In My Time - Dick Cheney [15]
WHEN I GOT BACK home to Wyoming in 1962, I returned to what I’d been doing off and on since high school—“working in the tools” as a union member on jobs across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. I helped build electrical transmission lines and coal-fired generating plants. I worked on bringing power to oil fields. One of my assignments was to work on Minuteman missile sites around Cheyenne’s Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, laying communications cable between silos in the middle of a Rocky Mountain winter.
As a member of Local 322 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, I started as a groundman, or “grunt.” Later, as I got more experience, I became an “equipment operator.” At one point I gave serious thought to taking out my apprenticeship papers and working up to “journeyman lineman.” These were the men who climbed the wood or steel towers to string power line.
The work we did was sometimes dangerous, and everyone had tales of spectacular accidents. While working on adding capacity to the Dave Johnston Power Plant outside Glenrock, I saw an equipment operator drive a truck mounted with a front-end boom close enough to a live transmission line to cause the power to arc, sending a large fireball down the line toward Casper and frying the truck. The equipment operator was frozen with fear and stayed where he was, which was a good thing. If he had tried to get out of the truck, that would have been the end of him.
On another job we were using dynamite, and after the charges were in place and the electrical blasting cap attached, I watched the crew foreman uncoil a roll of wire from the charge back to his pickup truck. He raised the hood on his pickup, leaned across the fender, and touched the wire to the truck battery to detonate the charge. The blast blew a large rock high in the air, and it came down right on top of the pickup’s hood, driving it down onto the foreman and seriously injuring him. We were in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a rough, mountainous area in western Colorado, and it took us several hours to get him to the hospital.
Stories like these were a reminder of what happened when you weren’t alert and careful. They illustrated why the spirit that prevailed in line work—cultivating competence and taking pride in your performance—was essential. If you were a groundman and you tied your knot right, the heavy crossarm you winched up to the lineman would make it to the top safely, and he’d be able to release it from the rope with ease, but if you fashioned the knot so securely that he had trouble releasing it, you complicated his job enormously, and if you didn’t get the knot tight enough and a crossarm or a string of insulators fell, you could kill somebody.
The culture and lore of line work were captured in a book, Slim, that the crews I worked on passed around. Written by William Wister Haines in the early 1930s and later made into a movie starring Henry Fonda, Slim told the story of a young man who joined a line crew and learned how great it felt to do work he was good at and could take pride in, how satisfying it was to have the money he earned in his pocket. He was free to pick up and move on whenever he wanted. It was a point of pride with Slim that when he was asked for his address, he pointed to the license plate on his car.
I was earning $3.10 an hour, which was good pay in those days, and picking up a lot of overtime at time and a half. I traveled from job to job with one large suitcase, driving a 1949 Chevy for a while. When it had to be junked, I hitched a ride or caught a bus until I managed to buy a ’58 Ford. Living accommodations were never fancy, usually a room in an old hotel or roadside motel. For ten or fifteen dollars a week, these places didn’t offer any amenities or impose any demands. I wasn’t tied down to one location or any particular job or anyone’s expectations. Whenever I wanted, I could pick up and move on.
After work, the guys on the crew would spend considerable