to an instrument appropriate to the player. I was told I had a woodwind embouchure. I chose trombone which is a brass instrument. I sorta wanted trumpet but so did everybody so trombone was a little different. To this day, after playing seriously for decades I don't have a good upper register. I guess the gal who made the recommendation could tell me she told me so. In defense, I went bass trombone as soon as I could lay my hands on one because I have a fantastic lower register. After that it was love.

I played baritone bugle in both the Lackland and Shepard AFB drum and bugle corps. I’d never been accused of being a prodigy with a horn. I sat either 2nd or 3rd trombone through much of high school. By the time I was a senior, I was 2nd chair 1st trombone but that was more based on seniority than anything else. I also played in the stage band in high school. Our director, Martin “Mike” Clancy had been a lower brass player himself and took a liking to me because I wasn’t an out and out thug. Unfortunately our high school had it’s share of thugs. 

My Dad sat on me most of my youth and I had grudging respect for authority because I hadn’t been given much of a choice. We called Mr. Clancy “Prof.” Prof had given me some music for trombone to practice. It was “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” I had a couple of Si Zenter albums and I would ape his style, which was heavy on the vibrato, using the slide to produce the unique sound. The night of our stage band’s senior concert, which preceded the regular band’s concert, Prof told me I would be playing Red Roses as a solo with guitar chord backup. 

I knew he did it because I was a good kid and I played the solo but to this day have no idea if it was really any good or not. I’d always questioned my worth, throughout most of my early years. The same year I played that solo, Mr. Clancy asked me and another trombone player to play with his Dad’s band in Mardi Gras parades. That year, my senior year, I played every day or night for eleven days and nights in a parades throughout town. From Carrollton on the first Saturday of carnival to both Rex and Comus on the final day of carnival, which is Mardi Gras. 

Some nights I marched with my high school and other nights with Clancy’s jazz band, which was Mr. Clancy’s father’s group. We were the king of carnival’s band behind the lead float in Rex. After Comus on Mardi Gras night I was soot black. The Flambeaux carried either fusee flares or oil burning rag lights. Both produced light but also produced a lot of soot. When my Dad, bless his heart, picked me up after Comus, he didn’t recognize me. I’d lost ten pounds by the end of the week and I was jet black.

I played at Lackland while on TDY for a few weeks on voluntary assignment. They let us delay our tech school for as many weeks as we wanted to stay at Lackland and play in the corps. One of the guys I played with accepted an assignment to play in the Air Force academy drum and bugle corps in Colorado Springs rather than get his tech school training. It would be his permanent duty assignment. We marched in graduations, parades and played to the colors when the flags were raised and lowered. In time, however, I felt I needed to move on and get the training for which I had joined the Air Force. It turned out, however, that Shepard AFB, where I would get eight weeks of computer training had another music assignment in store for me.

When I got to Shepard, I heard they had a corps and I sought them out and managed to catch on. To join the corps at Lackland you had to audition. If you had corps experience in the Air Force, you no longer had to audition, you were a legacy. The guy who ran the flight I was in initially was pissed off at me and gave me grief but in the end I got the orders and he had to let me go. I moved myself on foot across base to be in the corps. I was about five or six weeks into playing with the corps when we were practicing in a big room. 

We were working on a fairly new march. The bugle had a key and a rotor, in the key of G. You had to under or over blow it now and again to get subtle notes just right. By now all bugles are in the key of Bb, just like band instruments but back then it was traditional for corps to have G instruments. G bugles don’t have the tonal range a regular band instrument has. For one thing it lacks the three keys a Bb instrument has. It just has fewer ways of producing mid tones. By now I had been playing on a bugle for a few months and had played trombone for nine years prior to that, including college. 

