Working. Part 3

Illness in the fields is 120 percent higher than the average rate for industry. It's mostly back trouble, rheumatism and arthritis, because the damp weather and the cold. Stoop labor is very hard on a person. Tuberculosis is high. And now because of the pesticides, we have many respiratory diseases.

The University of California at Davis has government experiments with pesticides and chemicals. To get a bigger crop each year. They haven't any regard as to what safety precautions are needed. In 1964 or '65, an airplane was spraying these chemicals on the fields. Spraying rigs they're called. Flying low, the wheels got tangled on the fence wire. The pilot got up, dusted himself off, and got a drink of water. He died of convulsions. The ambulance attendants got violently sick because of the pesticides he had on his person. A little girl was playing around a sprayer. She stuck her tongue on it. She died instantly.

These pesticides affect the farm worker through the lungs. He breathes it in. He gets no compensation. All they do is say he's sick. They don't investigate the cause.

There were times when I felt I couldn't take it any more. It was 105 in the shade and I'd see endless rows of lettuce and I felt my back hurting . . . I felt the frustration of not being able to get out of the fields. I was getting ready to jump any foreman who looked at me cross-eyed. But until two years ago, my world was still very small.

I would read all these things in the papers about Cesar Chavez and I would denounce him because I still had that thing about becoming a first-cla.s.s patriotic citizen. In Mexicali they would pa.s.s out leaflets and I would throw 'em away. I never partic.i.p.ated. The grape boycott didn't affect me much because I was in lettuce. It wasn't until Chavez came to Salinas, where I was working in the fields, that I saw what a beautiful man he was. I went to this rally, I still intended to stay with the company. But something-I don't know-I was close to the workers. They couldn't speak English and wanted me to be their spokesman in favor of going on strike. I don't know-I just got caught up with it all, the beautiful feeling of solidarity.

You'd see the people on the picket lines at four in the morning, at the camp fires, heating up beans and coffee and tortillas. It gave me a sense of belonging. These were my own people and they wanted change. I knew this is what I was looking for. I just didn't know it before.

My mom had always wanted me to better myself. I wanted to better myself because of her. Now when the strikes started, I told her I was going to join the union and the whole movement. I told her I was going to work without pay. She said she was proud of me. (His eyes glisten. A long, long pause.) See, I told her I wanted to be with my people. If I were a company man, n.o.body would like me any more. I had to belong to somebody and this was it right here. She said, "I pushed you in your early years to try to better yourself and get a social position. But I see that's not the answer. I know I'll be proud of you."

All kinds of people are farm workers, not just Chicanos. Filipinos started the strike. We have Puerto Ricans and Appalachians too, Arabs, some j.a.panese, some Chinese. At one time they used us against each other. But now they can't and they're scared, the growers. They can organize conglomerates. Yet when we try organization to better our lives, they are afraid. Suffering people never dreamed it could be different. Cesar Chavez tells them this and they grasp the idea-and this is what scares the growers.

Now the machines are coming in. It takes skill to operate them. But anybody can be taught. We feel migrant workers should be given the chance. They got one for grapes. They got one for lettuce. They have cotton machines that took jobs away from thousands of farm workers. The people wind up in the ghettos of the city, their culture, their families, their unity destroyed.

We're trying to stipulate it in our contract that the company will not use any machinery without the consent of the farm workers. So we can make sure the people being replaced by the machines will know how to operate the machines.

Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It's hard, but if you're given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans-we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don't recognize us as persons. That's the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.

If we had proper compensation we wouldn't have to be working seventeen hours a day and following the crops. We could stay in one area and it would give us roots. Being a migrant, it tears the family apart. You get in debt. You leave the area penniless. The children are the ones hurt the most. They go to school three months in one place and then on to another. No sooner do they make friends, they are uprooted again. Right here, your childhood is taken away. So when they grow up, they're looking for this childhood they have lost.

If people could see-in the winter, ice on the fields. We'd be on our knees all day long. We'd build fires and warm up real fast and go back onto the ice. We'd be picking watermelons in 105 degrees all day long. When people have melons or cuc.u.mber or carrots or lettuce, they don't know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it. If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they'd know how that fine salad got on their table.

AUNT KATHERINE HAYNES.

