During the summer of 1968, I was back at home in Tracy on summer break from college. I had been home about two weeks and was looking for a summer job to make some extra money for college when the infamous Tracy Tornado came roaring through town on June 13, 1968.
I have covered my recollections of the tornado in a previous column written by Per in the special 50th anniversary edition of the Headlight Herald on June 13, 2018, featuring the tornado. The article, which can be found in the Headlight Herald archives, covered the posttornado response of ham radio operators, including me.
Because of all the destruction caused by the tornado, contractors all over southwest Minnesota came to Tracy looking for opportunities to help rebuild our shattered city. Although they brought in their own skilled workers to help rebuild, they were also looking for local unskilled workers to hire for much of the manual labor that was required as part of the reconstruction efforts. I applied to several companies and was hired for the rest of the summer by a construction company from Redwood Falls.
All the workers for the company were required to provide their own hand tools. The first and only hand tool I bought was a trusty fiberglass handled hammer which I purchased at Rignell’s Hardware, a hammer that I still have and use today. My other main tool was a crowbar my grandfather, Fred Kassel, gave me which was an advertising gift from the Hoyt Oil Company in Walnut Grove.
One of my first jobs was to help pour cement for a footing at a new house we were building in Greentown. My job was to carry the wet cement in a wheelbarrow from the center of the basement where it was being unloaded by the cement truck to where it was needed for the footing.
If you’ve never tried to balance a 300-pound load of a semi-liquid mass in a wheelbarrow while walking across a very uneven and sometimes muddy piece of ground, give it a try someday. I managed to dump the first load of cement about halfway to the footing which was 30 feet away.
After a lot of yelling by my boss, I wisely took a lighter load the next try. After an afternoon of this activity, I actually got quite good at this tiring job.
My next job was to help with the demolition and clean-up of a house that was severely damaged by the tornado and was going to be replaced with a new home. I was in charge of driving an old dump truck from the job site to the Tracy dump on the west of town where we dumped all the debris.
Fortunately, I knew how to drive the manual transmission truck after driving pickup trucks and tractors on my uncles’ farms south of Walnut Grove. It was an 8 or 10 speed floor-mounted shifter as I recall. It took me several minutes of trial and error to finally figure out how to raise the hydraulic bed of the truck to get the load to fall out the back end of the truck bed. Keep in mind, I had no prior training on how to operate any of the equipment the contractor used — I was just expected to figure it out on my own as everybody was too busy to train some rookie. Forget about any OSHA regulations, they hadn’t even been a thought in that era.
I quickly got the hang of things after a few trips back and forth from the job site to the dump after each new load, which only took a few minutes with the large excavator that was used to demolish the old house. All went well until I forgot to lower the bed of the dump truck on one of my return runs and headed back into town.
I was driving down the dump entrance road towards Highway 14 when I felt this slight hesitation in the truck and heard a loud twang-like sound. I looked out the truck’s rear-view mirror and saw that I had forgotten to lower the bed of the truck and saw the ends of two wires lying by the side of the road. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t a high voltage electrical line but a low hanging telephone line that I had apparently clipped with the raised bed of my truck.
Needless to say, I didn’t tell my boss what happened and during the aftermath of the tornado, inoperable phone lines were a common occurrence.
My next job was a killer job. We were re-roofing the old bowling alley located on Morgan Street next to the back side of Bill’s Super Fair. I was tasked with getting the rolls of asphalt roofing material up on the roof. This entailed climbing a shaky old wooden ladder as I carried a roll on my shoulder, balanced using one arm and using my other arm to hold on to the ladder without falling. There must have been over 100 rolls of asphalt, each weighing 100 pounds.
It was a huge rounded roof and as I recall, we were on that job for almost two weeks. After reroofing, we had to rework the hardwood lanes which had become warped due to the leaking roof.
Another much easier but in retrospect, a more dangerous job, was residing houses that had been originally constructed with asbestos shingles that were cracked or broken due to debris hitting the siding during the tornado. The replacement asbestos shingles were very brittle and we used electric table saws and saber saws to cut the shingles to fit around windows, pipes, etc. No respirators were used back then and people were not aware of the dangers of being exposed to asbestos. If I ever come down with Asbestosis, Mesothelioma or other lung disease, I will know the cause but at this point, it is water over the dam.
There were many other new skills I learned working on that construction job during the summer of 1968. Years later when I became a boss at several different companies, I always remembered all the previous bosses I had worked for and tried to emulate their best practices for motivating and treating my employees. Every job and associated experience are essential to becoming an adult.
I learned many valuable lessons that hot summer.
Next month: Lake Benton Showboat Ballroom