Perhaps I’d never been outstanding but by now I was competent. The Master Sergeant who had the corps had guys coming and going all the time. Troops came on base to get training, stayed a few weeks and moved on. Turnover was constant. He didn’t know me very well and for that matter didn’t know a lot of the baritone bugles of which there were about a dozen. The other thing I’d always done defensively is play out. Filling the horn hid struggles for range. Once you put enough air from your diaphragm into the horn you could pretty much blow any note you wanted, even if you struggled to hit upper range notes. It was defensive. It also meant I’d better know my part because you could hear me from just about anywhere. When I was at Ruston High School Mr. Barnes always knew when I hit a clunker because he could always hear me anywhere he was in the football stadium at practice. I was on the upper edge of whatever we were playing whether a high “piano” or a stronger “fortissimo.”

This day at Shepard, Sarge was directing us and was trying to figure out who was playing a certain phrase in the music and he couldn’t figure out where in lower brass it was coming from. Rather than embarrass anybody by making us play our parts one at a time, he had one bugle lay out each time we played the twelve bars of music as a group. We didn’t sit first chair or anything and I sat toward the end of the line. As we played the phrase over and over as one by one each bugle laid out, we played it over and over about nine times with a fair consistency. 

Then it became my turn to lay out. The other eleven horns began to play the phrase and little by little as they got two bars then three, it began to unravel and by the fourth bar the whole thing fell apart. Kind of like a musical train wreck. It then got weirdly silent. Nobody had said stop playing, it just fell apart when one out of twelve bugles laid out. I had been so loud for so long, I was carrying the entire section under me. When I was playing, I was the umbrella to play under. When I quit, the safety blanket was pulled. It was a strange moment. Most of my life I wasn’t sure of my worth. Sarge just shook his head and said, “look, don’t ever lay out again, okay?” It brought the house down. It was a defining moment for me. I was needed.

One night we went to town to play at a function in Wichita Falls. A school bus picked us up, we went to town, played our dozen or so marches, it got dark and we were picked up again by the same driver to return to base. I remember none of the details of where we played or what. On the way back to base on a fifteen minute ride, some of the guys in the back started to sing. It was kind of unorganized but one by one everybody started to fill in. We were musicians after all and most of us could hit the notes. 

The guys on the bus were a wide cross section of America. Tall, short, white, black and everything in between. A couple guys broke out with “Dixie.” You’d think the black guys would be offended but most of them had great voices and we hit two choruses and the volume picked up and well, it was amazing. The acoustics on the bus were like being in a sound chamber and our voices filled it to the breaking point. It was both loud and well, impressive. We were actually better singing than we were playing the bugle. 

Not a second after the last chorus of Dixie died, than Battle Hymn of the Republic began. If Dixie had been loud, the Battle Hymn became even fuller. Goosebumps raised on my arms as we sang three verses. I don’t know how I or anybody else on the bus knew all the verses of Battle Hymn, but there it was, in amazing harmony and it was stirring. As stirring as anything I can remember. As the final chorus wound down we realized we’d arrived at our barracks a couple of minutes ago and no one got up until we finished the final chorus. I was in the second row toward the front sitting behind the driver. As we began to rise to get off, the bus driver stood up in the middle of the aisle to address us. I sat close enough to see he had tears in his eyes. He told us he’d take us anywhere at anytime and consider it a privilege. It was an amazing, special moment in my life. It is almost indescribable to see such emotion in a perfect stranger but that’s what music is capable of. It’s why I was always a band rat.

No, I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that. I guess it's the beret or the neck scarf or the whole getup. Peter Allen would have loved it, for sure. Took me several decades to find a Getzen G bugle to replace the one (holding here) I left behind in Wichita Falls. Ebay. I love the thing and play it regularly. Bugles are an acquired taste.

