In My Time (7 page)

Lynne and me on a scooter in front of my mom and dad’s house in Casper, Wyoming in the early 1960s.

Plenty of scholarship students, finding themselves in a totally new environment, manage to get themselves together, apply themselves to their studies, and succeed. Instead, I found some kindred souls, young men like me, who were not adjusting very well and shared my opinion that beer was one of the essentials of life. At the beginning of our second year, twelve of us roomed together in Berkeley College, which with the benefit of hindsight I understand wasn’t a great idea. We created a critical mass that led to several encounters with the dean. My parents began to get letters, one of which began, “Dick has fallen in with a group of very high-spirited young men.”

I wasn’t entirely unaware of Yale’s intellectual attractions. One professor in particular stood out: H. Bradford Westerfield, who taught a political science course on the diplomatic history of the Cold War. It covered the foundation of NATO and the Marshall Plan, the war in Korea, the creation of post–World War II foreign policy. It was absolutely intriguing—probably more history than political science, though I didn’t understand that at the time. But even though the course was fascinating, I didn’t exert myself to get more than a C in it.

The university tried to motivate me by shifting the terms of my scholarship and making me financially responsible for my education. Beginning with my sophomore year, I was to consider all future financial aid as a loan. When that failed to get my attention, the dean asked
me to take a year off and come back only if I was willing to pay my own way. I managed to do that for one semester, during which I continued to accumulate bad grades and disciplinary notices. In the spring of 1962, Yale and I finally parted ways.

WHEN I GOT BACK home to Wyoming in 1962, I returned to what I’d been doing off and on since high school—“working in the tools” as a union member on jobs across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. I helped build electrical transmission lines and coal-fired generating plants. I worked on bringing power to oil fields. One of my assignments was to work on Minuteman missile sites around Cheyenne’s Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, laying communications cable between silos in the middle of a Rocky Mountain winter.

As a member of Local 322 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, I started as a groundman, or “grunt.” Later, as I got more experience, I became an “equipment operator.” At one point I gave serious thought to taking out my apprenticeship papers and working up to “journeyman lineman.” These were the men who climbed the wood or steel towers to string power line.

The work we did was sometimes dangerous, and everyone had tales of spectacular accidents. While working on adding capacity to the Dave Johnston Power Plant outside Glenrock, I saw an equipment operator drive a truck mounted with a front-end boom close enough to a live transmission line to cause the power to arc, sending a large fireball down the line toward Casper and frying the truck. The equipment operator was frozen with fear and stayed where he was, which was a good thing. If he had tried to get out of the truck, that would have been the end of him.

On another job we were using dynamite, and after the charges were in place and the electrical blasting cap attached, I watched the crew foreman uncoil a roll of wire from the charge back to his pickup truck. He raised the hood on his pickup, leaned across the fender, and touched the wire to the truck battery to detonate the charge. The blast blew a large rock high in the air, and it came down right on top of the pickup’s hood,
driving it down onto the foreman and seriously injuring him. We were in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a rough, mountainous area in western Colorado, and it took us several hours to get him to the hospital.

Stories like these were a reminder of what happened when you weren’t alert and careful. They illustrated why the spirit that prevailed in line work—cultivating competence and taking pride in your performance—was essential. If you were a groundman and you tied your knot right, the heavy crossarm you winched up to the lineman would make it to the top safely, and he’d be able to release it from the rope with ease, but if you fashioned the knot so securely that he had trouble releasing it, you complicated his job enormously, and if you didn’t get the knot tight enough and a crossarm or a string of insulators fell, you could kill somebody.

The culture and lore of line work were captured in a book,
Slim,
that the crews I worked on passed around. Written by William Wister Haines in the early 1930s and later made into a movie starring Henry Fonda,
Slim
told the story of a young man who joined a line crew and learned how great it felt to do work he was good at and could take pride in, how satisfying it was to have the money he earned in his pocket. He was free to pick up and move on whenever he wanted. It was a point of pride with Slim that when he was asked for his address, he pointed to the license plate on his car.

I was earning $3.10 an hour, which was good pay in those days, and picking up a lot of overtime at time and a half. I traveled from job to job with one large suitcase, driving a 1949 Chevy for a while. When it had to be junked, I hitched a ride or caught a bus until I managed to buy a ’58 Ford. Living accommodations were never fancy, usually a room in an old hotel or roadside motel. For ten or fifteen dollars a week, these places didn’t offer any amenities or impose any demands. I wasn’t tied down to one location or any particular job or anyone’s expectations. Whenever I wanted, I could pick up and move on.

After work, the guys on the crew would spend considerable time in one of the local bars, ideally a place that would cash our checks or carry a tab until we made our first payday. We consumed vast quantities
of beer. If something stronger was called for, we’d drink shots of bourbon with beer chasers—a combination that helps explain how I managed to get arrested twice within a year for driving while under the influence.

The first time was in Cheyenne, and I managed to brush it off. But the second time, in the summer of 1963 in Rock Springs, was a different matter. Many of my friends had just graduated from Yale. Lynne, after spending a semester in Europe, had graduated summa cum laude from Colorado College. And I was sleeping off a hangover in the Rock Springs jail.

