Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
It was 1942. Kenny was already working at North Vancouver Shipyards across the harbour from downtown Vancouver and had to make a transfer on the street railway before taking a ferry from the downtown terminal across to the shipyard. The day following my arrival in Vancouver, Kenny, who was on the afternoon shift at his yard and usually left home an hour later than I, came along with me to help me find my way across the harbour.
I was hired within fifteen minutes of my arrival at Burrard Dry Dock and was officially designated as an 'engine fitter's helper'. My brass identification tag (4388) with the greasy loop of twine attached to it still hangs from a nail in my bedroom all these years later. Dave Nichols was my 'engine fitter' and I was fortunate to have been assigned to him as I found that he was kindly, laid back and good-humoured.
The yard was building 9800 ton merchant vessels, a Canadian version of the famous Liberty ships built by the Americans. Sometimes they were torpedoed by the Japanese submarines within twenty-four hours of the time they left the yard. Most times they didn't sink because they were jammed full of lumber destined for California or Australia. They would come limping and listing back to the yard and into the drydock with huge holes blown in their topsides, above and below the waterline, but still afloat. I thought at the time that the Japanese submariners must have found it 'extlemely flustlating'.
In the peacetime 'thirties' there had been a couple of hundred workers in the Burrard Dry Dock yard engaged in the construction and repair of government and commercial vessels. Work proceeded at an orderly but leisurely pace. Then a neat little war came along and there were suddenly thirty-five hundred men on the day shift alone, and there was an afternoon shift and a graveyard shift, each of about five hundred men. It was highly profitable for the shipyards to carry out their patriotic duty. I signed on for the princely sum of fifty-five cents an hour and became part of the eighty-five percent of the work force who hadn't the vaguest clue about what they were doing.
Industrial safety was not a carefully considered item in the list of shipyard priorities. For one thing, there was no profit in it! One or two of the old-time foremen had hard hats, more as a sort of status symbol than as an acknowledgement of need. I wore a greasy fedora hat with the brim turned up in front like the one Leo Gorcey wore as 'Spit' in the 'Dead End Kids' movies. If steel-toed safety boots were available or required, no one was told about it. Scruffy black 'down at the heel' Oxfords were fashionable. Running shoes were not unknown.
There was an old signboard that had been erected in more halcyon times by a long-defunct safety committee. It read: 'This shipyard has been accident-free for ( ) days. Previous accident-free record: (120) days.'
Since they were at present averaging three deaths a week, I reckoned that filling in the blank space had been discontinued on the basis of futility and embarrassment. Records were falling into the category of accident-free hours and minutes rather than days. The record I remembered most vividly was the one in which three men were killed in unrelated accidents in one day. Those were just the deaths and did not include the unrecorded fractures and haemhorrages and burns and chopped-off fingers and toes. Needless to say, I was not including these statistics in the weekly letter I wrote home to my mother; I may as well have been on a first-class cruise as far as she was concerned.
After the steel plates had been moved from the storage area to the plate shop they were marked out with white paint to the shapes dictated by the hundreds of different templates stored next to the plate shop. Small plates capable of being moved about by hand went to a machinist standing before a steam-driven cutting knife which could cut through inch-thick steel literally like a hot knife cutting through butter. Once he had placed the piece of plate for the next cut he stepped on a treadle and the knife would descend moments after a clamp had secured the plate to the machine bed.
Regrettably there were no safety devices on such dangerous machines, such as are now required. Proper procedure would now require that a metal wand would sweep across the plate a split second before the knife descended, thus assuring that no human body parts were in line for unplanned severance. I have previously alluded to the degree of unnecessary featherbedding that existed, doubtless as a result of the 'cost plus' nature of the shipyard hiring procedures.