My Graduation from Weenie to Worker

From late 1978 'til early 1980, I worked for an engineering firm in Omaha. Water treatment. Sewage treatment. I’d just quit working for Trailways, American Bus Lines, as lead transportation supervisor and camped out for a few days at the employment bureau. The guy who was assigned my case was used to people registering for unemployment compensation visiting next door at employment because it was a requirement to draw your check. After a couple days he realized I really wanted work and began to review the screens for me as soon as a job became available. He sent me out to western Omaha to interview for the “order expediter” job at HEMCO. Carl took my application and did the interview. Carl was office manager. Carl was tall and thin, dark-haired and whip smart. He just couldn’t keep up with all the orders the firm had outstanding and needed somebody to work full time just calling the manufacturers to get the orders expedited. He worked with three engineers who were in the process of buying the firm from Whitey Menshing, who had recently retired. Whitey was the prior and nominal owner of the H.E. Menshing Company, or HEMCO. After calling my references and saying ”well, you haven’t burned any bridges and people at your old job said you were conscientious,” he offered me the job. I tightened up with my employment counselor with a fifth of Jack Daniels black label. I was glad to be employed again and set up working at a desk next to Carl and began the job of moving our orders forward and getting them fulfilled.

Within a month the guy who did inside sales took a flyer when he experienced an early life crisis. He wasn't old enough for midlife crisis but he blew town anyway. I moved into his old office and did order expediting and inside sales. I learned how to design blower packages using engineering manuals and how to specify mostly submersible pumps. We were the manufacturing representative for Flygt pumps from Sweden, probably the best submersible pumps in the world. I also sold water measuring equipment using flumes and weirs. I had my own take off table to do the design work. I had never considered being an engineer but working for the firm and with the other engineers was both fun and stimulating. In another month I began working with our shop to assemble the stands, motors, and blowers which I had specified for sale and which were put together in house prior to shipping. I got to know Eric Wren, our shop foreman fairly well and got to like him and the other mechanics. Eric was amazed by our maintenance manager who would take on jobs in the field, go out and camp out in various cities in Nebraska and Iowa taking what seemed like forever to do a job. His name was Ole or Swen or something. I forget. He was a big Scandinavian guy with blonde hair. He’d get up late, have coffee and hang out a lot. Ole went to the same church as our lead engineer, Bob Frisk, and was thought of as his friend. Whether this friendship caused the manager to feel he could be comfortable or not about skylarking on the job was the question of the day. I got tired of listening to Eric complain about him, so I braced Bob in his office about it and told him the shop could get these projects finished in under a week. We’d send more than one guy and save some money. It was taking closer to a month and some jobs never got done. Bob called his friend in to his office when he got back from his latest field work and discussed it with him and the friend got mad and quit. Beginning Monday the next week I was order expediter, inside sales manager and service manager. When I came in Monday to assume the role, Bob told me Eric wanted to see me in the shop. I dressed in shirt and tie, like the other office weenies. I learned in the Air Force there were two kinds of employees, office workers, who did all the work and office weenies, who wore shirts and ties and sat around and drank coffee all day. The workers were the enlisted and non-coms. The weenies were the officers. Eric, a worker, was waiting for me, a weenie, at a work bench. He had a small submersible pump pulled apart in pieces called the impeller, the volute, the rotor, and the stator. I watched him work for a couple of minutes and he said “so you’re taking over the shop?” I told him only with his help. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I knew enough to take over without a ton of help. One of the reasons I did it was to empower the guys working in the shop to get the job done better and quicker. He said “maybe. Let’s see what you know about pumps.” He offered up the greasy, oily middle of a bearing area for me to look at it. I took it from him, looked at it and tried to describe as best I could what I thought it did. He shrugged and nodded and took the part back from me and offered me a rag to wipe my hands. He said I could go back in and finish up with Bob on the job offer. After going back inside Bob explained Eric didn’t expect me to know it all, he just expected me to be willing to get my hands dirty and make a good faith effort. I wouldn’t be much of a worker but I wasn’t all weenie either since I was willing to get my hands dirty. I had passed Eric’s test and would now be considered the “acting” shop manager.

