The Maintenance Shop

The Maintenance Shop

Even though the tuition was relatively low in comparison to college costs today, you still had to come up with a way of meeting expenses.  I landed a job working for the college maintenance department.  The man who hired me was Lawrence Smith.  He was the school’s bursar, which was the title they gave to the chief financial officer.  I don’t want to say that he was cheap, but he did protect the school’s bottom line.  After all he worked for the school in that capacity during the depression.

He told me that I would make 55 cents an hour.  Minimum wage was 75 cents.  Besides that you didn’t get paid real money.  It all went on your school bill.

There were two levels of personnel at the shop (1) the full time workers (who got paid a little better) and (2) the students.

My jobs varied.  During my freshman year I kept the yard for the home of President Don H. Morris.  Fortunately I didn’t lose my job when I pulled up a bunch of flowers thinking they were weeds.  Sometimes I hauled trash.  That was my punishment for messing up the President’s yard no doubt.   I unclogged drains.  I assisted electricians, plumbers and others. I had only been working a few days when they sent me and a couple of others to clean and polish the tile floors of the SAC (Student Activity Center) in the basement of McKenzie.  One of the guys rather nonchalantly pointed at the buffer and told me to buff the floors.  Within seconds I was being swung around all over the floor, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my co-workers were laughing.   That’s the way they broke in a rookie.  I learned my lesson well.  I could operate a buffer today if required to do so, and I would control it, not the other way around.

After awhile I got a reputation for clumsiness and ineptness.  Part of it was earned, and part of it was imagined. There was a saying at the shop. “If anything goes wrong, Bales did it.”  I survived the whole thing, and it helped pay for my education. 

Most of the full time employees at the shop were amateur theologians.  When we came to work, they would ask, “What did they teach you in Bible class today?”  If we told them, they would quickly explain why we ought to discount what our professors said and listen to them.   Perhaps they thought the Bible department would have been stronger if the professors were fixing things that broke, and they were lecturing the classes.

There was one special assignment that I always enjoyed.  Sometime I would get sent to one of the girls’ dorms to repair something or other.  I always announced by presence by yelling, “Man on first” (or second or third).  It wasn’t baseball talk.  I was announcing that a male had invaded the girl’s dorm.  They usually teased us about it, and it provided a nice break from some rather mundane labor.