'Gonna lose a hand someday, that boy!' said my engine fitter one day as we waited for a special piece of bracing. The 'boy' he was referring to was one of the 'cost plus' beneficiaries I refer to. But he wasn't a 'boy'; he was a 'fortyish' Italian immigrant barely able to speak the local language but who was anxious to continually demonstrate his functionalism. Even after the machinist had satisfied himself that the plate was properly aligned and he was about to press the foot plate, the crazy little bugger would reach in, if only to touch the plate and indicate his involvement.
'Remember the little guy working for the machinist over at the plate shop?' Dave said to me about a week later.
'The one you said would lose a hand some day?'
'That's the one,' he replied. 'Well, I was wrong! He didn't lose the hand after all--- only most of the fingers on the hand!' He seemed to derive an almost wry pleasure at having had his prediction fulfilled.
'Jaysus!' I said. Even as inured as I had become to the gory accidents taking place on a regular basis at the yard I was slightly sickened by the news. There were days when I actually believed the army might be a safer place than the killing grounds at Burrard Dry Dock. But that was before D-day!
Each day I arrived at the yard I was greeted by the shrill screaming of the bolt-up reamers doing their job. Since the yard had not yet converted to welding the main plates together and was still fastening them in place with rivets, there were many plates that did not line up precisely. As a result red-hot rivets would not always pass smoothly between the plates, causing delays, rejected rivets and a great deal of bad language. Men equipped with large electric power-driven reamers would be sent up to ream out all of the potential rivet holes. Rivetting was slower than welding but less likely to crack apart in heavy weather. The men doing the reaming were standing on 'two by twelve' planks suspended on metal scaffolding. To my astonishment they had no safety belts and lines and some of the planks had no safety ropes strung along behind the planks.
One of the 'new' men was assigned to the reaming crew and on his second day was standing on the top plank doing his job at the bow of the vessel . It was not made clear why, but he took a step back either to admire his work or to light a cigarette (strictly prohibited). The outcome was, of course, predictable. He plummeted straight down thirty-five or forty feet onto the rocks near the bow of the vessel with deadly results. He was apparently no longer amongst the living when he left in the ambulance following a brief sojourn as a reamer. His departure was marked by the renewed screaming of the reamers.
I think I paid $35 a month for room and board at Kenny's house. His parents were aged somewhere in their early to middle forties. His mother was probably a reasonably attractive woman, in fact she was reasonably attractive, but plain. She wore no make-up and her hair was pulled back from her face and fixed in a ponytail. I used to joke to myself that the only reason they had only one child was that Kenny's mother had never really taken a good look at her husband until after the birth. He was not really an attractive-looking man. Even though her husband and Kenny were her only interests, saving myself, she seemed never to be without some work to do. Weekends we slept late and had a non-formal series of breakfasts before heading for the beach, but the Sunday evening meal was eaten in the dining room and featured roast beef and potatoes, vegetables and occasionally wine followed by a dessert of some kind. It was very homelike.
Kenny's mother asked me during the first week I was employed how many sandwiches I would like to take with me for my lunch break. I had acquired a standard black lunch box painted white on the inside with a rounded top carrying a clip-in Thermos bottle. She was in the habit of making wholesome sandwiches of roast beef and lettuce, chicken and mayonnaise, peanut butter and jam or ham and cheese from thick squares of pre-sliced bread. She was surprised but agreeable when I said I would prefer only two sandwiches and made with brown bread instead of white. I was equally surprised when I discovered that Kenny was regularly going off to work with four of these mammoth sandwiches in his lunch box. His Mom used to try to fill up the empty spaces in my lunch box with a piece of pie or some fruit.
The lunch boxes were handy and had snap latches for closing and a leather handle at the top to simplify carrying. They presented a security problem, though. When a number of the drunks who used to spend their days at the bars along Upper Granville Street learned about the lax conditions at the Burrard Drydock it occurred to them they could be paid for doing little more than they did at the beer parlours. The hard-core alcoholics amongst them went a step further by filling the thermos bottles not with milk but with whisky. Although drugs were presumably not a factor, the booze was a contributing cause in a high percentage of the accidents. A drunken yard hand lost his grip on a staging ladder one day and fell thirty feet to the floor of the engine room on a vessel under construction. At impact his head struck the circular cast iron handle of an eight-inch gate valve.