Every few weeks HEMCO would take on big jobs designing water and sewage treatment plants and working with the construction companies to build them. We also refurbished older plants. That and represent manufacturers of equipment that ran these plants. Getting these jobs was a majority of what our three engineers, Bob, Dean and Jim did. It was the engine that moved our company forward. The shop supported these big jobs and we actually would do some the smaller STP (sewage treatment plant) refurbishments in house. One of the other big jobs the shop tackled was cleaning STPs which had been allowed to stop working properly and overflow or freeze up.  One my first field operations was to take on the job paid for by the Jimmie Dean Pork Sausage STP in Shenandoah, Iowa. We got the call that the plant’s own STP had quit working and began discharging raw sewage to the town’s own STP causing it to overflow. The town’s plant needed to be cleaned up and put back in order. We put together a crew of a couple of mechanics, an electrician and some local high schoolers who traveled with us to help do some of the heavy labor. We loaded three trucks and a fifth wheel with various pumps and devices used to clean a digester. As we prepped for the job I asked Eric if he knew where the plant was or had ever been there. Eric said he found them without a map, en route, most times. Eric didn’t believe in instructions or maps. He figured he could figure things out without a drawing and if he couldn’t he wouldn’t want to fool with it anyway. He had never needed instructions to assemble anything. Eric had been in the Navy when I was in the Air Force. I was a computer operator. Eric worked on nuclear submarines. He was the first guy to suit up and go in when the reactor was malfunctioning. Eric was a very good mechanic. When we got to Shenandoah, I was interested to see how we were going to find the STP.  Eric said in his experience, most town's local STPs were run by the Mayor’s brother-in-law, who wouldn’t be there. This was normally why we had to clean things up. The brother-in-law had the job to collect his check and little else. Most BILs figured the plants ran themselves. Many did, for a little while anyway. So rule one was the Mayor’s BIL was in charge but wouldn’t be there. The second STP rule was that it would be located on the south side of town, adjacent to a river running north to south, where it discharged into the stream what was supposed to be treatment effluent. This was pretty much the way it was everywhere he went.

Eric pointed our lead truck toward the south side of town and when we were a mile or so from the river, we saw a black cloud on the horizon. I had never seen a black cloud before. In a couple minutes we were within a block and the overflow from the flies was making it’s way into our trucks. We rolled up the windows and pulled into the industrial area where the STP was located. The sky was darkened from several thousand flies that were circling the top of the STP’s digester. The pig offal from the feed lot runoff had traveled through the pork sausage plant’s STP untouched and went into this small town plant, overwhelming it and then filled the sewer digester to the top and then overflowed everywhere. Our crew sat in their trucks, dumbfounded. The digester was covered in liquid, tan pig shit and lord knows what other processed pig entrails from the slaughter house. The fly maggots covered the pig shit in thousands of white dollops.

One thing about management I learned in the Air Force. Your men expect you to lead, not follow. I had to get out of our truck and stand there batting away the flies. I had been on one other job prior this one to clean a digester at an institution in Iowa. The mental patients at the institution had flushed shredded sheets down the toilets over and over and had clogged the digester. It was a pretty simple job and Eric taught me about digesters there. Most digesters we visited were anaerobic, which meant sealed off from outside air and oxygen. The bugs inside the digester broke down the treated sewage, or sludge. The process gave off methane, which when combined with oxygen was explosive. Methane, is quite simply, natural gas. The methane could be piped off and used as natural gas. The first job that needed to be accomplished at any anaerobic digester was to vent the digester to atmosphere and allow the methane to bleed off for several hours until our sniffers detected very low presence of gas and it would be safe to go inside. You could normally go inside a digester and walk around a cat walk to see what the sludge looked like inside the digester. This one was overflowing however and there would be no gas as the offal had displaced all the gas inside with liquid. It wasn't sludge inside, it was raw sewage. It still had to be opened however and we had to work at locating all the top ports to lower our pumps inside to pump out the pig juice. I wore the uniform of our shop, as we had Cintas outfit me with the same uniform as the rest of the mechanics. Bob said he had an old friend in the business who always wore white suits to job sites involving sewage. Not sure what the point was there but Eric said we wore navy blue. I also had on leather engineering boots that I wore when I rode my motorcycle. While everybody stood around and discussed what a shitty job this was, I began climbing the ladder up to the top of the digester and when I got there began crawling through the pig shit and maggots at a 45 degree angle to get to the top of the digester vent to open it. Halfway up I realized Eric was right behind me and when we got to the port we spun the wheel together to open the hatch. I can still smell it. Once we came back down the guys had already hooked up the fire hoses and hosed Eric and I off and began the job of hosing off the digester so we could get a crane to pick up the pumps and drop them into the digester to begin the job of pumping out the pig offal. Guys don’t hesitate to pitch in when they see you’re there with them.

