Jobs in Colorado

Jobs in Colorado

In 1969 Mary and I took off on an adventure. I had always felt that I had an attraction for the mountains. I suppose it was a combination of Saturday morning TV westerns that I watched as a kid and the romantic notion that living in the western mountains was somehow the culmination of American life. I had also had an experience in Colorado when Dad went there to train with the 10^th Mountain Division of WWII. Mom and I went out there to visit him and although I must not have been more than two years old that experience put some kind of mark on me. I don’t suppose I remember it but with the stories that Mom would tell and the photos that we had, it seemed like a real experience to me.

Mary and I were teaching in Indianapolis and I was not pleased with my performance. I found that I was not a teacher. I was not able to express myself verbally as I felt internally. I decided that I would like to become a wildlife biologist. In my mind this would be more of a solitary occupation and I would not need to have the verbal skills as a teacher might. I did some research and found that one of the best schools for such a study was Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, Colorado. So on to Colorado.

In the summer of 1969 we purchased a VW van, moved in with Mom and Dad and I overhauled the van and Mary worked at the Holiday Inn in Crawfordsville. (The story of the trip is another adventure). We had no particular destination in mind other than the eastern slope of the Rockies north of Denver. We saved enough money to get us there and to be able to spend about a month looking for a place to live and find a job. We also had enough to get back to Mom and Dad if necessary.

We arrived in the late summer and began our quest. We came into the foothills through Loveland. We drove south to Boulder looking for a place to stay and finally ended up back in Loveland were we found a weekly motel like room. I began to look for a job and found one in a trailer factory in Loveland. We then moved into an apartment.

At that time it was pretty easy to find a job although there was not much income. I think I made about 5 or 6000 a year. About a $100 a week. Our rent was $90 a month. We had a new car payment of $112 a month. (the car was a 1968 Triumph TR250 that I had just bought the year before not knowing I was going to have this adventure. The car was also back in Kingman in storage in the back of Dad’s garage.)

There were hundreds and hundreds of people with the same idea as us. The area was being flooded with people moving into the area. At that time the Ft. Collins area, which was about 10 miles north of Loveland, was one of the top five fastest growing areas in the country. So jobs were being created but there was a lot of competition for each job. People were moving there with families but could not find suitable housing. I remember one man who had 4 kids and he was living in a travel tent while trying to save enough to get a permanent place to live.

My job at first was to do mostly semi-skilled labor such as doing what I was told. So what ever they told me I would do. I did a lot of repairing screw ups. Walls for the units were put in place with an overhead mobile hoist. Sometimes the walls would be set on the wrong side of a layout line or would just be set a little bit off the mark. If the mistake were caught immediately the wall would be reset. But if the unit was traveling on down the line and it was suddenly found that a cabinet set or a bath tub would not fit were it was supposed to, then I would come into action. We had a BMF hammer. That was a Big Mother F*ckin’ hammer. It was a 16 pound sledge hammer that we used to move a wall. You would place buffering block of wood against the wall and hit it with the BMF hammer. The wall did not resist the movement. The BMF hammer was used only for small movements usually only 1 or 2 inches.

Another repair we often performed was the too big opening for an electrical outlet. We had three sizes of electrical receptacle covers. The normal one, a slightly bigger one for slight mistakes and the huge one for BMF mistakes. If the guys who cut the holes for the electrical outlets screwed up, then we had to come in and change out all of the cover plates in that room.

As I worked there I had several ideas about making the assembly more efficient. I would tell them to the supervisors and sometimes the ideas would be implemented. I was beginning to be noticed and would probably have been moving into management if it had not been for my big mouth. Often several of the people on my shift would go after work to a bar and hang around, drink and flirt with the waitresses. One evening I got into a political discussion with the production manager of the plant. I don’t remember what I said but that sort of cooled things for my management career. Then shortly after that a few of us were with another upper management person drinking and eating pizza. I got sick and threw up in his car. That pretty much put me on the black list. Then one day at work I had to go to the bathroom and the boss would not let me go. So I quit.

Now I was without a job. But it didn’t take long to find another. I found one in another nearby town. I think it was in Greely. The Loveland factory produced very well built units and they were double wide. Built mostly with regular building materials as you would build a site built home. The factory in Greely was just the opposite. These units looked much better when finished but they were junk underneath. The exterior walls were built with some sort of bracing construction of 2x2 lumber. The floors were not built to withstand much of a load. These units had a raised area of about 6 inches in the front. A sort of breakfast area raised above the kitchen. One time I hopped off the raised area onto the floor below (about 6 inches) and went through the floor. That was enough of that. I could be a party to that kind of deception. I quit.

Looking again. There were many trailer factories in the area so I went to another in Berthoud. Their product was somewhere between Loveland and Greely. I don’t remember why I left there.