A worked-out mining town in eastern Kentucky, Blackey. It is near the Virginia border. The c.u.mberlands are in view; is it fog, smoke, or a heavy dust that causes them to appear more distant than they really are? The people of the town, population 350-the young have gone-are, many of them, of Revolutionary War stock. Most are on welfare.

Along the superhighway, cutting through the mountains, gangs of men are casually engaged in road repair. All day trucks and half-trucks rumble by, kicking up clouds of coughing dust. During the trip to Blackey, there were glimpses of deep "hollers" and shacks; and an occasional person. Half-hidden by the mountain greenery were the ubiquitous small mountains of slag.

We're behind the mountains, deep in the hollow, Bull Creek. It's a long, winding, tortuous dirt road, some seven miles from Blackey.

Aunt Katherine Haynes is seventy-seven. She lives by herself in a cottage, on the rocks, at the foot of the mountains. It is surrounded by caterpillar tractors and bulldozers. On the wall, among olden photographs, is the legend: G.o.d Bless Our Home. It is a spare place, singularly neat: a folded umbrella in one corner, a homemade broom in another; an ancient bra.s.s bedstead is the one conspicuous piece of furniture.

She recalls the hollow of her small girlhood: "The road, a horse could travel it, but that was all. No cars, no wagons, or no nothin' back then. Then they went to have wagons and kinda widened the road up. Each man used to work six days a year, free labor. On the roads. If he wasn't out on the days the others was, why they laid him off a bigger piece to finish and he had to do that. That was the law. They always done it in the fall of the year.

"In the fall of the year, it's the prettiest place you've ever seen. When the leaves is colored . . . it's beautiful to see the hills when it's colored like that, brown and red and green and yeller. The pines always looks green and if the rest is all colored, the pines shows up.

"There was more big trees then, but the fields were cleaned up and tended. You can see there's nothin' cleaned up any more, 'cause I ain't able to do it . . ."

Housework and farmin' is all I done, never worked at nothin' else. Eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. Out-of-doors and then in the house at night. I have worked out in the fodder field and carry it in some time after dark. We'd stack it by moonlight. Never got much rest on what little time I was in bed. (Laughs.) You usually didn't get much rest on Sunday, had to cook for ten children on Sunday. I've raised ten and I had eleven. Three meals a day I cooked on Sunday. I got so I couldn't cook like I used to. I used to be out here just runnin' and cookin' those meals in a few minutes and fillin' the table full. But my mind just jumps from here to there and I can't do that no more. Just hard work, that's all I ever knowed.

I can run circles around every girl I've got in the house today. I'm awful thankful for it, but I won't hold up much longer. I'm a gittin' down. Used to be I could stand and split wood all day long, but now I go out there and split a little while and it hurts the back of my legs to stoop over. But I done awful well I think.

I just don't know. I was just raised an old hillbilly and I'll die one. Radio, it's sittin' up there, but I cain't hear too good. Don't have a television. I say there's too much foolishness on for me to watch. I hear a little about Vietnam. And I study a lot about it. But I have enough worry on my mind without listenin' to that to worry more about. What was to be would be. No, I don't guess I have a grandson in Vietnam now. Terry's boy, I actually don't know if he's out of Vietnam or not.

They wasn't much to think on when you didn't have no education. I didn't get half through the third reader, so I've got no education at all. Only five months of school. I just quit out until we got the fodder saved. Then it got so cold, I couldn't go back. I'm just a flat old hillbilly. That's the only way I know to talk and the only way I'll ever try to talk.

There was fifteen in the family and we were raised in a log house. There wasn't a window in the house. If we seen how to do anything in the winter, we done it by firelight. There wasn't even a kerosene lamp. We had to keep the door open regardless of how cold it was. If you needed to work at somethin' we either done it by the light of the fire in the grate or opened the door. We always kept a good fire.

That was the way I learnt to write. I'd get me a piece of clay dirt out of the cracks and write on the side of the log house. I couldn't write a line when I was goin' to school. Now that's the truth.

JOE AND SUSIE HAYNES.

Aunt Katherine's nephew and his wife. On this morning, a piece of sun peers over the c.u.mberlands. "That's young white oaks up there a growin'," he says. "They'll be there till the strip and auger11 people pushes 'em down and they get diggin' for lumber."

