A Summer Job

The chill of the morning reminds me that winter is closing in on us, and as a result, opportunities to barbeque at KC's Korner will soon be dwindling. As a barbeque professional, this development is somewhat disheartening because it means that I will soon have an aboundance of time on my hands. Consequently, I've begun looking for other opportunites to occupy my time.

In my long career, I've had a variety of jobs. One of the first I had involved pouring concrete for the 'new' Library at Arkansas State University. Of course, this 'new' library was being built in the summer of 1976. My job was to help pour concrete into forms for a concrete column. The columns were roughly fourteen feet tall and two and a half feet wide on each side. A huge crane would lift a steel bucket containing one cubic yard of wet concrete, and I would climb up the 2x4s that braced the forms and were held in place by things called 'froglegs'. Standing so that my waist was at the top of the form, I would reach up and guide the huge steel bucket so that it was over the top of the form. When the bucket was positioned just right, I pulled the release bar down, and a gate on the bottom of the bucket opened, allowing a stream of concrete roughly twelve inches in diameter to flow down filling up the forms. For all the construction jobs I had had to date, this was the best. No sweating....No lifting....No hauling..,..Three dollars an hour to climb the forms and pull the lever. Sweet.

Usually.

As with all sweet gigs, sometimes things go badly. One day in the heat of the summer, I was standing on top of the forms, and the crane operator, Bozo, had a bad day. Actually, his day wasn't all that bad, but mine got dramatically worse very rapidly.

As Bozo manoeuvred the bucket containing a cubic yard of wet cement toward the column I was standing on, something out of the ordinary happened. The bucket suddenly dropped about 2 feet, and swung rapidly to the left, toward the form I was standing on. A cubic yard of cement in a steel bucket has a good amount of kinetic energy. It was barely moving when it bumped the form, but it was like a freight train bumping a litter basket, the litter basket loses.

The form, originally made up of 2x4s and plywood, instantly turned into splinters. It wasn't a gradual thing. It was a 'touch' thing....like when you turn on the light switch, the light is 'on' right then. Well, when the bucket contacted the form, the form was shattered right then.

I had that Wiley Coyote feeling. The form I was standing on was no longer there. I was fourteen feet in the air, looking for something to grab so that I did not fall onto the concrete pad that the forms for the column rested on.

In a crisis, your mind works so fast that the world seems to slow down. As gravity took hold of me and started pulling me toward the concrete pad, I reached out for the bucket. If I could just get a hand on the metal rim around the bucket, I might be able to hang on.

I stretched with my left hand as far as I could, and just as my feet felt the forms fall away, I got a grip on something. I swung my right hand over and also got a grip. The forms crashed to the pad below, and my momentum caused me to swing toward the bucket, and then, unfortunately, I swung under the bucket and I realized that I had not grabbed the bar around the rim of the bucket. I had grabbed the release bar.

As I swung beneath the gate at the bottom, my weight on the release bar caused the gate to open, releasing the concrete. One cubic yard of concrete, in a 12 inch diameter stream hit me in the chest. I lost the grip I had on the bar. I fell fourteen feet, landing flat on my back on the broken remains of the forms, and was promptly buried by one cubic yard of wet concrete. The guys on the crew immediately jumped into the pit and began digging me out of the concrete using shovels.

That was the last time I climbed a form.