I had many jobs in Colorado. Getting a new job became an adventure in itself. Mary was substituting in the school system so we had some more income. Oh yes, during the time I was working in the Loveland trailer factory, we bought a filter queen sweeper. We were living in the mountains in a cabin that didn’t even have carpet. Talk about selling an icebox to an Eskimo. The selling factor for this sweeper was the fact that we could make a lot of money setting up demonstrations. I think it was $10 for each appointment and $35 it a sweeper was sold. The sweeper was very expensive especially for someone who didn’t have much income. I think it was over $200. Of course we bought it on payments and Mary said we could make a lot of money with this. So we tried to get appointments set up for the demonstrations. Of course we hardly knew anyone there so how could we get appointments set up? We ran an ad in the paper saying something like ‘Would you like to make over $10 an hour? Call blah blah for details.’ Anyone who watched a demonstration also got paid. The demonstration was about 45 minutes and you got $10. Ten dollars an hour was big money back then. One of the first calls we got was one of the people in upper management. He called and began giving his qualifications for being worth $10 an hour. We took down his information and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want him on the list because the name of the person who set the appointment was used when the appointment was confirmed and I didn’t want him knowing it was me that got him into this situation. It was also embarrassing to listen to him tell us why he should have the job.

The sweeper thing didn’t turn out to be the money maker we had hoped. Mary quickly gave up on it and I soon petered out on it too. We were stuck with the payment and no carpets.

Many other jobs came along. I worked in a feed mill for one day. This was a place where my job was to make rolled oats. Raw oats were steamed and then passed between two rollers that smashed them flat much like Quaker oats. These oats were mixed with other things including molasses think and then bagged into feed sacks that weighed about 80 pounds. I stacked these bags on pallets to be sold to ranchers coming in to purchase horse feed. I think the job started at 5 in the morning. I was to prepare the orders for the day and then when the ranchers came to pick up the feed, I was to help them load it. It makes me hurt just to think about that job. I think I took this job because I got off about noon. When I got home that day I called and said I would not be back.

I also worked as an insurance agent, in an antique store, in a furniture factory, building Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, Taco John, worked on a ranch, I did some substitute teaching, I applied for a position as a reporter for a small paper but I didn’t get it. I would have liked to have had that experience.

The furniture factory was a real treat. I was looking forward to working there. The owners were German and I had heard that they were master craftsmen making furniture that was very much in demand. I arrived at the facility early and they showed me around. They had a very heavy accent and many of the people could not speak English. Apparently the owners were bringing Germans in to work in the factory. When they were through with showing me around, I was put on a radial arm saw to make repetitive cuts for furniture parts. As I worked the saw began to make an extremely loud scream. It was deafening almost to the point of pain. I shut the saw down and the supervisor came running over to see if there was a problem. I told him about the scream of the saw blade and he sort of laughed and told me to get to work. I thought he might give me some ear protection but they didn’t have any. I went back to work.

At the break I had to go to the bathroom so I ask where the bathroom was. One of the workers who could speak English told me that we had to go outside on the railroad tracks. Well I did and went back in and finished my work. When quitting time came I went home and called the state and told them about the working conditions at the furniture factory. I hated to do it but they were taking advantage of the all those immigrants. The place was closed down.

As an insurance agent I didn’t have the heart to close the deal. I was hired by MFA. I forgot what that stands for. They sent me to school in Missouri along with 3 other new agents. The school was a couple of weeks and it was in the winter. On our way back (we drove) it got very cold and I got sick. So after I was well again I began to work. Making cold calls to get appointments was the first order. I had to make a certain number of calls each day and then I could do whatever I wanted. I began to get appointments and make presentations. I even sold some policies. The call that did me in was an old lady. I made a presentation for some kind of insurance and she said she wanted it. I was with a trainer and he pulled me aside and told me that I should offer her these other types of insurance. He told me if I offered it she would buy it. I told him I couldn’t do that and we walked out. I quit that job the next day. I did this for about 6 months and I was just starting to make some money but I just could not take advantage of that old lady. I did buy a set of eating utensils from her. She was selling things in order to go live with a relative. We still have that silverware set.

At Taco John I made $1.25 per hour and all the tacos I could eat. Needless to say we had a lot of tacos. Tacos piled high with meat, lettuce, tomatoes and cheese. Boy were they good. I think I would have worked for no money. The manager was a drunk and was seldom there. Employees were taking home huge packages of meat and other food. The restaurant was about to go under. When I started I began to take care of the food and to inventory food purchased and to correlate it with the food sold. This was not a highly accurate inventory but it was easy to see what was happening. In the next few weeks most of the people who had been stealing food left. But I couldn’t get the manager to hire new people. Sometimes I had to call Mary to come and help me out during busy times. The store began to make money and soon was the most profitable for the stores that the owner had. One time I had a drunk come in and ask for the hottest taco we had. I fixed him a hot taco and he just poo pooed the heat of that taco. I then fixed him one with a special hot sauce that I had never used that was kept out of public access. He took a bite of that one and practically went into a fit. He left with his burning mouth. I finally got tired of tacos and left.

I worked as a laborer for a commercial builder for a time. I mostly helped put up forms for basement walls and foundations. The forms were sheets of plywood. There was a spacer between two sheets to keep them evenly spaced. Bolts then went through the plywood to keep then tight against the spacer. The forms were aligned for the proper arrangement and concrete was poured into the forms. My job was to take a large tool that vibrates and push and pull it up and down in the fresh concrete to get the bubbles out and to make sure all the form was filled. I don’t remember the weight of the vibrator but it was heavy. One job we had we to build a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. When that job was finished I went to work for Shakey’s.

At Shakey’s my job was to make the dough. They had a huge mixer that stood on the floor and was about 5 feet tall. I would make a large ball of dough. The dough was run through two spaced rollers onto a long table and a cutter was used to cut a pizza dough crust. I don’t remember leaving this job or how long I was there.

I am sure there were more jobs but these are all I remember. You can check back at a later date to see if I have remembered more.