His speech comes with difficulty, due to partial paralysis of his face and shortage of breath. Frequently during the conversation we take time out. He wears a hearing aid. She is hanging out the wash. A small dog runs about; a few chickens peck away.

"Minin's about all the work here, outside highway work or farmin' a little. My father started workin' in the mines when he was eleven years old. I guess he was fifty-seven when he quit, he had to. He had to walk across the big mountain and it'd be late into the night when he'd come back. So we never got to see daddy but on Sunday."

JOE: I graduated from high school in 1930, November. I went to work in the mines. We worked for fifteen cents a ton. If we made a dollar and a half a day, we made pretty good money. You got up between three thirty and four in the morning. You'd start work about six. We usually got out around maybe dark or seven or eight, nine o'clock. I come back as late as ten o'clock at night. Sometimes I just laid down to sleep, not even sleep-then wash up.

I just got short-winded and just couldn't walk across the street. I'm better now than I used to be. The doctor advised me to quit work. My heart got bad to where I couldn't get enough oxygen. March of '68 I quit. They turned me down for black lung. I'm paid through Social Security. My old uncle, he retired forty-nine years old. He's been dead a long time now. Guess he had too much sand.

My hearin' . . . It coulda been affected with so much noise. I was tampin' up, shootin' the coal down, just behind the machine. I worked that continuous miner. That made lotsa noise. This hearin' aid cost me $395.

I think the United Mine Workers has let us down a little bit. I think they sold us out is what I do. They teamed up with the operators, I think.

SUSIE: I went to school with a young boy and he got mashed up in the mines. He was about eighteen years old when he got killed.

JOE: Oh, I remember lots of accidents. I guess there was eight or nine men killed while I worked at one. These truck mines I worked in was all. They wasn't union mines. The strip and the auger about got 'em all shut down right now. I have a nephew of mine run a mine. He worked about seventeen men. They all gone to unemployment now.

Yeah, I was born in an old log cabin here. I had a great-great-great-grandfather or somethin' fought that Revolution. Grandfather Fields and his brothers was in the Civil War. One on each side of it. My grandfather owned 982 acres in here. He sold his minerals12 for twenty-seven and a half cents an acre.

You're in one of the richest areas in the world and some of the poorest people in the world. They's about twenty-eight gas and oil wells. They have one here they claim at least a three-million-dollar-a-year gas well. One of the men that works for the gas company said they valued it at twenty-five million dollars, that one well. They offered a woman seventy-five dollars on the farm that the gas well's just laid on, for destroyin' half an acre of her place to set that well up.

They can do that legally because they have the mineral rights-broad form deed. Eighteen eighty-nine, my grandfather sold this, everything known and all that might be found later-gas, oil, coal, clay, stone . . . My grandfather and grandmother signed it with two X's. They accepted the farmin' rights. Company can dig all your timber, all your soil off, uncover everything, just to get their coal. Go anywhere they want to, drill right in your garden if they want to.

They took bulldozers and they tore the top off the ground. I couldn't plow it or nothin' where they left it. Come through right by that walnut tree. I've got corn this year, first year I raised it. About four years since they left. Nice corn over there. I had to move a lot of rock where they took the bulldozers.

They threatened my wife with trespa.s.sin' here because she called up the water pollution man, the gas and oil company did. (Laughs.) If the oil runs down this creek, ii'd kill the fish and everything in it. And I had a lot of chickens to die, too, from drinkin' that oil.

SUSIE: When they come through with them bulldozers and tear it up like that, the dirt from it runs down to our bottom land and it ruins the water. Our drinkin' water gets muddy. So we don't have much of a chance, don't look like.

Our boy in the Navy when he comes back, he says all he can see is the mountain tore up with bulldozers. Even the new roads they built, they's debris on it and you can't hardly get through it sometimes. I guess that's what they send our boys off to fight for, to keep 'em a free country and then they do to us like that. Nothin' we can do about it. He said it was worse here than it was over in Vietnam. Four times he's been in Vietnam. He said this was a worse toreup place than Vietnam. He said, "What's the use of goin' over there an' fightin' and then havin' to come back over here an' pay taxes on somethin' that's torn up like that?"

