A Flower Shines Thru

Foreword

You may be asking, Who is this man Ronald Wilde and what is he writing?

I'm considered a man well rounded in both waist and experience. I'm obviously also middle aged and walk on a tilt.

I guess my one leg gives the tilted part away. Some unkind souls question the Middle Aged part of that statement. In truth, I'm rapidly pushing old which means I've accumulated a treasure trove full of what some think is questionably true and long time remembered or just made up stories to share. I've been a long time single and am filled with the warmth of numerous people I've been blessed to know, love and cherish.

The good Lord has grown weary watching over me and is commanding my close attention to his word. With this He wants my overtime to write.

Give me a moment of your valued attention and I'll return it back with more and much more. Here is my story.

What have I done?

Deep in the back of your mind the following question may be sitting and festering.

What does long hair, empty wallets and an unlikely adventure have to do with mental illness?

If it doesn't, it should!!

Sit back and prepare for some mindless fun and a departure from reality.

Remember, Not all you hear is true and what is may not be believable. For me, I'm not so sure there is a difference.

Make yourself comfortable and Enjoy

Can you remember 1974? Many would say, if you do, you obviously weren't there.

This was a confusing time forcing us to make drastic changes and view the world in drug altered eyes.

We were losing the war in Viet Nam and being greeted with strange clothes, a politically driven fuel shortage and expensive if not truly rare gas. For the first time it seemed that we were being pushed around by outside peoples we hardly knew or understood.

In addition, work for many was slowing and drying up with inflation beginning to sore. The only thing it felt like that wasn't inflating was my wages. We were working harder and getting less for it. This change seemed to happen to us over night. The year before started with my switching jobs to one that paid considerably more than the one at my family's factory. It took me a total of two hours to find and be hired.

This was a company called Winter Weiss which was a builder of portable water drilling machines. They were large outfits carried by a modified Semi and required another large truck to carry the associated parts and drill pipe that was part of it.

Winter Weiss was located in lower Denver along the main rail yards and in an old ware house. It was completely fenced in, including the parking lot to keep the wandering hoards of drunken bums out. They were always looking for a warm place to sleep and possibly something to pilfer.

I was hired to run a big milling machine and would be making items larger than anything I'd ever done before.

This work was at night and had a young Forman who was related to the family who started Bartlet pears. He was sharply dressed in starched and ironed uniforms, soft spoken and appeared more than willing to put in the effort to train me. He was not to be the typical shop foreman.

I was truly the kid in this group. It was easy to see the results of years working in this factory.

The lighting was poor mostly due to the fact that the walls, windows and ceiling were completely black from years and years of coal soot. Because this had been a long time converted ware house, heating and ventilation was minimal at best. For years it was a machine shop with everything driven together with a common shaft and leather drive belt. All was driven by a coal fired steam engine. Much of the now unused shafting was still on the ceiling. This was truly an old plant.

I would be making mostly long and heavy drill pipe drivers and chain cases necessary to turn them. The solid steel shafts were 20 feet long and six inches in diameter. They looked like telephone poles only being metal. They each needed three rounded cutouts running evenly spaced from end to end. This was a bit of a feat as the machines table was only 10 feet long. Think of it like thanksgiving with only room for half the guests. There would be a lot of people eating off their laps and passing the turkey and gravy would be quite a hazard. The heavy shaft was to be held in place on the table by three vices that were perfectly aligned. The part of the shaft that was unsupported was carried by an overhead crane with a nylon strap. As the machine table would move, moving the crane was required. What's the word here? O yes ,Multitasking. It looked scary to run and required your undivided attention.

It took repeated cuts to make just one guide so this took a while. Usually one shift would start a cut and the next shift would finish. There was a lot of standing with a brush and small pan following the cutter and picking up chips.

Each drilling rig needed two shafts, one for use and one for back up when the first wore out.

Even though they were made of a special alloy steel that was hard and extremely tough, they wore fairly often in the dirty climate they were subject to.

Actually, the hardest part to this job was getting to it during the nice weather. I'd never worked a swing shift before and at times I was caught riding my motorcycle in the mountains and couldn't get back to work on time. It seemed that most of the crew shared the same problem and compared to them, I wasn't all that bad.

There was two characters that bund around together, both lathe hands that worked on opposite ends of the long shop. At first glance, you'd think they didn't like each other. In truth they frequently would be missing for a few days at a time drunk in faraway places. One was a cowboy and the other , well something quite different. The cowboy had a radio that he played nonstop and always country music. A machine shop is loud so his music had to be even louder. His buddy had a radio blaring rock and roll at the same time on the far end and he just couldn't stand the sound of that mans hillbilly music. For us in the middle ear plugs was the cure.

After months of hearing this mixture of racket, he just came unglued.

For days he plotted how to stop the music.

