Off the Rim
By Jim Keyworth
Gazette Editor
When I was in college, I spent several summers working for the Genesee County Road Commission, within which my hometown, Flint, Mich. is located.
Next to working at one of Flint’s General Motors factories, it was just about the best summer job a college kid could get. Besides, only the children of General Motors employees got the GM summer jobs, and my dad wasn’t.
But dad did have a little pull at the road commission.
Most of the college kids who worked for the road commission got stuck running tractor mowers at a 45 degree angle on the banks of the freeways.
Every week or so one of them tipped over. Nobody ever got seriously hurt, though, because the first lesson they taught the summer crew was how to jump off a tractor when it started tipping. We were, after all, college students, so the mowers learned the lesson well.
When it rained and they couldn’t mow, these guys would be assigned dumptrucks. I forget what they were hauling to where, but I remember that they used to have dumptruck races on the backroads after they had delivered their loads and were on their way back to the yard.
Thanks to my dad, I escaped the jumps off the tipping tractors and the dumptruck races. An old school chum of my dad’s – Fern Shell was his name – was the foreman of the road commission sign department. Because he knew my dad, Fern chose me as the single summer employee in his department.
It was the best of all county road commission jobs.
We would go out after somebody knocked over or stole a STOP sign and replace it. We’d also replace light bulbs in traffic signals.
And while we were waiting for someone to steal a sign, we’d work in one of the county’s five or six parks – installing swing sets or putting up signs.
I’m pretty sure I learned as much those two summers in the sign department as I did in college. From grizzled sign department veterans like Frank Perrow and Ken Lybolt.
Neither of them was educated. Frank, who stenciled the brown park signs, was always asking me how to spell some four-letter word like SLOW (as opposed to SLO, SLOE, or SLLOW).
But Frank and Ken were wise in the ways of the world. I was getting married for the first time one of those summers and Frank would kid me about which body parts I had to be careful with and which were indestructible.
We carpooled to work, and Frank would never allow me to drive my Volkswagen beetle (it was the 60s) on paydays because such a small car would never hold all of our money.
Frank and Ken also taught me a few things about being a man. About how on your lunch hour, real men stop at a convenience store and buy a big onion to eat like an apple with your sandwich. About how to play poker while eating your sandwich and onion and still have time to grab a 10-minute catnap before beginning the afternoon’s work.
I also learned a lot those summers about consumer preferences. During the big summer holiday weekends, we could get overtime by being on garbage detail in the parks.
I needed to make all I could those summers, so I always volunteered. Our three-man team would consist of one guy driving the garbage truck and two of us emptying the trash cans into it.
I remember being amazed at how many Sara Lee products were consumed on picnics. And by how much food people wasted.
But at least they put that food in the trash cans. What I saw last Saturday while helping my Mesa del Caballo neighbors clean trash along Houston Mesa Road was a display of just about how dumb people can be.
Here’s some of what I learned:
O A lot of people drink and drive. You wouldn’t believe the number of empty beer cans and wine containers along the roadway.
O A lot of people throw their cigarettes out the window. Can you imagine anything dumber than that, especially along Houston Mesa Road. Whatever could they be thinking? Is it that much work to use an ashtray and empty it when it gets full?
O A lot of people are pigs. In fact we talked as we labored about whether being a pig and being stupid were mutually exclusive or went hand-in-hand.
O We also pondered eternal philosophical questions like: If trash is thrown in the forest where nobody can see it, is it really there?
The moral of the story, I guess, is that no matter how old we get, we never stop learning – especially about the flaws and frailties of the human race.
Of course, there were also some tangible rewards. The Consort and I got motivated for the cleanup by deciding we were going to find a big gem, the Holy Grail, or maybe a $1 million bill.
We didn’t, but among the nine of us in the crew we scored three golf balls and a dime. Oh yeah, and five tires. Very useful if you’re building a boat dock or a swing.
We weren’t.
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