JOE: If we don't organize together, why these big companies is just gonna take anything they want. That's the only chance on earth we got. It's all gone over to the rich man. Even the President. And we don't have a governor.

SUSIE: Everybody talk about it all the time. Especially Aunt Katherine up here, that's all me an' her talk about-what they done to us. My mother and father sold all their land out, where my mother's buried. Company said they sold the mineral to some other company and they was goin' to auger it. They won't have to dig the holes for the ones if they're goin' into my mother's grave. 'Cause there won't be enough left of 'em to dig a hole for. We're not gonna let it happen to my mother's grave because there's seven of us children and I know that five of us will stay right there and see that they don't do that.

They said, men from the company, we'd get a road up to the cemetery that's on top of the hill. I said, "Well, it won't be any use goin' up there, because there won't be any dead up there. There'll just be tombstones settin' there. Because the coal is under the graves." An old preacher down there, they augered under the grave where his wife is buried. And he's nearly blind and he prayed an' everything.

It's something to think about, that a man to make a few dollars would go through and under a cemetery like that. Not even respecting the dead. You can't talk to 'em. They won't talk to you about it. They walk off and leave you. They know they're doin' wrong.

Our son just come back from Vietnam, he went to work for a strip mine. We told him we wouldn't allow him to work for them and stay home. So he quit. He was tellin' me yesterday, looks like he's gonna have to go back to work. I said, "Well, do you want me to pack your clothes tonight or do you want to wait until morning to get 'em? 'Cause," I said, "when you start workin' for the strip mines, you're not comin' back here. I'm not responsible for anything that happens to ya." Don't want none of ours in that, no way.

You and Joe have very little money. Life is rough and life is hard . . . Your son could pick up about fifty dollars a day . . .

SUSIE: From forty-five to eighty a day.

JOE: He's an equipment operator.

SUSIE: Yeah, he worked and he made good. But we didn't want him in that. He was gonna get killed over there and we wouldn't be responsible for no doctor bills and no funeral bills for him-if he was gonna do that kind of work. Then he said he had to make a livin' some way. Well, he's gonna have to go back to the army, look like. I said, "Go to the army and come back. Maybe you can get a job then." He said he didn't want to go to the army. And he went to work for one of his cousins, night watchin'. He makes $150 a week. But he told me yesterday that they were gonna close down over there and he was gonna have to go back and work for the strip mines. I said, "When you start work, I'll pack your clothes. You're not gonna stay here."

We sent him to school for him to take this heavy equipment. I worked and cooked over at the school, helped send him there. I said, "I'm not sendin' you to school to come out here and go to work for these strip mines." I'd rather see him in Vietnam than see him doin' strip jobs.

I just think if it's not stopped by officials and governor and all, we're just gonna have to take guns and stop it. When they come to your land . . . We got tax receipts here dated back to 1848 that the Haynes and Fields paid tax on this place. Do you think we should let some money grabber come here and destroy it? For nothin'? And have to move out?

JOE: They sweated my grandfathers out of it. Millions of dollars . . .

BOB SANDERS.

His home is Boonville, Indiana. It is an area of newly built one-family dwellings: pleasantly arbored, front lawns uniformly well-trimmed, two-car garages to the rear. It was somewhat difficult to distinguish this house from the others, though a good distance separated them.

It is said young Lincoln studied law in this town, along the Indiana-Kentucky border. Today the natural landscape of this region is overwhelmed by slag heaps, huge banks of shale. It is strip mine country; one of the earliest.

He's been a strip miner for more than twenty. years; his father was one too. He earns about twenty thousand dollars a year. Casually he voices his one regret: he might have been a major league baseball player. He had a tryout with the New York Giants some twenty-five years ago; it looked promising. Marriage plus his jather's illness cut short the promise. He lost the chance of proving himself a major-leaguer.

At first he spoke with a great deal of reluctance; his comments short, cryptic. Gradually, he let go . . .

I don't dig coal. I take the dirt off coal. You have to know how to handle dirt, to get the best advantage of your machinery. You just can't take a piece of equipment that's developed to take eighty foot of dirt and go on and get ninety, ninety-five. That's management, you follow me? All you get over the maximum, that's gravy. You have to uncover it as cheap as possible.