While cowboy was taking a break to relieved himself, here came his buddy with a sledge hammer in hand and with a devil look on his face made mince meat out of his radio. Clean up required nothing but a whisk broom.

Now there was just one radio to contend with and us in the middle could breathe a bit of relief.

My other major job was sizing the large chain cases that housed the gearing for the drill.

This was done with a four foot multi tooled cutter and required a lot of force to work.

When it was seen that I was setting up to do these cases the shop took on a new look. Hats were adorn along with heavy leather gloves. Next came worn out jackets being put on and paper work was placed out of sight.

This machine would make visit to everyone in the shop. Once it started cutting the sides of the chain cases it would throw heavy 9 shaped chips glowing bright red and fell on every one. The fall out would start in a far corner and then proceeded down the length of the shop and ended at the other end with the completion of the cut. I had to hide around to the back of the machine to escape with the exception of my shoes. The chips melted into my souls and burned their stitching. By the end of the shift, I stood a good inch taller. It would take a good fifteen minutes to pull out this debris with pliers. It wasn't long and I'd have to cut out inner tubes and tape them on my shoes with duct tape. Sometimes the new rubber went inside the shoes also.

I liked the work but out of the blue the market dropped out and sales came to a halt. Next came the words I hated to hear, Lay Off.

My next job wasn't so easy to find and another choice of work had to be had. It was as if everyone had ceased to be making things.

Welcome to Climax Molybdenum Mines..

This is a major mining group and they had an add looking for a slushier operator at their Urad mine located on Berthoud pass and of course I hadn't an idea what that entailed but I applied anyway.

What I didn't know was this was to be grueling work on a drag line, which I had never seen before, at an altitude of 11000 feet. That's twice the height of Denver and getting your breath at this altitude is difficult for those not acclimated.

Most who hired on with no prior mining experience would quit on the first or second day. The frequent bone jarring explosions and the giant rolling boulders scared the devil out of most and didn't come back. They went through a drawer full of students looking for a fast and easy buck. Giving their lives wasn't in their thoughts. Before starting I had to take a thorough physical by the mines doctor and purchase a miners hard hat and a tool called a buzzy. I also needed a couple pairs of striped overalls, leather gloves and hard toed shoes.

Lunch money was going to be slim until my first pay day.

The doctors physical checked everything he could it seemed. There were no secrets hidden from him. I thought that I was in good shape but the mines doctor wasn't so sure. He found my weight to high, elevated blood pressure in question. He gave me the OK but added for me to cut down on the salt and maybe get a test for my sugar levels.

He told me that this was rotating shift work and for the first week I'd be on the day shift. From then on it would rotate on a weekly basis.

Shift started at 8 in the morning which meant I'd have to get out of bed and be on the road by 5. The commute was about fifty miles of mountain driving some of which could be in heavy snows.

First day of horrors.

At the base of the pass there was a small two lane gravel road that twisted and turned steeply up to the mine with a bridged crick crossing thrown in for giggles.

On my right side was the mountain and to the left was a long drop off looking into a lake filled with tailings. The color of this lake was strange for it had colors of bright green and orange mixed in.

Once at the mine there was a large parking lot and several steel buildings one of which housed the dry room where we showered and kept our work clothes. This seemed a strange place at first for all the work clothes were in baskets pulled up to the ceiling. Much of the time they would get wet and with the ceiling being warm, would dry out before the next day’s work.

Once everyone was dressed and with jackets on there was a few minutes before heading into the mine. Here I met my Forman and the others I'd be working with. They stood in a big circle and to my surprise pulled out round boxes of chewing tobacco and proceeded to chew and spit into the middle with spittoon. It was easy to see that I was entering a new culture.

At a quarter till we headed into the mines entrance where there was a small train awaiting us. It would be a mile or more ride until we were at the middle of the mountain and where we caught the first of two elevators to take us to where we were mining at. These elevators were no more than wire cages with steel floors having big holes cut in them. My foreman explained to me that under the floor was about four feet of water and if the elevator failed this supplied a cushion before hitting the bottom. He also instructed me to stand on the open holes. It wasn't much later that I was to know why. The elevator did fail and down we went. I wasn't standing on the holes and nearly drown from the water streaming up through the holes.

Once at our working level the Forman showed the others where they were to man their drifts and start working their drag lines.

Once they were set he introduced me to my slushing machine. Here was a huge one hundred horse power motor with a pair of big drums mounted in its front with inch and a half diameter wire cables wrapped on them much like a spool of thread, only much bigger of course. There was two long steel handles to operate the machine which turned two wheels which drug a big flat bucket back and forth in the drift we were in. Just in front of the machine was a big hole having a heavy steel plate covering it and being about three feet below the floor line. This was where the ore was to drop into the bottom of the mine where a rock crusher was to reduce it down to fine pieces. This looked easy enough and of course it should have rang out a warning bell for me.

My very first instruction was to make sure the metal plate covering the holed