Hard Times Beget Secrets

Post date: Sep 03, 2012 7:34:23 AM

I noticed back in my youth when I was learning my trade as a electrician, I was put to work with an older man named Ed. Ed was very jealous of his knowledge and would get angry with me if he caught me watching him doing something like bending a three point saddle in a conduit. At the time I didn't understand why he was this way. Years later as I studied the history of the Great Depression and talking with some people who lived through that era, I come to understand.

Back in that time, a job very well could mean not going hungry, or your children suffering from malnutrition or from the cold. So knowledge was a trade secret to make yourself so valuable that you could guarantee your occupation.

When I was a little child, I remember one man who sent the others on an errand. While they was gone he stood a heavy cast iron tub, still in the crate, on it's end. Then he backed up to the crate, grabbed the slats on each side and lean over to balanced the tub on his back. With it a few inches off the floor, he shuffled into the house and installed it. When the others came back, they was shocked that the 145 lb man was able to carry it by himself. He never did tell them how he did it though.

My father was like this. In his later years I got him to tell me some of his tricks of the trade. Like one time when I was very young I remember how one large man tried to break a rusted pipe union loose. He tried and tried to no avail. Finally my father went and put a pipe wrench on it, jerked and broke it loose. The man had another 100 lbs on my father, could not believe a little man out did him. Years later we was reminiscing over that memory, he told me his secret. He loosen the pipe wrench so it would slip some and then catch. This created an impact reaction much like a impact wrench.

So if you run into people who is like this, he/she may be a product of the Great Depression. Sometimes these traits are instilled in the next generation by their parents. With these people you have to be observant without appearing to be so.

My grandfather who survived the Great Depression taught me this. He said "If you are going down the road and see a man digging a ditch, pause and see how he digs." The lesson here is, don't be so arrogant that you have the opinion

"I know how to dig a ditch!" and not take the time to observe someone's work. After all he might know a technique that you may have never considered or seen.

I recall a young man in his early twenties who was use to using power tools to cut conduit. He was proud of the fact that he was a foreman on his last job and reminded of it everyone if he thought he wasn't getting the respect he deserved. We was over a hundred feet up in a control room when he realized he needed to cut a piece of EMT (Electrical Metallic Tubing) conduit. He didn't want to run down multiple flights of stairs to trim the end off. He asked me if he could borrow my hacksaw (that he ridiculed the day before as obsolete.) He sat down, laid the pipe across his lap and tried to saw it. I stopped him because the pipe was sliding all around, kinking the blade. I use bi-metal blades and did not want him snapping the teeth off. I told him to watch while I cut the pipe. But he stood with his back to me and railed how he was insulted because he was a foreman on his previous job and he KNEW how to cut a pipe. I am thankful that my grandfather and my father instilled into me at a early age to be observant and be open when someone wanted to show me something.

Back in the 1980s I was asked to help an old man whose helper had quit and needed help with wiring a house. So after I got off from work, I went over to help him. As I was making up some boxes, I watched him go down the hall drilling holes in the floor joists overhead. (two story house) He would drill one, skip one, drill one, skip one. When he got to the end he turned around and came back and drilled the ones he skipped. By doing this (his drill and bit was too long to fit straight between the joists) his holes was angled so they was always pointing at the next hole. When he pulled his wire in, instead of fighting the wire from joist to joist, it zigzagged smoothly through the joists. I don't know if he ever knew it, but I learned a new trick of the trade that evening. It made my time helping him worth my while.

I don't want my knowledge to die with me. After a person is gone, his legacy should live on in others.