From the time you go to work, like eight o'clock in the morning, when you step up on that piece of equipment and get the seat, why there's not a piece of equipment that's not movin' all day. We run around the clock. We're on a continuous operation, three s.h.i.+fts a day, seven days a week. I work at least forty-eight hours every week.

You don't ever stop it. Eighty dollars a minute down time is what they figure. You have an oiler that you break him in to operate. When I'm eatin' lunch, thirty minutes lunch time, that machine's still runnin'. The only time the machine stops is when you change s.h.i.+fts. Most machines have even got a time clock on how long it takes you to swing, how long it takes you to grease, how long it takes you to load your bucket and go to the bank, how long it takes you to dump it, how long this and that. I drink coffee and smoke and never miss a lay. There is no break. They don't pay you for that.

I know what this piece of equipment's raised to do. I always try to get that and to better it. Any company, if they're worth 150 million dollars you don't need to think for a minute they're not gonna know what you're doin'. They didn't get there that way . . . and if I want to go any place . . . If I'm supposed to move five thousand cubic feet of dirt an hour, if that's what the machine's rated at, you know d.a.m.n well they know it. Sure, you're gonna get a certain amount of fatigue.

"There's some dangers to it, yeah. There's danger if you go out on the highway. If you get 125 deep. If you don't get this hole tamped right and this kicks out, instead of goin' vertical it goes horizontal-well h.e.l.l, I've seen it go seventy-five foot high and the house covered up . . . people. It still isn't as dangerous as underground. But around the tipples, even in strip mining, the dust is tremendous. These people have to wear inhalators to stay on the job. I do. They can be subjected to black lung."

We go as deep as ninety-five feet. From the operator's standpoint it's more profitable. From the consumer's standpoint, they stand to benefit by the profit the company gets. The cheaper they produce the coal, the cheaper the electricity gets.

The company I work for produces five, six thousand ton of coal a day. A million ton a year. Our coal runs from four to seven foot thick. Four-foot coal runs six thousand tons to the acre. We'll mine an acre a day. You have b.a.s.t.a.r.d veins, where the coal runs fifteen foot thick. They're gettin' ready to put in three and a half million ton a year mines.

People's misinformed about this environmental thing. About your soil being dug up and not put back. Ninety percent of this ground, even twenty-five years ago, was rundown. Ninety percent of the ground I've seen tore up, you'd starve to death tryin' to raise a roastin' ear on it. But in the next ten years you're gonna see good farm land that'll be bought up by the coal companies. You're gonna see some good topsoil move because the companies are gonna pay prices. They're gonna get this coal.

There's ground that doesn't look too good now, but that's all gonna be changed. The companies are makin' the money to go and do this. They're gonna level it. I can take you to a place right now where they're throwin' banks up eighty feet high. They have tractors up there running twenty-four hours a day and it's leveler than my yard. That ground is in much better shape than it was before it was turned over.

Don't misunderstand me. For years these things went on and the companies have been at fault. h.e.l.l, they're just like you and me. They done got the gravy, and when they have to go puttin' it back, it's just a dead cost to them. But h.e.l.l, they can afford to do it, so there's no problem. They're gonna do this. I'm no operator, I'm a workingman, but I don't think it's fair to the industry for this kind of talk to go on.

There's a lot of things I don't like about my work. I've never really appreciated seeing ground tore up. Especially if that ground could be made into something. I think about it all the time. You tear somethin' up that you know has taken years and years and years . . . and you dig into rock. You get to talkin' about the glacier went through there and what caused this particular rock to come out of the bank like it does. You see things come out of that bank that haven't been moved for years. When you see 'em, you have to think about 'em.

"Only about fifteen percent of strip miners are veterans. See, in 1954 mining industry was dead. h.e.l.l, everybody quit burnin' coal. Everybody went off to gas and oil. Coal mines were dead. Then in 1954 we had a few power plants that started bringin' it back. Up till the last three years, your natural gas people consumed that tremendous rate. They don't have natural gas hardly to last a century. All right, look at your oil. The cheapest thing in this world right now is coal. This is for heat, light, anything. So now coal minin's boomin'. From the time we got our last contract three years ago, companies were gettin' three dollars a ton for coal power plants. Now they're gettin' six, six and a half a ton. And they're not even diggin' their coal out."