'It never broke the handle,' Dave, who had been an eyewitness, said with morbid preoccupation. 'But the threaded stem of the valve was bent over like a fuckin' wilted dandelion.'
'No shit! Did it kill him?' I asked naively.
'Are you kidding?' Dave scoffed. 'You wouldn't want to know what the back of his head looked like!' But he volunteered the information anyway. 'There were chunks of skull and bits of brain scattered about, and blood? Migawd, you wouldn't believe it!'
'I'm sorry I missed it,' I said, feeling nauseous.
Sometimes it seemed that the wail of ambulance sirens was as much a part of the the shipyard ambience as the scream of reaming bits and the staccato bursts of the rivetting guns. But I wandered innocent and unscathed through it all, a sort of juvenile 'real-life' Buster Keaton. I stood one day on the bilge deck of a newbuilding amidst a tangle of vari-coloured hoses and cords snaking across the steel decking. A red-hot 2 lb. rivet missed by a 'bucker-up' high above me landed at my feet, bounced away, and began burning through a red and green oxy-acetylene hose bundle. An aromatic ribbon of blue smoke began curling upward so I walked over and kicked the rivet away. Then Dave grabbed me roughly by the arm and hustled me under the shelter of a corrugated steel walkway.
'You tryna get yourself fuckin' killed or somethin'?' he shouted angrily. I looked
back at the smouldering rivet, thinking it would have made a neat souvenir.
There was a fat old gray-haired fellow in bib overalls whom I saw walking through the yard several times a day. He was never empty-handed; he was always carrying a small toolbox, or he'd have a short length of pipe with a valve affixed to it tilted over one shoulder.
'Who is that old guy?' I asked one day when Dave and I were sitting waiting for the drydock to be pumped out.
'Engine-fitter's helper, same as you,' Dave replied laconically.
'Where's he going all the time?'
'No place; he's goin' no place.'
'How come? Where's his fitter?'
'He ain't here. They took him to the hospital about a week ago.' I pondered that one for a while.
'So what the hell's he doing walking around with those bits of stuff over his shoulder all the time?'
'Makes him look busy,' Dave said. 'He'll find a 'hidey-hole' at the other end of the yard and crawl in for a smoke and maybe a little nap. Then he'll pick up his 'prop' again and walk back through the yard.'
'But why bother?'
'He knows that if he stands around looking idle somebody might re-assign him. Mainly he's afraid he'll get fired, but o' course that'll never happen.'
'Jesus, that must be worse than working,' I said.
'That's what I'd have thought,' Dave said, lighting up an illegal butt.
When the water had all been pumped out of the drydock our assignment was to go down to the pump room door, remove a series of bolts and a seal and enter the dark room that held the pumps for the drydock. We were greeted by a sharp, indescribable nose-piercing smell that must have contained a component of ammonia, perhaps the result of virtually lightless anaerobic growth. I have never since smelled anything similar. It was not a stench but it was definitely not pleasant and any time since that I have smelled anything close to duplicating it I have had an immediate flashback to the pump room of the drydock. Our powerful flashlights revealed stark white sea onions hanging from the ceiling, otherwise there was a dearth of crustaceans or other sea growth, definitely nothing that required photosynthesis to survive. We scraped the sea onions free and scooped them out the door, gave the pumps a cursory inspection and departed. We were not in a mood to linger.
In spite of the variety of swim trunks I have owned in the past fifty years I can still remember the maroon-coloured pair of swim trunks I wore in Vancouver. Perhaps because it was the only garment I wore on our many bare-footed trips down the hill to Spanish Banks. It was not crowded but there was always a scattering of other sun-worshippers lying on the sand. I actually swam and was surprised to find that at a depth of about ten feet there was a perceptible interface between the warm surface water and the ice-cold deeper water. I found out years later that this is called 'the thermocline'.
