By John Carlson—
It’s no secret that the more nebulous jobs our economy creates, the more desperately we need traditional workers whose familiarity with, say, plumbing runs deeper than knowing how to flush a toilet.
If I might cite a personal example …
Experience has shown I couldn’t replace a toilet float if my life depended on it. On the other hand, four years of college sociology, which is the study of group interactions, never put a single Cheerio in my cereal bowl. While as an ignorant young sociology grad I may have ventured into a business once and asked the boss if there were group interactions he needed studied, he’d have been fully justified in kicking my butt outa there.
This all came to mind recently while reading something about safety issues regarding amusement park rides.
It struck a personal note with me.
See, just one week out of college, I wound up working in a small but busy amusement park, hired as the Tilt-a-Whirl guy. While it seemed like a step down from being a highly regarded emerging young professional sociologist, at least tilt-a-whirling was something somebody paid me minimum wage to pursue.
The thing was, we early hires were also expected to help put the rides together.
Now, I’m not going to tell you this amusement park was putting up sophisticated thrillers like the Tower Of Terror ll roller coaster. It wasn’t. But besides the Tilt-a-Whirl, we had old standbys including The Scrambler, The Pendulum, a Ferris Wheel, and The Gravitron.
Ultra-colorful fair rides seem to scream “excitement” to potential riders. Photo by Nancy Carlson.
As we gathered that summer of ‘72, we were basically an unpromising bunch of longhaired college kids who muttered “Groovy,” frequently, and “Whoa, I don’t git it, man!” even more often. Come day one on the job, a look flashed between me and the disassembled rides as I thought, “We’re gonna build these? You gotta be kidding me.”
But then suddenly, like an otherworldly vision, he appeared. No, it wasn’t God, though we certainly could’ve used the help.
It was our foreman.
He was short and stocky, his face burnt red by the sun and bald as your proverbial bowling ball. A cheap, unlit cigar was clenched between his teeth by the hour, and at the end of each shift it would be soaked by his spittle and mindless chewing. While it was the dog days of summer, you never saw the poor guy in Bermuda shorts, let alone sandals. Day in and day out he showed up for work in what some wag might call “janitorial-chic,” his dark gray pants and shirts having been picked from the shelves at some Sears & Roebuck.
Anyway, a single look at the foreman and one thing became readily apparent to me: This guy had no clue what sociology was about.
And yet, soon enough he had us organized into interacting groups of his own devising, going to work on putting together the rides to which we had been assigned while he hustled from one to another, keeping a wary eye on our progress.
What’s more, he did this with good humor and an effortless note of authority that made the dopiest of us kids wonder if we could actually pull this off. I never saw him get mad or exasperated with any of us, and by opening day, danged if we weren’t ready for business.
This ostensibly unschooled foreman was a guy whose brains, wit and common sense made the rest of us look like … well, I dunno what.
Competent? Which was amazing …
And don’t even get me going about the skills in the man’s hands. He just flat-out knew things, all sorts of things. As was inevitable, with the end of preparing a carnival ride there were sometimes a few leftover bolts, nuts and washers, things that hadn’t made it back onto the ride from which they’d earlier been extracted.
But that was OK.
Sheepishly handed a palmful of such mechanical tidbits by one of us, the foreman would study them, analyze them against his knowledge of the ride before him, and soon have them reattached to their rightful places. Watching this early on, it was hard to believe how reliably he could place and reattach them.
Of all our rides, one called The Parasol seemed the most dramatic. Seated in tubs under glittery plastic tops of red, orange and gold, riders were launched probably seventy feet into the air in a continuous circular pattern accompanied by their happy screams and laughter.
Some of us kids had watched the parasols’ flight through the air with a sense of foreboding. Had any of our loose nuts and bolts come from a mistake we made, something we failed to do? Watching nervously, we wondered would a couple innocent riders find their tub fly free in an arcing loop through the nighttime Hoosier sky?
How would we explain such a thing?
But it never happened, thanks to a foreman who’d doubtless grown up as a typical American kid of his time, feeding his curiosity about mechanical things and learning how they worked. For my money, that guy had far more on the ball than any of us college kids.
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten him.
Here’s hoping there are plenty more of his ilk coming along.
John’s weekly columns are sponsored by Beasley & Gilkison, Muncie’s trusted attorneys for over 120 years.
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A former longtime feature writer and columnist for The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana, John Carlson is a storyteller with an unflagging appreciation for the wonderful people of East Central Indiana and the tales of their lives, be they funny, poignant, inspirational or all three. John’s columns appear on MuncieJournal.com every Friday.