Working at HEMCO was fun and exciting. It was also dangerous. Working with sewage can make you sick. We worked out of doors in below zero temperatures where water froze if it stopped moving for more than a second. We did the huge digester in Iowa City and worked a couple in January when it was 15 below. Riding in the back of a truck at the end of the day meant risking frostbite.

While working to rehab a small STP in Walthill, Nebraska, I climbed up and down a wet well a dozen times. Walt Hill had been an Indian agent on the Omaha Indian reservation there. The town bore his name, just concatenated from Walt Hill to Walthill. I had on many layers of clothes and two pairs of gloves, the outer pair of which was rubber coated. It was about 5 below zero. The wet well was over 25 feet deep. It was made of concrete sections with a metal ladder running down one wall. The cover was flipped open all the way so I could get in an out quickly. I had to go to the bottom to adjust the float switches and come back up and go inside to run the pumps to see if I had the adjustment done properly. The inside pump controls were in a control room. You would climb a short set of ladders over to the top of the wet well which was a concrete platform about 12 x 12. The well was on the south side of the plant and adjacent to the control rooms. it just went down into the ground another floor or so below the rest of the plant. So you went up a floor to access the well from the plant and then climbed down the ladder into the well to get to the bottom. Overall it was about two stories from the top to the bottom of the well. At first it was pretty scary to look down all that way from the top to the darkness of the bottom but after you go up and down a few times, you acclimate. Having the lid open aided in seeing the bottom. Because it was a pain to set your feet down the narrow rungs of the metal ladder embedded into the concrete while putting your hands on the upper rungs, I put a broom stick handle across the opening of the top. I would grab the broomstick handle with one hand and swing down to put my foot on the lower rung and grab the upper rung with my other hand. Sort of a stretched out monkey grab. It would have made more sense to have one guy down at the bottom shouting up to another guy on top but there were only two of us at the work site and my co-worker was getting the blowers going while I got the pumps working right. We were working short-handed because I had given Eric a hard foul on a layup in a shop basketball game during lunch one day. Eric had welded up a base for the basketball goal and it stuck out below the goal on the floor like a trip hazard. Our shop was like a warehouse and we could play indoor basketball during lunch. When I fouled him as he went in for the layup, he tripped over the steel goal base and broke his foot. It was hard to do field work in a leg cast and I told him we’d switch jobs until his foot healed and the cast was removed. He could do weenie work with a bum foot, just not worker work. And so I found myself running up and down steel rungs embedded into a concrete wet well in Walthill, Nebraska in December.