One Sunday afternoon we were leaving the beach when Kenny veered off toward a couple of sun-browned beauties lying indolently side by side in matching black one- piece bathing suits.
'Hi Kenny!' said the nearer one, flashing a glistening white smile in his direction.
'Hi Margie,' Kenny replied, walking over to stand above her. '"What are you doing away out here?'
'What does it look like I'm doing, stupid?' she laughed, "I'm sunbathing, aren't I?' Kenny pointed out to me later that he'd first met Margie at Kitsilano Beach.
'You're a long way fom home out here; you usually go to 'Kits' don't you? What's the matter, it's too crowded for you today?'
'Just a little change of scenery, that's all!' I thought I detected a blush under her deep tan. The black bathing suits were where the similarity of the two girls ended. Margie was definitely a 'super babe'. Her long legs were tanned to the dark mahogany-brown of Baker's chocolate and her chest and face only slightly less dark. Straight nose, full lips, dark brown eyes, perfect smile, the works!
The trite conversation went on until Kenny finally made the comment I assumed the whole meeting was about.
'Maybe we could get together sometime; maybe take in a movie or something!' All very casual; non-committal.
'Yeah, I guess that would be all right sometime,' she said, affecting insouciance.
'Gimme your phone number then,' Kenny said, 'I'll give you a call!' I'd like to tell you a little more about the other girl but I don't even remember her name. I confess that my eyes had not strayed far from Margie's flat abdomen and the fascinating groin where her perfect legs joined just below the sweet mound above. Kenny said he didn't have a pencil and paper.
'Never mind, I've got a pen in my bag,' Margie said, sitting up and reaching for her bag. My eyes nearly crossed permanently as I saw a thin line of snow-white flesh exposed at the bottom of her tight-fitting swim suit and a magnificent cleavage develop between her breasts.
Kenny wasted no time that evening, wheedling his father for the use of the family car. It was not a difficult exercise, since Kenny, being an only child, was spoiled rotten. We were halfway to Margie's house before Kenny told me that he had made no arrangements for me with Margie's girl friend.
'Three's a crowd, pal, maybe you should just drop me off at an intersection somewhere; I can make my way home on the streetcar!'
'Don't be silly,' Kenny said. 'this is a great movie, you shouldn't miss it!' I was not happy but I consoled myself with the thought that I could sit next to her and indulge in deep draughts of whatever sublime perfume she had chosen to wear.
Margie came out of her house wearing high heels and a short skirt and otherwise looking absolutely stunning. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had a touch of light reddish orange on her lips. 'Maybe we should have asked Francine,' she said in a flash of incredible brilliance. Kenny remained silent. When we entered the movie the usher took us down halfway to the front. Kenny held Margie's arm and gestured for me to go on in to be seated. I expected her to follow but got Kenny instead, as he let Margie take the aisle seat. Who the hell was I, anyway, Cyrano de Bergerac? Kenny didn't smell all that great! I felt extremely functional sitting in the back seat of the car on the way back to Margie's.
'G'night!' Margie said, wasting no time opening the door. She then turned to Kenny; 'You can come in for a minute if you want; my folks are down in the States for a week!'
'G'night!' I said to her back as I watched Kenny open the driver's door and walk around the front of the car. I continued to sit upright expecting his momentary return. After fifteen minutes I realized that he was probably not shaking hands, so lay down on the back seat. Bear in mind that I was seventeen years old, virginal and drenched in testosterone. If I had seen a pile of rocks that I thought had a female snake under it I'd probably have been tempted to screw it. Fantasizing about the events in the house I developed a diamond-cutting bone on that a big dog couldn't chew! Margie's black swim-suited groin dominated my thoughts!
