Welcome to my second job. I came home from my freshman year of college. It was good to be back to Colorado but I soon became aware that I had changed a whole lot more than Pueblo had. I left Pueblo a proud member of the Young Republicans, and returned after a year of an incredible education at Phillips U., and the ongoing turmoil of the Viet Nam War. I had a student deferment, while many of my East High classmates found themselves in the midst of rice paddies and gunfire. I was driving a 1956 Oldsmobile that I had bought from my Uncle Virgil. On the rear bumper was a Eugene McCarthy bumper sticker. He was running for president on an anti war platform. My plans were to go up to Estes Park and get one of those dream summer jobs. I landed one and I was all ready to take off for the Rocky Mountain National Park and join with hundreds of college students from around the country. My plans were canceled when my dad told me he had gotten me a much better paying job at Tri-Plex—a piston manufacturing plant that supplied pistons for all of the US auto makers. Well there was another lesson in economic determinism.
I began my career as a member of the United Steel Workers of America and the soon to be operator of a Baird machine. I showed up to work at Tri-Plex for the afternoon shift on a very hot May afternoon. The supervisor walked me over to a huge machine at the beginning of one of the six assembly lines. There were two sides to the plant, the foundry and the manufacturing side. I was on the manufacturing side. I guess I was fortunate as I heard the temperatures of the foundry could reach 130’ and not too long ago some poor soul got torched in an accident.
I will try to explain the Baird machine as simply as I can. It was the first step in an eight step tooling process to make a finished piston. The pistons were brought over from the foundry and a raw piston was then placed every few seconds on a rotating tooling device. It very much resembled a huge six chambered revolver. My job was to place the piston in a secured place on the revolver. It required that you had to observe how the finished piston came off the mount, then remove it, place it in a large tray, and then put a new one on. The tricky part was they never came off exactly the same way. Half the time it was remove the piston with your right hand and place it with your left hand, or just the opposite. The supervisor said, “We will know by the end of the night if you can do it”. I did have a helper that first night who guided me through the process.
Not only did you have to do this every 20 seconds, but between cycles you had a variety of calipers to make sure that the tools were making the proper cuts. Every so often the lathes would have to be adjusted or replaced and my job was to not only run the machine but also provide quality control. After the second night the supervisor came to me and said, “You got this, its all yours”. Oh boy, I would spend eight to nine hours from 3pm to midnight starring at the Baird machine. We got two 15 minute breaks and 30 minutes for lunch, which was really dinner. There were 3 other college guys who were working that summer. For the break times we found ourselves sitting on crates behind the plant. Over the course of the summer we befriended a number of the men who fed their families doing this very hard work.
Two encounters really stand out in my memories that I want to share. 1968 was a year of huge tensions in America. Time magazine and others have called it the most tumultuous year of the 20th century. It was a time of enormous uncertainty and cultural shifts. It was the summer of the Democratic Convention in Chicago and rumors of civil war. One night I was in the parking lot getting ready to go home. I was surrounded by a number of guys who were asking me about the bumper sticker supporting McCarthy. They were questioning my patriotism. They asked me to remove the bumper sticker and I said, “No”. I am not sure where I found the courage to stand up to them but they backed off.
The second encounter happened the night I did something that had NEVER ever been done at Tri-Plex, I ran a perfect 1,600 pistons through the Baird machine. The supervisor came at the end of shift to tell me that yes, in fact for the first time any one could ever remember I did it. Mind you there were six lines of this kind of operation running three shifts a day five days a week. I was very proud of my accomplishment, not all of the workers shared in my exuberance. By this time I had grown to like and know a number of the full time guys. We were having “lunch” and they asked me to come have a talk with them. There were about eight of them.
“Mark” the spokesperson said, “I know you are very proud of your perfect Baird run. The boys here and I are going to try to explain something to you. In about a month you are going to leave here and go back to college. When you leave we will still be here. We have to show up every day all year long. We are trying to take care of our families. We are not saying that you should quit here. You need to slow down. You see the company is always looking for ways to push us, screw us over, ask for more and give less. We have a new contract coming up and you might be making us look bad. Do you get it”? I actually did. I had come to like these guys, even with their skewed politics and racist rants. “Ok, I think I get your point. It was dumb luck about the perfect run guys, everything had to go right. You guys have been great to me. I will slow down”.
In early September I headed back to Oklahoma for my sophomore year. I had learned a lot that summer—things that professors or books cant’t teach.
Onward and Upward,
Mark
Lyfting Me Up 