I have a story: Thirty or so years ago I was a little younger than I am now. I had been working in the oil fields of Texas for the last couple of years when the boom went bust, I went from 100 hours a week to laid off. So I decided to come home to Missouri. I collected Unemployment for a while and drifted around a bit, trying to stay out of the bars and not succeeding. Along in there somewhere I met Sandy and Everett. We became a family and I needed a job to support us. I have never been afraid of work, Learned to have a good work ethic from my Dad. He would tell me, You have to work for it son nothing is free. I heard about a sawmill-pallet mill that was hiring, Risbys pallet and lumber was the name. The main part was located out in the woods about seven miles north of Van Buren, Mo. The sawmill part was located just outside of Ellsinore, Mo. I was hired to work at the Sawmill in Ellsinore, I started in the month of January on the night shift. That Missouri winter was very cold, I dont know if anyone reading this has ever worked at a Sawmill, We had a roof and that was it, The owner did not want us to get wet but he did not mind if we froze. The pay was around $5 something an hour. If you think your job is dangerous try the edgerman job in a sawmill. There is a six foot circular saw blade spinning madly about four feet from where you are standing and a drunk head sawyer operating the damn thing. The forklift driver would load the logs on the ramp, the sawyer would grab a log and dog it down on the carriage and slam it through the blade at about 40 MPH. My job was to grab the resulting slab of wood and send it through the edger blades adjusting the machine as I went to yield the maximum amount of usable lumber. It was fast paced and physically demanding. It was just another routine night when suddenly that big six foot circular blade hit something in a log and saw teeth and chunks of metal went flying everywhere, the noise it made was horrendous. I dropped to the ground and covered my head with my hands as debris rained down around me. I was thinking the sawyer was probably dead, he sat in a plexiglass booth right next to the blade. As it became quiet I slowly stood up and looked to see how the sawyer was. He was still sitting in the booth pale as a ghost , his eyes as big around as saucers. The plexiglass in front of him was gone and a lot of it was in his beard it sort of glistened when the light hit it. Both of his hands were locked onto the control stick in a white knuckle grip. As things calmed down and the sawyer came back from the outhouse, we looked for the cause of the accident. For some reason in the past someone had poured concrete in a knot hole. We had hit nails before but that would just make a spark and you might change a few teeth on the blade. But concrete was a first and it sure made a mess out of the saw blade.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 12:25:15 +0000
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