On what I hoped was my last float level adjustment, I hustled over to the top of the well, I grabbed the broom stick handle with my one rubber-gloved hand and swung forward to the embedded ladder rung a few feet down with my foot as my hand grabbed the topmost rung. Except my bottom foot slipped and my top hand missed and my broom stick hand’s rubber didn’t afford enough grip to hold on by itself and my grip slipped off and I found myself suspended, face up, laterally across the top of the wet well without anything holding me, suspended, very momentarily, in air. At that particular moment I realized I had made a fairly severe tactical mistake and was calculating the possibilities of surviving the fall as gravity quickly took hold of me and I began to see if I could fly backwards without wings. I couldn't fly but I could sure drop. Brain alarms went off when the realization of survival looked dim. Sort of a “feets don’t fail me now” moment without any way to flee the hazard. I’d have the extra adrenaline but no way to use it save flapping my non-existent wings. I began my gradual drifting down and down the well, “flying” backwards, looking upward toward the top, as I descended, affording me a great look at the four walls of the well as I receded down and down and down. My reaction to the situation, spoken internally was, “Oh shit.” It quickly occurred to me that these were not profound last words. I fell and fell and fell. The entirety of my experiences to date seemed to want to play itself forward for me as I fell. Images raced through my mind. It was as if my brain knew I didn’t have long to think, so let’s rethink everything, like an all core dump. It was a fairly amazing experience but all such things are transitory and I hit, flat, with a bone-crushing double thud and blacked out. I came to as the well began filling up. My shoulders had broken the metal support for the float controls and triggered the pumps and sewage was rushing in. My hard hat had cracked on impact and one of the float prongs that held the loop for a float control had passed through my winter coat an inch from my back and I was semi-stuck on it. I knew I had to get up and get out or drown. My problem was my brain told my body to get up and well, things weren’t working so good. At that point it was get up or die and through a lot of swearing and teeth gritting I managed to roll onto my side and then sit up and then get to my knees and grab the bottom ladder rung and begin the very slow and very painful ascent of the ladder. The shock kept the pain at bay but my muscles didn’t want to respond to command. To be honest I don’t remember climbing the ladder at all by this date and working my way up the ladder and onto the concrete deck up top hurt pretty badly and I was doing everything slow motion. I do remember that but when I laid on my back on top and began to freeze in the sub-zero cold I had a sense of elation it’s hard to describe. Either I was experiencing post death experiences or I had cheated death. Either way I felt honored and privileged to be experiencing anything because just a minute before I had no expectation of survival when my rubber glove slipped off the broom stick handle and my other hand just couldn’t quite grip the metal rung of the ladder. For the first time I started to call out for help. I shouted and shouted until my co-worker heard me and came running up to the top of the well from the plant. He saw me laying there and asked what the hell was going on and I told him I had fallen into the well, hit the bottom and then climbed back out. I had a hard time talking and I couldn’t move any more. He just laughed and said “the hell you did. What happened? Why are laying here?” I don’t think he ever believed me. He helped me get inside the control room and I laid down on a table and couldn’t get up. I still have a funny place on the left side of my lower back where something isn’t quite right. I had on tons of clothes because it was so cold and the floor of the wet well was covered in sewage which cushioned my blow. The float prong missed skewering me by an inch and my hard hat kept my head from cracking on impact. Just dumb-assed luck kept me alive, plain and simple.

But back to the pig plant overflow job. When we finished at Shenandoah after two days of pumping orange pig offal into drying beds we loaded the trucks up and began the drive back to Omaha. We pulled over at the first filling station we came to and I went inside to give them the company credit card for all three trucks. The uniformed gas station attended was sitting at an old desk working on a parts order and his mechanic was outside in the shop pulling parts for a car that was in the first bay. As I stood there watching the guys pump the trucks full of gas, I looked at myself in the mirror. My uniform was a clean one but my boots were the same. I needed a shave and I had a few dark areas on my skin that hadn’t cleaned up well. The attended started to sniff the air. He looked at me and looked around and shouted out to the guy in the shop. “Hey, Larry? I thought I told you to dump that bucket out. It still smells terrible in here.” He got no response from Larry but I looked at the guy and said “That smell is me. My boots stink like pig shit and I guess I do too, at this point. Sorry.” I’ll never forget his expression when his eyes got wide and he looked up at me and said. “Hey, mister, I didn’t mean anything with the stink thing, you know?” He was stammering. He was genuinely afraid of me. It was at that point in time when I realized I had finally graduated from weenie to worker.