The author, pictured on the right, on a summer pipelining in South Carolina in 1970.
Pipelining is in my blood. My father was a pipeline bending engineer for nearly forty years, and I worked ten summers on the line, starting at the tender age of fifteen.
It’s been over fifty years since I measured my first joint of pipe but memories of those summers are among my most vivid. Some of the strongest are of the hardworking pipeliners themselves.
When I was seventeen working in Virginia, I spent part of the summer with the clean-up crew working as a swamper on a dozer. My job was to clean the tracks, grease the dozer, adjust the blade, and do anything else my operator Nick wanted. “Sailor” McMullen was the foreman. I never knew his real name.
Sailor was a loud, barrel-chested man who wore a white cowboy hat. I liked him because on the rare occasions when we interacted, he talked to me like a grownup and treated me like any adult member of his crew.
Once I was driving Nick’s truck down a woods road and encountered Sailor’s truck blocking the way. He was standing next to it drinking a beer so I got out to see if he would let me by.
Instead of moving over, Sailor offered me a beer and started making small talk. He then looked me in the eye and in a serious tone said, “Son, as you get older you’ll come to realize that there are more horses’ asses in the world than horses.” Sailor apparently had had a run-in with someone and was cooling off, but that little bit of wisdom stuck with me.
On another occasion, a D-7 caterpillar had to be moved farther down the line. There were no operators at hand, so Sailor turned to me and said, “Why don’t you jump on up there and take it down there?”
Taken aback, I stammered that I had never driven a cat before, so Sailor found someone else. I’m still amazed that he was cool with letting a kid take off unaccompanied on a D-7 and regret that I didn’t give it a go.
One of the oddest jobs Sailor gave me was to catch softshell turtles that were driven out of the water-filled ditch when it was backfilled. I scooped up a number of them and placed them in a burlap bag, which Sailor took home. The next day, he cooked up a delicious turtle soup and made sure we all got a bowl.
Daddy’s engineering crew spent a good bit of time around road crossings. The man who ran the boring machine was known as Brother-in-Law because of his relationship to Steve, the foreman.
Brother-in-Law was one of many World War II veterans on the line. In 1968 we were working in South Carolina and had some young Vietnam vets on the job, as well.
During one break, I sat and listened to Brother-in-Law and a former Navy corpsmen swap tales. Brother-in-Law recalled the day the Germans ambushed his unit and chased it across a field. One German was closing in on him, so Brother-in-Law turned around quickly and shot him. He lowered his voice and said, “I guess I killed that feller.” Even at my young age I could tell that it still weighed on him.
The Vietnam vet then told of the wounds he and other men in his unit had suffered from ingenious booby traps set by the Viet Cong. That started the two to comparing German and VC booby traps. It was quite interesting to listen to the two veterans of different generations and different wars compare their experiences.
Like some other pipeliners, I never knew the real name of the man everyone called “Turk.” Turk was a white-haired gentleman who ran a back hoe, and he usually dug the ditch at the road crossings we had to work.
Sometimes, the ditch had to be deep, real deep, in order to bore under the road. It was often too deep to jump into, so we had to walk down the line to find a place to get in and then walk back up the ditch to the road to get our measurements.
Daddy and Turk had worked many years together and knew each other well. Turk must have noticed our trouble in accessing the ditch because at one road crossing we found that he had dug out a sloping walkway down into the ditch so we could get in and out easily.
Turk started doing that at all the deep road crossings and Pop named the walkways “turkey trots.” Turk didn’t have to do it, but he readily spent the extra time to help out a friend.
That was one of many lessons pipeliners taught me.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe who has received numerous awards for his books and outdoor articles.