You go on a piece of equipment and say it's worth ten million, fifteen million dollars. You don't expect people to go out there and take care of that for thirty or forty dollars a day. If you got that kind of money to spend for equipment . . . it just doesn't add up. I make more money than anybody at the mine. Still and all, they don't have the responsibility I have. The difference is maybe eight, ten dollars a day between what I do and the men down there. All he has to do is get his bucket and go to work and come home. But if I don't uncover the coal, n.o.body's gonna work.

Aw no, I don't feel tense. I've been around this stuff ever since I was a kid. I started working a coal mine when I was in high school back during the war. I started in the laboratory and then went to survey. These are company jobs. A miner is a UMW man. I don't think there's a union man that wants to see the ground torn up.

I don't think anybody's gonna say their work's satisfyin', gratifyin', unless you're in business for yourself. I don't think you're satisfied workin' for the other person. But I make a good livin' at it. I've been offered better jobs. But I've got a year and a half to go, I'll have my pension time in. Then I'll go company-wise. I entertain the idea of being an operator, put it that way.

HUB DILLARD.

A lower-middle-cla.s.s suburb south of Chicago. It is a one-family brick dwelling with a two-car garage in the rear. "This one next door is a contractor. The fella across the street, he's an electrician. We have one that's an engineer for Allis-Chalmers. We have two policemen that live here. Everybody kind of minds their own business."

He is a forty-eight-year-old construction worker who has been at it for twenty-two years. His wife works; his two married children live elsewhere. He is considerably overweight and his breathing is labored. "l'm a heavy equipment operator. I run a crane."

There is a pecking order: apprentices; "dirt work"-sewers, water mains, tunnels, roads; buildings; "soft jobs" for the older or disabled. "They're supposed to be in the union at least ten years and fifty-five years old."

There's no job in construction which you could call an easy job. I mean, if you're out there eating dust and dirt for eight, ten hours a day, even if you're not doing anything, it's work. Just being there is . . .

The difficulty is not in running a crane. Anyone can run it. But making it do what it is supposed to do, that's the big thing. It only comes with experience. Some people learn it quicker and there's some people can never learn it. (Laughs.) What we do you can never learn out of a book. You could never learn to run a hoist or a tower crane by reading. It's experience and common sense.

There's a bit more skill to building work. This is a boom crane. It goes anywhere from 8o feet to 240 feet. You're setting iron. Maybe you're picking fifty, sixty ton and maybe you have ironworkers up there 100, 110 feet. You have to be real careful that you don't b.u.mp one of these persons, where they would be apt to fall off.

At the same time, they're putting bolts in holes. If they wanted a half-inch, you have to be able to give them a half-inch. I mean, not an inch, not two inches. Those holes must line up exactly or they won't make their iron. And when you swing, you have to swing real smooth. You can't have your iron swinging back and forth, oscillating. If you do this, they'll refuse to work with you, because their life is at stake.

They're working on beams, anywhere from maybe a foot wide to maybe five or six inches. These fellas walk across there. They have to trust you. If there's no trust there, they will not work with you. It has to be precision. There has been fellows that have been knocked off and hurt very seriously. If there's someone careless or drinking . . . I had a serious accident myself. My one leg is where I don't trust to run a crane any more with 239, 240 feet of stake.

These cranes are getting bigger and bigger, so there's more tension. Now they're coming out with a hydraulic crane. Cherry pickers they're called. They're so very easy to upset if you don't know exactly what you're supposed to do. And it happens so quick.

They're more dangerous if you don't respect 'em. Everything inside your cab has got a capacity, tells you what it can lift, at what degree your boom is. But there's some of these foremen that are trying to make a name for themselves. They say, We're only gonna pick this much and that much and there's no use we should put this down. A lot of times they want you to carry things that weighs three or four ton. On level ground this can be done, but if you're going down a slope, you're asking for trouble.

It's not so much the physical, it's the mental. When you're working on a tunnel and you're down in a hole two hundred feet, you use hand signals. You can't see there. You have to have someone else that's your eyes. There has been men dropped and such because some fellow gave the wrong signal.

