I spent a little over a year on the line crew. In retrospect, that was the most enjoyable job I ever had. Jack Cain, the real life model for Jack Kane in the Hammer Spade books, thought so too. His career paralleled mine except, instead of being in eastern North Carolina, he worked in Illinois. I liked working outside. I liked the teamwork. The work was complex enough to keep our minds occupied. It helped that I enjoyed climbing poles and became quite skilled at it I thought. I also liked my co-workers and my supervisors.

My line foreman was a ladies’ man. I was riding with him in the company pickup in Greenville one day and we passed by a house with a porch. A young woman was sitting in a chair with her feet up on the railing. She wasn’t wearing underwear, something my foreman spotted at once. He jammed on the brakes, backed up and told me to write that address down. He borrowed somebody’s car that night saying he was going somewhere on a “mission.” She was nice looking and every couple of nights, he went on another “mission” the rest of the time we were in Greenville.

Young men in good physical condition attract women like a magnet picks up metal filings, especially if they are confident acting young men. The team camaraderie was good natured with lots of kidding around. If we worked in one spot for a few hours, college girls would appear to watch us doing manly stuff. Some were quite attractive and fetchingly attired. It was a banquet for the single guys.

On one occasion I was assigned to help two local technicians sting a drop wire across a four-lane road. I was sitting between them in the pickup as we drove through a business district. We saw a very attractive woman walking toward us and the driver, who was a pretentious lothario, started making lewd remarks about the woman. I didn’t say anything and I noticed that the man on my right was quiet too.

 After a particularly gross suggestion by the driver, the man to my right said through clenched teeth, “That’s my wife.”

I have never heard a more sincere apology than one the driver made that day. And he repeated it several times.

That’s a more common experience than you would think. Many years later, I was in Cookeville, Tennessee with another general office staff member. All of the women at the phone company in Cookeville Tennessee were lovely. We were taking a coffee break in the break room with the local engineer we were meeting when a particularly attractive representative walked by. My general office companion made a coarse remark. The local engineer turned red as a beet and told him that was his wife. Although my general office co-worker tried his best to smooth that one over, our local host remained cool towards him for the rest of the trip. I made it a point never to travel with that man again.

The driver in the pickup mentioned above Chevrolet loved cars. He bought a new one every couple of years. While we were working in Greenville, he took delivery of a brand new 1958 Chevrolet with all the bells and whistles. He suspected an engine oil leak and one day when he drove it to work he put a big piece of cardboard under the engine. Then he went off on his first assignment.

The guy that was sitting to my right that day we saw his wife watched him lay the cardboard under his car. He took a quart of oil out of his pickup and poured every drop of it on the cardboard.

When the owner of the car returned to the work center for lunch, he saw that oil on the cardboard and took off the rest of the day to return his car to the dealer. I guess revenge was sweet.

Right before the crew moved to Greenville, a man who was an alcoholic was put on the line crew because he had showed his behind at a company party. He had been a cable splicer. Everybody knew he was a heavy drinker and I guess the supervisors became concerned about his drinking enough to move him to a job where he wouldn’t drive a company vehicle. He was a mouthy, arrogant man. Because of his alcoholism he was too physically weak to climb poles. He was also too weak to put down anchors. On the first day he was on the crew the foreman made him climb a pole and hang a crossarm. He made it look so hard that the foreman remarked that he was so weak that he “couldn’t wring a wingnut with a pipe wrench.” Folks, that is pretty weak.

We were in Greenville for about ten weeks and sometimes I commuted back to New Bern where I lived. The alcoholic also lived in New Bern and rode with me sharing the gasoline expense. There was a liquor store beside the work center in Greenville. He would buy a pint of whiskey when we got off work. He drank the whole pint on the drive to New Bern. When we arrived in New Bern he would have me drop him off at the liquor store for another pint. He did this every day.

Talk about choosing a perfect site for a phone company work center, the one in Greenville at that time was beside a Krispy Crème Donut place in addition to being next to the liquor store. When my family and I traveled home to visit our parents, who lived near Warrenton, we always stopped to get donuts in Greenville. 

Gene Alston