Manuscript Page 34
a pneumatic hammer to chip all the loose rocks off the cliff face. I became very familiar with the roof of the power house some two hundred feet below me. I learned not to watch when I dropped a chipping tool. The sight just reminded me how high I was and made me dizzy.
On the second shift I helped set the steel plates that sealed the new spillway gates that were to raise the level of the lake. It was back breaking work but it was just wonderful to go from no job to two jobs. I feel compelled to point out that from September 1936 to July 1976, a period of forty years, I was never without a job and occasionally I had at least two. I do not suppose that is a record but it would be virtually impossible to do that today.
The Peters Construction people knew that if Standard Stations offered me a job that I would leave even though they offered me a permanent job. I did not want to make a career of construction work so when Standard Stations offered me a job I left Peters and went to Phoenix to be trained for "pumping gas."
After two weeks of training I was assigned to work at a large station in Tucson. I did vacation relief at both Tucson and Nogales but found that I really did not like service station work so I kept calling the University about a teaching job.
Just before Christmas I got an interview with Mr. Rukin Jelkes regarding a tutoring position in his home which was a large horse ranch in the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson. This was part of the Jelkes family who had made millions through the development of Oleomargarine. They had a nine year old son who was caught between a doting mother and an insensitive father. Since I was sick of pumping gasoline I took the tutoring job. They were to pay $150 per month plus board, room, laundry and the use of a car. I had barely reached the ranch when they got an emergency telephone call to go to Georgia where Mrs. Jelkes mother was seriously ill. I was to stay at the ranch until they returned after Christmas. The family had hardly driven away from the ranch when I got a call from the University informing me that the Superintendent of Schools from Nogales wanted to interview me for a teaching job. I went for the interview, was offered a job teaching a fifth grade, I accepted and sent my resignation to the Jelkes family in Georgia. I never heard from them again.