It had taken a lot to drive the message home, but I realized the morning I woke up in that jail that if I didn’t fundamentally change my ways, I was going to come to a bad end. As soon as I was released, I drove home to Casper. I remember spending the better part of a day on Casper Mountain, up near the top where you can see all the way to the Bighorns. It was a good place to get perspective on life and to figure out what I was going to have to do to get off the self-destructive path I was on. I talked to Lynne and my folks, and although they would have been fully justified if they’d stopped speaking to me then and there, they seemed to believe that even after all the false starts, this time I really meant it about turning my life around.

I went back to Rock Springs, to the apartment I was sharing with Tom Ready, a journeyman lineman and crew foreman, who had been drinking with me the night I was arrested. The job we were on—building a 115,000-volt line from Rock Springs to the new Flaming Gorge Dam, on the Green River—was the third we’d worked together. Tom was an interesting guy, good enough on a horse to rodeo on the weekends. I considered him a friend but told him he would have to get a new roommate. I was moving out and camping at the job site. When he asked me why, I told him I’d decided to clean up my act and go back to school in the fall. “I’m going to make something of myself,” I said. “Who in the hell do you think you are?” he responded. “You’re no better than the rest of us.” It was the last time we spoke.

__________

I MOVED OUT TO the job, where my crewmate Bob Lieberance and I had the assignment of going ahead of the other crews, drilling and dynamiting holes for the wooden structures they would follow along and build. Bob had a fascinating and complicated history. The way he told it, after he’d gotten in a scrape in Tennessee in the late 1930s, he had moved to Canada, and when the war started in Europe, he’d joined the Royal Air Force and flown missions against Hitler. After Pearl Harbor he’d transferred to the U.S. Eighth Air Force and been badly wounded on one of his missions. By the time I got to know him, he was something of a loner. For most of the year he worked as a “powder monkey,” dealing with all the explosives on a site, but in the winter he would leave and hole up in the mountains.

Bob lived out at the job site, sleeping in a camper on his four-by-four truck and stowing his gear in a big wall tent he used for cooking. He considered a stray dog he’d picked up as his best friend, and he didn’t have many others, but he and I got along. After I spent a night in my sleeping bag in the open, he told me I could set up a cot in his cook tent.

Except for once-a-week trips to town to buy groceries, shower, and hit the laundromat, I spent the rest of the summer out on the job and far from the bars. Bob and I would work hard all day and share the cooking at night. After dinner I began reading Churchill’s six-volume history of World War II by the light of a Coleman lantern.

In the fall, I moved to Laramie and enrolled at the University of Wyoming. UW is a school with many virtues, not least of which in my day was that, regardless of my previous academic record, they had to accept me because I had graduated from a Wyoming high school. The tuition was $96 a semester, and I moved into a $45-a-month, one-bedroom furnished apartment that fronted on an alley. I saved on expenses by getting my high school classmate Joe Meyer, who was now going to law school, to sign on as a roommate. Eventually Joe would have one of the most distinguished political careers in Wyoming history, serving as attorney general, secretary of state, and state treasurer, but while we were rooming together he was best known for being one heck of a jazz clarinet player and for dating Miss Wyoming.

I got a part-time job reading to a retired air force colonel who had lost his sight. He was getting the credits he needed to become a counselor for the blind, and four nights a week I read his textbooks to him for $1.75 an hour, paid for by the Veterans Administration. I also spent a fair amount of time studying and got very good grades, almost all A’s—as I would do for the rest of my years in higher education.

In late September 1963, not long after I’d started back to school, President Kennedy came to Laramie to deliver a speech at the university’s War Memorial Field House. I stood among the crowd of thousands and listened to him deliver an eloquent call to public service. He talked about the Greek definition of happiness—the full use of one’s powers along lines of excellence—and said that working for the public good could provide that kind of satisfaction. He talked about the importance of bringing what we were learning to the task of building a better nation and a better world. When he had finished I left the field house by a back door and saw his motorcade pulling away. He was riding in an open convertible and hundreds of students were running after him, wanting a last glimpse as he departed the campus. He had inspired us all, and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described. When he was killed only two months later, the mood at the university was especially somber. Everyone remembered that he had been with us so short a time before.

DURING MY FIRST YEAR at the University of Wyoming, I spent most of my weekends in Boulder, where Lynne was working on her master’s degree at the University of Colorado. At Easter we went home to tell our parents we were going to get married, and we set a date—August 29, 1964.

While Lynne and her mother worried about flowers and silver patterns, I went back to work building power line. One of the things I was saving for was the honeymoon Lynne and I were planning at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park. But I came down with a terrible case of food poisoning and had to be hospitalized for a week.
I had no health insurance, so in addition to losing seventeen pounds, I spent all the money I had been saving on medical bills. We still had a nice wedding, complete with bridesmaids and groomsmen, with my little sister, Susie, as our flower girl and Lynne’s brother, Mark, as the ringbearer.

Our wedding party – my sister, Susan and Lynne’s brother, Mark are the young attendants in the front row.