Margie's house was on a dark side street lined with large trees and I was several times tempted to go and stand silently beside one of them and simulate Onan, the son of Judah (Gen. xxxviii). With my luck I figured a police prowler would drive slowly along the avenue at the critical moment. Then I'd go to jail. On the other hand (you'll pardon the expression, I'm sure!), I was still sufficiently imbued by residual Victorian discipline to be daunted by the possibility of an untimely return to the car by Kenny and to be caught en flagrantis in spite of what I assumed had transpired in Margie's house.
After what was probably little more than an hour but seemed like two hours Kenny emerged looking marvellously contented. He made no apology, of course, for the long delay. I tried to make small talk for a while but gave it up in light of his sustained laconism. There was really nothing wrong with me that couldn't be cured by a bed in a dark room, a hand and a box of Kleenex.
-o-
Meanwhile, life and death went on apace at the shipyards. Kenny's mother went off one week to visit her sister so we were stuck with 'the Dad'. One night we were sitting in the dining room when he asked me if I'd like a drink. I agreed readily, primarily out of curiousity since I'd rarely had a sip of beer or liquor and had never been intoxicated, so we sat and talked and I consumed a couple of bottles of beer.
'Well, I've got an early day tomorrow so I guess I'll turn in,' he said, somewhat to my surprise. Kenny was not due home for at least another hour and I'd expected the Dad to await his arrival. Instead he pointed to a large china cabinet stuffed with bottles of every description. 'There's the liquor cabinet,' he said, 'just help yourself to whatever you want.' I assume his idea of what I might want and my idea of what I might want differed substantially. I could scarcely believe it! I decided it was a prime opportunity to try a little bit of everything! So I worked my way gradually through a little bit of creme de menthe, a little bit of creme de cacao, a little bit of Scotch, a little bit of Rye, and so on and so on until by the time Kenny arrived home I was well and truly pissed.
Recognizing this he decided that the best cure was a walk in the fresh air. Experts have informed me that fresh air just makes a drunk drunker! He was literally holding me up as we started around the block.
'I gotta have a piss!' I slurred when we were about half way around the block. Strangely enough, I remember stopping next to a rock garden to relieve myself. Kenny patiently held me upright as I fumbled with my zipper and extracted my penis.
'Let me know when you're going to start,' he said, obviously concerned about my performance.
'I've already started,' I mumbled.
'News to me!' he said. About the same time I became aware of a warmness on my right thigh resulting, of course, from the fact that I was pissing down my leg inside my pantleg.
'Shit!' I slurred, 'I'm pissing down my pant leg!'
'Good thinking,' Kenny said. 'Makes it more difficult for the police to arrest you!'
'Very funny,' I said.
I showed up for work the next day suffering the first hangover of my life. I still drink a lot but seldom suffer from hangovers. I attribute this to a couple of factors; I have learned to pace myself to a greater degree and since I'm retired I make no morning appointments and as a result get at least eight to ten hours of sleep. I have always maintained that hangovers result as much from lack of sleep as from excessive drink.
I think it used to take me about an hour to get to work in Vancouver and the same to return home. Going to work I would walk up the street half a block to catch the old Fourth Avenue trolley street car which would travel in an easterly direction for a few blocks then turn south at Sasamat to wait at the bypass. There was only a single line running west from this point so the conductor would have to await the oncoming streetcar to 'pass the block'. The 'block' was simply a foot-long piece of two by two inch wood painted black. No streetcar was allowed in the single rail line area unless it had 'the block'. At Tenth Avenue we turned east and stayed on board until we reached Granville Avenue where we disembarked and transferred to the Granville Street car which took us down across the Granville Street Bridge and on to the ferry dock at the foot of Granville.
