Plus seven years

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

In my last column, I hopefully regaled you with my story about December 1974. Seven years later, 1981, found me working at the Westvaco Paper Mill at Wickliffe, Ky. Where is this? About two miles south of the merger of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. In “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, there is a fictional feud that takes place at about this spot. 

Again, it is near Christmas, and we are getting ready for the Christmas shutdown.

We are missing a large heat exchanger for the shutdown. It was ordered in plenty of time, but it is behind schedule. We need it no later than Dec. 24. My job is to “encourage” the manufacturer and get it to the mill on time.

Early in the week, Tuesday, Dec. 14, I fly to Richmond, Va. to visit the fabricator. This is a fabricator that makes “pressure vessels” – often those big, tall cylindrical things you see in photos of oil refineries. Our heat exchanger was nowhere near that big – it would fit on one flatbed semi-truck.

When I arrived at the fabricator, the whole place was bedlam, a word I used in my last column and often describes construction work around Christmas. I am introduced to a room full of desks occupied by expeditors.  

Assessing what is going on, it is this. Even though Jimmy Carter has left the White House Jan. 20,1981, still under construction is a pilot alternative fuel plant in Colorado that President Carter had ordered, and which is managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (where, coincidently, my oldest daughter works now).

This Colorado project is way behind schedule and has this shop full of orders for pressure vessels. The other expeditors tell me the managers of this shop have lost control and essentially the expeditors are running the place. 

I am further told the only hope I have of getting my heat exchanger on time is to chase down the parts, see if they are all made, get the ones made that have not been made and get it assembled. The expeditor screaming the loudest is getting their work done.

As an aside, I go out back and they are loading one of these large vessels for the Colorado project. It stretches over three flatbed railroad cars. When they get it loaded, the expeditor gets on the open flatbed cars with his sleeping bag and food, despite it being December.  

It is explained to me they had been having trouble getting these loads through the Chicago and Omaha switchyards, so the engineering company resorted to putting an expeditor on each load. That expeditor’s job, when the car reached a major yard, was to go scream at the yardmaster to keep the load moving.

I went back inside and found myself a desk among the expeditors. Fairly soon, a vice president of the company comes around and suggests we go to lunch. We did. After small talk and telling me how much they valued our order, etc., etc. he got around to his main question.

“Well, Mr. Thompson, are you going to check out our progress and go home? I am sure you have plenty to do back at your mill.”

I responded, “That’s true, but this is my priority right now. In fact, I think I will just hang around and follow the load back to Wickliffe.”

Crestfallen, he asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

Every day that week he tried to talk me out of my plan. I didn’t budge.

I got so that I would go in at ten in the morning and ten in the evening to make sure they were still working on my heat exchanger.

Sunday morning, we are ready for hydrostatic testing (checking for leaks) and called in the independent inspector. It passed.

Got it loaded on the truck. I was introduced to the driver, “Tiny” (he weighed about 350, I would guess).  

They were still trying to talk me out of following him.  

“You won’t be able to keep up.”

“I think I will.”

It was sunny that afternoon as we pulled out of the yard in Richmond.

I figured out how Tiny got his name. We stopped about every two hours for pie and coffee and Tiny smoked a couple of cigarettes. Everywhere we stopped the waitresses knew Tiny.  

We got to the weigh station on I-40/I-75 in Knoxville. It had already been dark for an hour or two. I hoped they didn’t want to look at Tiny’s logbook. They didn’t.

Somewhere between Knoxville and Nashville it started snowing pretty good. We kept going.

When we got west of Nashville, on I-24, the snow turned to freezing rain. We kept going.

I had told Tiny that when we got to Paducah, we would get off on U.S. 62 (yes, the same U.S. 62 that runs through Hillsboro).

Tiny asked me to go ahead of him when we got to the two-lane U.S. 62, which I did.  That way he could follow my taillights in the dark and rain.

In another 30 miles, we pulled into the receiving yard at the mill about daylight. My rental car, the truck and the heat exchanger had about 2 inches of ice all over them.  

The heat exchanger was installed on Friday, Christmas Day. We had beat the installation date by five days. The project manager at the mill had already pulled it off the work schedule because he thought we could never get it there on time. Wrong. He had to put it back in.  

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.