Chapter 8, It only gets worse.

The start of my junior year was hopeful. I had worked all summer building high steel grain elevators. Everyone knows that high steel is dangerous but in those days the contractors hired young farm kids who would do anything to make $5.00 and by anything I mean climbing, working, welding and assembly at heights over 100 feet with no safety rigging at all. We thought it was normal.

The pay was good, $1.25 an hour working from 8 am to dark building grain storage towers for corn and beans. We worked in crews, 2 crews with 2 totally different bosses, Red and Duke, both heavy drinkers. Red was always talking and Duke seldom said squat. I started working with Red who quickly found out that I could read blue prints and count. counting the pieces, panels, bolts and sundry parts is a constant job on site, how much of what, when and where. I learned that management was thinking ahead and that few people were very good at it.

Red and Duke made a lot of money as subcontractors putting up these grain storage units with teenage labor, but I got what I wanted.

I had two interesting classes that year, Biology and Geometry. When I learned about the Phylum’s of Life it was wonderful thing, a thing I had seen in nature only structured, categorized and connected. Everyone had to do an insect collection which I did will zeal and determination. I had managed to…