Out Arizona Way
#1
Some of you might remember that I used to write a column called, Out Arizona Way for a newspaper in Ohio. The idea was that I got the paper every week giving me an idea of how folks lived in that area, and I would write an article for that same paper so those folks would see how life was around my area. It’s been a good ten years since the owner passed away and they stopped publishing the paper. I also used to write a monthly article, Along the Lines,  about trains for a publication in Tahachapi, CA. Yup, that town near the Tahachapi Loop. That too went belly-up with the downturn in the economy around the same time. I do have a blog here where I posted about a dozen of those articles. I do miss writing both articles, and although this sub-forum has been tagged for blogs about railroads, it’s been dormant for a few years, and so, we have decided to widen its scope. Rather than use the Hobo Camp thread to post short stories, as I’ve been doing occasionally, I’ll just post some old and some new ramblings of an old man here. Feel free to comment. I guess I could post things in one or more social sites in hopes of getting a few thousand or million, “likes” or “followings”, but that’s just not my bag. I see where there are people becoming millionaires by posting stuff on social media such as, youtube, but it’s too late in life for me to think about all the complexities of being a millionaire, so I choose Big Blue members as my target, forgoing the chance for fame and fortune. Icon_rolleyes

Again, feel free to comment or even open your own blog and add your own stories. We still have the Hobo Camp forum for daily chit-chat and personal updates, blogs are more for story-telling. My stories are about what it’s like living in a place that once was a vast desert, I would hope others would start a blog on what it’s like living in their part of the world.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#2
Here’s my first story:

 There’s a small restaurant that we have breakfast at once or twice a week. There’s room for a few booths, some tables and a small counter. It’s called. "Brenda’s Kitchen", and Brenda is there to greet everyone when the door opens, regardless of where she is at the time. The place is decorated with old kitchen utensils and do-dads that change with the season or holiday and reminds me of a small-town meeting and eating place in rural America. We get there early since it fills up quickly and can get a bit noisy once it does. However, you can still hear Brenda greeting someone over the din of people talking and eating. One real unique thing is that no two coffee cups are alike, and they too change along with the season. Your cup might be from Cheyenne Frontier Days, or advertising some insurance company in St. Louis one day and from the Statue of Liberty or just say, “the greatest dad” the next. I don’t know how many cups she has, but counting Christmas, Easter and patriotic holidays, I’m betting it’s well over a thousand. The great thing is that you still get to fill it with coffee for a dollar. Yeah, that’s right, $1.00 cup of coffee with as many refills as you can drink. Just remember, the place is too small for a public restroom, so drink responsibly. Brenda knows just about everyone and usually what their order is before they even sit down. You might get ready to leave and there’s no check, someone else is “paying it forward”, and picked up yours.

Most everything is reasonably priced, but as old-school as the place is, Brenda has picked up on the current Internet trend with advertising. Each day the servers are wearing a shirt advertising someplace different. It could be a plumbing company, an auction house, an accountant or a local store of some sort. Along with this, there are placards and business cards on each table from the same company that’s printed on their shirts. Just a fine way of offsetting selling coffee for a buck a cup.

There’s no punch line ending to this story, just that it’s a great place to start your day and make new friends while knowing you can still find places like Brenda’s, even in a large city, if you look hard enough.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#3
Sounds like a great place to eat Don! Don't know about the lack of a restroom though, here in NC I don't think the health dept. would allow that.
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
Reply
#4
(08-01-2019, 05:05 AM)Tyson Rayles Wrote: Sounds like a great place to eat Don! Don't know about the lack of a restroom though, here in NC I don't think the health dept. would allow that.
There has to be one there, but for employees only. There's another restaurant that we go to once in a while that hasn't got a public one either, I'm not sure if that's the one that says, "use the restroom next door".... I've seen signs "no public restroom" on places as well, so I don't know what the regulations are. Lots of places nowadays have three, "Men", "Women" and "Families", but the family one is usually so small that it's hard to get a whole family into it. Icon_lol
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#5
Don, that's true but I've found that it's the one least used and frequently empty.

