Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
My friend Tad McMillan often joked that he had a firm handle on his future as an early teenager. He went on to elaborate that the handle was always connected to a shovel, a hoe, a pick, or a rake. Those formative years in a farm kid’s life are often connected to hand tools, the shovel being the most likely implement.
As a teenager, the shovel was my companion in digging ditches, irrigating, opening garden beds, and shoveling oats and barley with a scoop shovel.
A few years later, I paid for my last two years of college and bought a new car by dancing with the “idiot stick.” That’s what my college roommate called the 12-pound digging bar we both carried far too often in following a track hoe as it dug out the future Riverton Water Treatment Plant.
I’ve had a lot of “spot jobs,” temporary positions that made a little ready cash, usually with a lot of physical exertion.
When I was between building garages, decks, or pouring concrete in the summer, I used to sign up at the Riverton Job Service for temporary work. Most often, it was helping moving companies load furniture. These poor guys were sent off to Podunk Riverton, Wyoming, alone and were expected to load an entire household of furniture, clothes, and dishes into a moving van.
The going rate in the 1980s was eight bucks an hour, and I almost always got a big tip at the end. A couple of times, a permanent job offer came after loading the van. No thanks, that is incredibly hard work, and I didn’t want to make a career of it.
Working summers as a college kid, we had a breakdown at the Louisiana Pacific Planning Mill in South Riverton down by the “Hobo Hotel” one Thursday. They laid the entire crew off, but one of our truck drivers told me somebody was looking for a guy to unload a semi-truck onto a loading dock so smaller trucks could pick up the goods.
When I asked what it paid, he said $100 if you unload the entire truck. It was 1977, and at 20 years old, hard work meant nothing to me. It turned out the semi was loaded with 100-pound, burlap bags of crushed coal, used as a filtering agent.
I started at 6 am and was finished in time for lunch at my Grandma Gasser’s house, with a crisp Ben Franklin in my pocket. I ate on the lawn that day, covered with coal dust.
As I got older, those grunt-style jobs didn’t hold the same allure, no matter how much they paid.
As a teacher in Lusk, I started a summertime construction company with fifth-grade teacher and assistant wrestling coach Dan Anderson. The other coaches had gigs roofing houses, pouring concrete, and a few on local ranches.
Dan and I started painting, building decks, and doing odd jobs.
Late one afternoon, as I fried a few trout for dinner in one pan, with a mixed bag of potatoes and onions frying in another, the phone rang. It was Dick Pfister on the other end of the line.
Dick was an awesome guy, a World War II Marine officer who owned a huge ranch north of Lusk that extended into South Dakota and Nebraska.
Dick had an intriguing offer. He opened with, “What do you know about windmills?”
I didn’t know squat about windmills, but I knew how to solve problems, how to use tools, and how to work without injuring myself.
Dick owned thousands of acres in all three states.
He’d hired me the previous summer to work a branding at one of his corrals.
There are two types of brandings, the social and the working. A social has 50 “workers” and 10 calves. A real, working branding has two cowboys on horseback, somebody’s wife vaccinating, a seasoned cowboy castrating and three grunts throwing calves. As a 25-year-old, I had a size 50 shirt and a size 2 hat. That’s how Dick described my job qualifications.
We made $50 a day, they fed us a fabulous lunch, and after a few too many “adult” beverages, they drove us back to town, picking us up the next morning at 6 am.
It was enlightening working those December calves, but it was July, and some of them were over 500 pounds. It was a workout.
Dick needed his windmills serviced. Not a problem. Windmills are pretty simple mechanisms, just a big fan to catch the wind, a motor to transfer the torque created by the spinning blades into horizontal motion that turned another cog attached to a rod that moved the pump up and down. Pretty simple.
Dick gave me a couple of boxes of parts, a grease gun and a dozen or so tubes of lithium grease, a 10-foot ladder and a map indicating the locations of a couple of dozen windmills.
He had a warning before I left, “Lock the windmill with a pair of vice grips before you climb up there, I don’t care if the wind isn’t blowing, this is Wyoming, the wind is going to blow when you least expect it. You don’t want to lose any fingers in the gears.”
No, I didn’t.
It took me almost two weeks to service all the windmills and Dick paid $50 a day.
Most of the work was climbing the tower, checking the mechanics of the windmills, making sure the blades were attached firmly, and then finding the zerks and pumping the gun until the grease squeezed out of the joints.
After servicing the windmill, I had to check the gaskets on the pump. These were all old-style hand pumps with the handle replaced by the rod connecting the pump to the rotating pitman arm of the windmill. A few had slipped and needed adjustment.
This was the most enjoyable part of the job. I’d climb the tower, unlock the vice grips and if the wind wasn’t blowing, I’d spin the windmill blades by hand and watch to see if the water flowed. If it didn’t, I took the pump assembly apart, checked the gaskets, greased the piston, and repeated the process.
On occasion, when the Niobrara County wind was blowing at 15 or more miles per hour, the water flew out of those shallow wells at an impressive rate. It was no surprise that the Union Pacific and Chicago North Western used windmills just like these to fill their water tanks along the rail lines.
My odd jobs have evolved into writing grants, installing computer components, and writing stories for various clients.
The size 2 hat might remain, but the size 50 shirt isn’t the same as it once was. In the words of Bob Seger.
Stood there boldly, sweatin’ in the Sun
Felt like a million, felt like number one
The height of summer, I’d never felt that strong
Like a rock
I was 18, didn’t have a care
Working for peanuts, not a dime to spare
But I was lean and solid everywhere
Like a rock