Then there's sometimes these tunnels, they cave in. There's been just recently over here in Midlothian, it was four fellas killed. They encountered some gas in there. Sometimes you get a breakthrough in water. There was one of 'em here in Calumet City about a year ago. It was muck. This thing caved in their mus.h.i.+ng machine. A big percentage of 'em, the accidents, come from a habit. You're just not thinkin' about your work, becomes second nature. Maybe you're thinkin' about somethin' else, and right there in that instant something happens.

The average age of the workingman, regular, is seventy-two. The average crane operator lives to be fifty-five years old. They don't live the best sort of life. There's a lot of tension. We've had an awful lot of people have had heart attacks. Yeah, my buddy.

There was eleven of them in an elevator downtown. They built Marina Towers. The company that built that elevator, it was supposed to be foolproof. If it got going so fast, it would automatically stop-which it didn't. It fell twelve floors and they were all hurt bad. Two of them had heart attacks when this was falling. There was one fella there that was completely paralyzed. He had eleven children. The only thing he could move is his eyes, that's all. It's because somebody made a mistake. A lot of stuff that comes out of the factory isn't exactly right. It's faulty. They don't know until it's used on a job. It's not just one person that's hurt. It's usually four or five.

Before I had this heart attack, I sure wanted a drink. (Laughs.) Sure, it relaxes. You're tense and most everybody'd stop and have a beer or a shot. They'd have a few drinks and then they'd go home. They have a clique, like everybody has. Your ironworkers, they go to one tavern. Maybe the operators go to another one. The carpenters go to another place. They build buildings and tear 'em down in the tavern. (Laughs.) There's a lot of times you have to take another man's word for something and a lot of people get hurt. I was hurt because I took another man's word. I was putting the crane on a lowboy-the tractor that hauls it. This foreman told me to swing this stub section of the boom from the front of the lowboy to the back. I said it couldn't be done. He said it's been done a number of times. The lowboy wasn't big enough for the crane and the crane went over backward. They had some extra weight on the back of the crane, which is an unsafe practice. When the crane went over backwards and threw me out, a five-hundred-pound weight went across my leg and crushed my ankle and hip. I was in the hospital, had three operations on my leg and was out of work eighteen months.

With an air of fatalism, he relives the moment: "It threw me out and it was a real hot day. I said, 'My leg is broke.' He said, 'No, it can't be broke.' They Seen me lyin' there, these women came over and started throwin' blankets on me. I said, 'Jesus, as hot as it is now, you're gonna smother me.' The ambulance came. They started takin' the shoe off. They ended cuttin' it off. And the bone came out.

"This doctor showed me everything he did. It was crushed. It wouldn't heal. He told me to go home, walk on it. I'd get outside and I'd scream. So finally they took me back in the hospital and operated again. There was a piece of jour-inch bone never mended. He said it didn't show on the x-ray.

"Comin' downstars or goin' down a ramp, it bothers me. We have a boat, it's an awful nice boat and it's awful hard for me to get in and out of it. I used to do an awful lot of huntin'. I'm a farm boy. Boy! I can't do any huntin' now. It was three years ago, August twenty-second."

What were you thinking of during those eighteen months?

Trying to feed my family and make my house payments-which was very hard. My wife worked a little bit and we managed. The union gave us thirty-one dollars a week, Workmen's Compensation gave us sixty-nine dollars a week. And after I was off for six months, I received $180 in Social Security.

The work I'm doin' now, sewers, water mains, and such as that-dirt work-there's no chance of hurting anybody. If I was doing the same work as before, set irons, such as that, there's a chance somebody could be killed. Your hands and feet, the pairs of them, have to work together.

You take other crafts, like an ironworker, he needs a belt, two spud wrenches, a knife which costs him fifteen dollars, and he makes more than a crane operator. The crane operator, he's responsible for a machine that cost over a quarter of a million dollars. Regardless of what kind of machine it is, they all costs anywhere from thirty-five, forty thousand dollars and up. So why isn't he worth as much money?

In the wintertime, sometimes you're off several months. People will say, look at the money this man's making. But when other people are working, he's getting nothing. In the steel mill, when they get laid off, they get so much money per week for so many weeks. When I get laid off, there's nothing more than to get another job. We have no paid holidays, no paid vacations.