Tom
Life is simple - Eat, Drink, Play with trains

Occupation: Professional Old Guy (The government pays me to be old.)
Reply
#6
The ones for the disabled are the best....loads of room, and usually the cleanest. 


Just remember that if there's a line-up waiting when you exit, at least try to fake a limp.  Personally, I prefer to exit whilst babbling incoherently to myself....leaves little doubt as to the nature of my impairment.

Wayne 
Reply
#7
I saw a discussion on Dear Abby about objections to non-disabled people using the stalls marked with a disabled sign. Just that, those stall are marked that they "accommodate" people in wheelchairs and those that need grab bars and the like. They are not "exclusively" for the disabled, so I would think that you're OK Wayne, even though I understand that you do babble to yourself a lot.... Icon_lol Icon_lol Icon_lol

As for me, they just take one look and let me go to the front of the line, some even run the other way. Crazy Crazy
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#8
I've talked a lot in the Hobo Camp threads about the Arizona summers, so you might have herd some of this stuff before, so after this, I'm backing off. There aren’t too many people on the planet that haven’t heard, “but it’s a dry heat,” when talking about how hot it gets in this part of Arizona. That point was emphasized a few years ago when the relative humidity dropped to 2%. As I recall, the dew point was around –5 degrees as well. My meager knowledge of weather numbers tells me that this says that the temperature has to drop to at least –5 degrees before we can hope to see even a trace of dew or condensation, never mind rain. I think a few years later, it dropped to 1%, but who's really paying attention? What’s normal? Well, the humidity is usually around 6-10% on most summer days (Monsoon season not withstanding). So, what’s it like when the humidity gets that low? For one thing, you don’t seem to perspire much; but in fact, you do. You just don’t notice it because most of it evaporates before it accumulates on your skin. The bottom line here is that when it gets that hot, it’s not that pleasant, regardless of how dry it is.

 Speaking of weather and evaporation, we have something that happens here in the summer when it does rain. Frequently, it’s so blasted hot out that the rain evaporates before it hits the ground. If you’ve lived here for a while, you sometimes really feel the need to be rained on. We’ve headed over in the direction where we see it raining only to find the moisture never made it all the way down. It does cool things off a bit, but that’s not enough satisfaction, so back home and bask in the A/C.

Just a few more words about the heat, when it’s over 105, it doesn’t matter; I’ve always said that you can’t tell too much difference after that anyway. However, the hotter it gets the more caution you need when touching things that have been outside for a while. If you turn a hose on that's been lying in the sun, the water that comes out can scald you. Also, if your vehicle has been parked outside, use care in touching anything metal. You can get a nasty burn from the shiny trim. Keep the door open for a bit to air the car out, temperatures inside can exceed 150 degrees quickly. The first blast of the A/C will bake your face as well, so be careful. Don’t try to walk around barefooted either. One summer, someone tried to get across the street to hand a letter to the mailman. He got halfway there without shoes on before he couldn’t walk anymore. Neighbors carried him with his blistering feet to his lawn where he waited for an ambulance. I frequently see young men walking around without a shirt on, or women with the smallest top and shortest pants that the law will allow. That’s crazy; even with sunscreen they can wind up with some nasty consequences. There are frequent rescues of hikers not able to get back down a mountain trail, exhaustion or lack of water are popular reasons.

And that's life in the Arizona desert, although our Summer Monsoon Seasons are different. We can talk about that some other time.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#9
So Don to you think it will warm up any time soon?  Goldth
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
Reply
#10
(08-03-2019, 06:22 AM)ezdays Wrote:

.....or women with the smallest top and shortest pants that the law will allow...



Wow!!  Sounds like my kinda weather, and with the benefits mentioned above, too?    I gotta revise the plans for my next vacation.  It'll be like working in a steel mill, but with better scenery.

