Standing In The Dry Part

18 and Taking the World By Storm

I had already been out of high school for a year.  A year spent at OSU and Wesleyan College.  Not to say it was a great year, by any means, not even to say it was an OK year...but it was a year I had managed to get through and I had managed to get summer employment at J.M. Huber Carbon Black factory in Borger, Texas.

Borger Texas, land of my birth, had not shown much of  a world moving forward in 1977, and looking back on it now, it really seemed to move backwards in time, even though it had only been 14 years since I had lived there the first time.  There was several "industries" in town; Borger Pipeline, Phillips 66 Carbon Black, Phillips refinery plant, Phillips rail car, on and on with Phillips, and J.M. Huber Carbon Black. Phillips and Huber were across the street from each other, and it is important to talk about how black the black was when you went there.

Company Logo

Carbon Black is/was used in about everything.  A small portion of it went in every car tire made, and a smaller portion went in licorice that you ate, to turn it that black color.  Ink pens, paints, car parts, everything took carbon black.  Carbon black was fairly simple to make (in theory) as it is just fuel and fire, cooled by water, moved by water, and then packaged into seventy pound bags, or put inside large hopper cars on the railroad, and transported to the companies that used black to make their products.

J.M. Huber Corporation

It was black.  When you drove out to the plant, about three miles from the two plants, the earth turned black.  The road was black, street signs were black, the signs telling you J.M.Huber was on the right side of the road was black. The fences, tires, pick-ups, steel buildings, water hoses, EVERYTHING within that you could possibly see, was black.  The people that worked there, the clothes they wore, their hardhats (issued white, turned black) their jeans and work shirts, their skin, and even people's teeth were black in color.  We were paid 30 minutes a day to take a shower, using strictly baby oil to break the black up, get it from around your eyes, and mouth, your hands, any part of you that was exposed to working, turned black. Carbon black was about the consistency of baby powder, just black. 

Powder on Your Face

Your clothes were washed four times per week, and you had two lockers, one on the clean side, where you would come into work strip down to nakedness, walk through the showers, into the dirty side, where you would put on your black clothes (that may have been blues jeans and blue work shirt) but were soon again black.  You even had powder, like baby powder at the locker room door, that you would dip your hands in a fifty-five gallon drum, rub it all over your hands your face and your neck, to try and keep the black from attacking you so badly.  It rarely worked.  It was important that you kept yourself dry through the day, to keep the black from sinking in.  This rarely worked too, as that one time where you managed to stay out of working so hard, was met by some clown, just outside the locker room, who had a garden hose, wetting you down.  At the end of the day you showered, walked across to the clean side, drove home, took your dirty/clean shoes off on the porch, and went inside.

Getting Clean

I had managed to talk four professors into me leaving early, taking my tests and getting to Borger about mid-April to work.  I took the tests, packed my bags and headed west.  I was living that summer with my Uncle Pete and Aunt Lora (that was pronounced Ain't Lore) and when I had been there a couple of days, work began.

My boss was Woody Paige, he was the safety man in the plant.  Woody had worked in the black for several years, but told me he had actually lived in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (where I was from then) and had worked for Arnold Moore Funeral Home.  It was hard seeing this all come together because I had had my dealings with Mr. Moore, and here was Woody, a dyed in the wool carbon black safety man, whose clothes were black, smoked Camel shorts, and a pair of the biggest safety I had ever seen.  Woody had told me he left the funeral home, when he had "been discovered" having an affair with a lady that worked there, in a not so pretty way, by Arnold, and had managed to take a gurney into the front of Arnold's trousers, with Arnold in them, and pushed Arnold down the stairs, all the while trying to get his own trousers off of the floor and getting the woman dressed and out the door.

Woody turned out to be a great boss, because we never saw him except in the mornings, and in the shower of an evening.  He never told us to do anything, he just put us with the right people and off we went to do out job.

Staying Clean?  Nah....

(A tiny little footnote on Woody:  He left J.M.Huber a couple of years later, after, on a drunken binge, he had managed to steal a tank from the Army reserve field there in Borger, and had managed to get it some three miles down the highway, running the thing over the center lanes and curbs, and turned and ran it into a hardware store that Woody felt owed him money.  Later on, sobered up and in jail, Woody admitted having never been in the hardware store.....)

The plant was about about a mile and a half wide, and approximately two and a half miles long.  There were pipes and buildings and hills and burners and fixtures and motors in almost every foot of that plant.  Standing at the foreman's shack, looking north, shipping and receiving and testing was on the left, operations was on the right, railroad tracks ran down the east side of Shipping and Receiving Building which was roughly about five stories high.

There were all sorts of fun stuff that happened that summer.  We were sent as a group, to the top of shipping and receiving's building, and told to clean the dome lids that were on top of the building.  This made as much sense as white birthday cake being served on the lawn, but we went, took shovels and chisels, and gaskets, four of us I believe, to clean the dome lids.

When we got there, there were about fifty dome lids scattered across the roof of the building.  It is imperative to remember that this was summertime, and it gets very hot out on the West Texas panhandle plains, and every inch of the surface that we were dealing with was black.  So we all walked down to the middle of  the five story roof, took all the bolts off the dome lid, popped the lid (about forty eight inches in diameter) off of  the roof, and leaned in to look down.  The roof storage area was full of carbon black, up to about four feet from the hole.  We checked it out and the dome was clean. (black but clean) so we decided to check a few more, and they were clean.  So we all settled down and talked about why Woody had directed us to the roof.  That was when it snapped in someones brain that Woody just wanted to not worry about us that day.

So everyone was sitting around that bare hot roof, looking at those bare dome lids, when one kid, David I believe was his name, stood up, walked to the edge of the lid, and told us goodbye.  Then he jumped.  Straight down into the black.  You could of knocked us down with a feather.

After a long three second wait, we all stood up and ran to the hole in the roof, bent over it, and there we saw him, buried about up to his chest, laughing til water was running black out of his eyes, because he had gone as far as he could go.  Then it became a matter of who should go in next.  Within about seven seconds, all four of us were in the holding bin, laughing and having about as much fun as kids in a black snowstorm could have.  It is amazing that you can throw black and is disperses into a small cloud on its travel.

We were in there about thirty minutes or so, when we decided to get out, and head on down and go to work, but that was when we discovered that the holes had gotten above our reach to get out, as the black had moved beneath our feet (unbeknownst to us) and it was now about six feet up to the way out.  The only way out.

Within a few minutes we had figured out that if one kid climbed up on another kid, the kid climbing could get out.  The decision was made that each would climb on my back, get out and then two of them would lay down and pull me out.  It took time, as the black kept sinking. but, we made it anyway.

(to be continued....)