The ferry ride across the harbour took about twenty-five minutes and the ferry docked no more than a five minute walk from the yard entrance. Returning, I boarded the Granville streetcar just up from the ferry dock then transferred at Tenth and Granville to await the streetcar with the Sasamat-10 roller sign. Sometimes at night I was the solitary traveller sitting on my lunch bucket on the northwest corner of the intersection across from the 'Aristocrat' cafeteria. In those days the conductor called out the name of each main intersection as we approached it and the long trip each way gave me an opportunity to read and I read two novels that summer: 'The Moonstone' by Wilkie Collins, reputed to be the first of all mystery novels, and the Greene Murder Case, whose author I don't remember. I'm a mighty slow reader but a hell of a good rememberer , it seems. Except for authors!
'Can you drive a car?' Dave asked me as soon as I mentioned that I would have to head back to Calgary the last week in August.
'Sure, why?' I answered without hesitation. My reply was technically correct but really didn't bear close examination. For instance, he didn't ask how long I had been driving or how much. Where had I driven and what sort of terrain had I experienced? It was all academic--- I had a driver's license and that seemed to be adequate! In fact my driving experience was limited to about three-quarters of an hour on a gravel road west of Calgary to which my brother Lloyd had taken me. I had somehow learned that anytime a person asks you if you can do something you think you can do, you answer 'Yes!' In this instance I may have come dangerously close to answering too promptly. Dave's elderly father and mother were returning to Saskatchewan and he felt that it would be better if an experienced driver were in charge through the mountains. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry! He told me where to show up on the North Shore about a week later. Ostensibly my cost-free transportation back to Calgary was assured.
Accidents at the yard continued at an unchanged pace, and included pay for those who had worked the previous Saturday and Sunday. As a result there was more than the usual mad dash for the pay exit on Fridays, partly motivated by those who wanted first choice of seats on the ferry and partly by those who wanted to get down on their knees on the ferry deck and gamble away their weeek's pay shooting 'craps'.
The steam engine moving steel plates from storage to the cutting shop continued to work throughout this frenzy, unaffected by the normal working day hours of the yard hands. Its fixed steel rails ran along close to the plate shop leaving just enough room for the rear end of the steel cabin used by the operator to clear the plates leaning against the wall of the plate shop whenever the crane was swung off to pick up a plate amongst those stored on the other side of the tracks. At these times there was a clearance of a couple of inches between the back of the cab and the pile of steel plates leaning against the wall.
During the mad rush to the exit one Friday a perspicacious yard hand on the dead run spotted the interstice between the cab and the plates leaning against the shop wall. At this moment, while the steam engine was moving along the rails toward its next pickup, there was a space of about sixteen inches available and space and movement were frozen in the mind of the pitiable emergent, thinking only of getting his pay and finding an early turn at the dice; the option available could save him at least five minutes! The timing was impeccable, so to speak, as the crane , moving along the track and rotating the cab simultaneously, spread the anxious escape artist along the stored plates like peanut butter and jam on a slice of sandwich bread. Fortunately I never saw it but I heard about it in detail for at least three days.
'Maybe you should get lost for about three quarters of an hour,' Dave said to me one afternoon.
'Get lost?' I said , somewhat baffled.
'Yeah, I got a couple of things to do and I won't need you,' he said. I had stuck to him like shit to an old army blanket for more than six weeks so it did come as a bit of a surprise.
'Shall I do like the old fat guy and walk back and forth with a piece of pipe over my shoulder?
'No, go to that new ship they're building over there and climb down the stern well ladder. Crawl along the empty drive shaft for about fifteen or twenty feet and you'll come to a dark room. Just sit down and stay quiet there and I'll see you later.' I followed his directions and found myself eventually sitting in a pitch black airless room. It was literally as silent as a tomb. I wondered how Dave knew the room was there. A red dot of light suddenly appeared about ten feet across from me. I couldn't smell smoke so I assumed there must be some hidden ventilation carrying it away. Then I saw another brief red glow, and another! Eventually I counted four separate 'light sources' all emanating from cigarettes being smoked clandestinely. I was in a 'hidey hole'! There were no introductions and no conversation, only the intermittent glow of partially shielded cigarettes. I never found out what 'couple of things' Dave had to do and I felt that it was wise not to ask.
— The End —