Chapter 5

The Sunflower Army Ammo Plant near De Soto, KS was built on over 10,000 acres and during WWII they employed over 12,000 people. It was put on standby, then reopened during the Korean War, standby again, then reopened during the Vietnam War with 4,000 employees then the final standby was in 1972.

The Contractor AG Proctor Inc. was from Aurora, CO and had jobs on Gov't. Bases all over the country. Their low bid contract included getting paid for all their equipment parked on the jobsite. It didn't seem to matter that their Operators hauled it in and had to pull it off their trailers as most of them wouldn't run. The CofE (Corps of Engineers) Inspectors complained about this so their Mechanics made some attempts at getting it all to work. The Project Manager was originally from South Carolina where it rains a lot. He had worked most of his life non-union. He couldn't understand why we wouldn't leave the showup and work in the rain, yet we would go out in the mud and play touch football. He finally gave up on trying to get us to leave and would just hide in the trailer's office and wait for us to either finally go to work or just take our 2-Hour (show-up time) or 4-Hour (if we had already started work) time and usually head for the bar that was outside the Plant's entrance gate. Over the years that bar had been a real money maker!

I got my clearance at the gate and drove to their showup trailer where all of the equipment was parked. It was like looking at a museum! I could see where I was going to have some fun learning to operate these antique pieces of equipment. I found out that this Contract included leveling the ground to build an electric switching station, building and installing switchgear and controls in the blank cabinets in the existing control building, wiring emergency lights inside the control building plus the regular Linework of replacing poles, conductors and all that it takes to build new high voltage to supply the new areas of the Ammo Plant. Most of this type of work was new to me and to the other Lineman and all of the contract was to be done by Linemen. With the help of 2 Contractor Electricians that were later cleared out of the Hall to help us figure all of this out.

The Linemen that were already on the jobsite were all new faces to me. I met Bob Murphy RIP that later took a call building steel tower transmission towers. On the corner towers there were guy wires going down to the anchors in the ground that held the strain of the dead-ended wires. To save climbing down, some of the Linemen would put a small dolly/roller on a guy wire, clip their safety strap into the hook and "ride" the guy wires down to the ground. They would wrap a small rope around the guy wire to control and slow down their descent speed. On transmission towers they do not install "Johnny Balls" (Stay aka Strain) insulators that separate part of the lower guy wire from the top section. So the only thing that stops you is the ground level of the anchor rod where the guy is attached. One day Bob tried this. He either didn't wrap the "brake rope" right or it broke and he hit the ground going very fast. His back was broken and he lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

I met a tall and lanky Lineman that had the nickname of "Slim" (of course). As one of the Lineman that was 1st on the job, the Contractor's Manager chose him as one of the Foreman. I also met the Heffernine Tramp family. The father Ira, with a Lineman son named Stan (nicknamed "Wolfie") and another Grunt son but I don't recall his name. Ira told us about his wife and mother of his boys that she used to drive out to the jobsite when he got a new call. She would watch for a while and if she saw anything going on that looked dangerous to her she would start honking the horn to call him down off the pole. He said even during the lean times when they had very little food for the kids or gas money to go to another job, she would make him drag up. She wanted him to stay with them and not worry about the budget. He said that this worked out during their days on the road, but on this job she worried a lot as she couldn't get a clearance to come into the Plant's guard gate to have a look around.

One of our 1st projects was to start installing the footings for the short steel poles that would support the 2" aluminum buss (pipes) just outside of the switching station. The ground had to be leveled before starting to dig to pour the concrete footings. That took some time but it was fun learning how to run all of the controls. I say I "ran" it because I would never be able to really "operate" it like a pro. But we finally got it leveled and dug the holes for the steel poles and started to build the forms for the top of the holes to hold the foundation bolts in place. Slim the new Foreman found a transit in the tool trailer and said he wanted to use this to get all of the foundations leveled. I helped him set it up and get his elevation from the "benchmark" elevation marker near the existing switchgear.

He was having fun with the transit and after lunch I saw him move it. I asked him why he moved it and he said that an existing post was blocking his view. I said "Well, I will help you figure out his new elevation." He said "No, don't you remember we did that this morning?" I couldn't convince him that moving the transit threw off his original elevation and he got mad. I mean really mad! He yelled "Alright wise guy! You do all this technical work! I'm dragging up!" Well, no one there tried to talk him into staying so he went to the Clerk and got his last check. Later on I heard that he went to Missouri and while working there he brought his new common-law wife back to live with his wife and family in Kansas. I never did hear how that all worked out though.

He was really strange. One of the local bars had a costume Halloween party. Slim dressed up in a wig, mini-skirt, high heels, and the whole ensemble to look like a hooker. But he was so tall, gangly and just plain ugly that everyone recognized him. He got really mad over that and never went into that bar again. Yes, I met all kinds on the "tramping" road.

Building the new switching station for our new electric lines we were building was our "fill-in" work when we were not changing out poles and stringing in new conductors. We had added crossarms on the pole just outside the station where we would tap one of the new circuits going into the switching station. The crossarms were lower than the rest of the line so the new conductors were low enough so that the strain pulled them up. Ira Heffernine and I went up that pole to "clip it" (tie it) in. He worked on the new circuit above me.

We did not have our aluminum tire wires rolled up. This was something I would learn to do later. Ira had taken his conductor out of the roller and was holding it down on the top of the insulator. When he put his tie wire around the top of the insulator the ends of the tie wires were pointing up. The conductor got away from him and bounced up. Ira still had hold of it when the ends of the tie wore hit the hot conductor of the circuit above us. There was a loud roar and a ball of fire around Ira. I told myself to just stay still and hide under my hardhat. I could see myself standing in front of me talking. Crazy, huh!