Wayne
Reply
#11
(08-03-2019, 07:06 AM)Tyson Rayles Wrote: So Don to you think it will warm up any time soon?  Goldth

Not really, it only got to 111 yesterday, same for today Icon_lol

(08-03-2019, 09:29 AM)doctorwayne Wrote: Wow!!  Sounds like my kinda weather, and with the benefits mentioned above, too?    I gotta revise the plans for my next vacation.  It'll be like working in a steel mill, but with better scenery.

Wayne

Sound good, except when it's 115 out, nothing looks good except a block of ice or a cold beer....
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#12
I'm certainly not meaning to  trivialising your weather, Don, but 115 degrees is nothing compared to digging soaking pit bottoms with jackhammers and the water from the three or four hoses left running to "cool" the bottom is evapourating as it hits.

For a pit to be considered suitable for digging, it had to have been shut down for a minimum of 24 hours, with all gas lines blanked and locked-out, hoses running, pit cover open and combustion air fans running during the 24 hour timeframe - that's mainly to cool the the pit's recuperators, large rooms on either side of the pit, filled with honeycombs of refractory brick through which the hot air and gasses are circulated when the pit is in operation. 


There were five thermocouples (temperature sensors) in each pit, one in the pit cover, and the other four near the corners of the pit, and about 1' above the pit's floor.  I recall checking the read-out on the control panel, and was shocked (the first time, anyway) to see that a couple of feet below the scale on which we were working, the accumulated material was at almost 500 degrees....I'm pretty sure that at that temperature, the readings were not very accurate, so it was likely less than the figure indicated.

Nevertheless, even a few shifts later (operations went on 24 hours a day) it wasn't uncommon for the jackhammers to reveal red-hot scale or lumps of steel.


This hot, noisy, and dirty job was, fortunately, done to the bottom diggers' own schedule:  if you were too hot, thirsty, or tired, come out for a break, and for as long as needed.

Perhaps surprisingly, I have lots of fond memories of the various jobs I held there over the years.

Wayne
Reply
#13
Nice description Wayne, it almost sounds like how they build swimming pools here. Icon_rolleyes

All joking aside, that has to be a tedious and dangerous job. Are those mills still active today? There are some jobs that I've never gave a thought about doing, but admired others that did. Working in a mill is one and miners are another that I believe some of my ancestors.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Reply
#14
(08-03-2019, 12:45 PM)ezdays Wrote:
Nice description Wayne, it almost sounds like how they build swimming pools here. Icon_rolleyes

All joking aside, that has to be a tedious and dangerous job. Are those mills still active today? There are some jobs that I've never gave a thought about doing, but admired others that did. Working in a mill is one and miners are another that I believe some of my ancestors.


That mill, which rolled ingots into slabs, was torn down after the company installed a continuous caster, which made slabs directly from molten steel.  Also torn down were the five remaining open hearth furnaces (a capacity of about 1700 tons every four hours-or-so), three of the four remaining blast furnaces, two stripper buildings (keep your eyes on the road - they used cranes to strip moulds from the hot ingots - nothing to do with scantily-clad Arizonans).
Those changes also precipitated the end of most of the in-plant railroad, which was quite extensive.
A couple of other mills were closed - the strip mill, as it wasn't capable of handling the bigger cast slabs, and the plate mill, as the continuous caster was not suited to producing some of the high value specialty grades made for plate.  At one time, we produced a fair amount of that for the U.S. military, but pipe orders were what had kept it rolling - some single orders entailed up to three years of continuous production.


As for mining, no thanks - I'd rather be digging bottom, which was claustrophobic enough.  I do admire those who can work in such conditions, though, along with those who work at heights.

You're also right about other jobs  being mostly obscure to people not working in those fields.  I was fortunate in that respect, as my father had worked in a wide variety of jobs and industries, so I have a little knowledge of at least some of them.  I always enjoyed plant tours whenever one of those companies offered them.

Wayne
Reply
#15
I had heard that General Motors had a serious problem with the black automobiles when they started using acrylic lacquer in 1958. It would heat to reflow in the Arizona sun. I never heard how the problem was solved but I kind of figure that black would not be a popular color in Arizona or any other place that is that hot. 
Charlie
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)