Summer Jobs

While at Portland State College, I got summer jobs with the Oregon Highway Department as an engineer aide in 1964 and 1965.  I qualified by taking an exam that was made up of simple math problems.  I was a math major.  The jobs had nothing to do with math.

The first job was on the southern Oregon coast in Gold Beach.  This was mostly being a part of the survey team.  We aides would hold the transit while the department employee would check the location thereof.  The survey would take a circuit ending and beginning in the same place.  The calculations of the ends of the circuit were required to match for proof of accuracy.  They were checking for new highway routes.  The work continued in good and bad weather and we were required to clear a path with a tool called a brush hook – a long handle with a vicious blade at the end.  First rule – a transit was more valuable than we were.  

I lived in four different locations while in Gold Beach, one of which appeared to be condemned migrant labor housing.  My meals were simple fare where I stayed or a hamburger stand.  I mostly wore the same clothes, but did go to a laundromat a few times.  When the boss thought we had gotten too shaggy, we were sent for bad haircuts.

We three summer workers mostly hung out.  The locals were not particularly friendly with the  outsiders from more urban Oregon.  Gold Beach had maybe two thousand people.  No car, so I couldn’t do much outside of town.  The only significant breaks were from a visit with my then girlfriend, and my college roommate with a car who had a similar job a little to the north.

Most of my off the job time was wasted wandering around the small town or the surrounding woods.   The town wasn’t really a beach or tourist town.  A highlight of the summer was a stinky dead beached seal.

On the plus side, I spent so little money that the minimum wage we received ($1.61) left me with what was at the time plenty of cash for the next school year.  At that time multiple students in the Portland State neighborhood could rent a room together for around $100.

The next year I qualified to stay in the Portland area.  The job was to check the density of the new road bed before paving for Highway 26 which split into two two-lane roads, one going east, and one west through Sandy Oregon east of Portland.  I’d pick up a panel truck and pick a site to test.  The test was done two ways while I was there.  The old tedious way was to dig a hole in the road bed, weigh the contents in scales in the panel truck and then check the volume with an instrument which dropped a balloon into the hole.  As we know weight/volume =density.  I did that some of the time, but one time I had to go back to the shop because the balloon broke.  The other was much simpler to perform, but came with a serious downside.  The method used an atomic counter.  Just put the machine on the road bed.  This required that the user of the counter had to wear a film which would change if exposed to radiation.  The density checking with radiation led to jokes about certain body parts glowing, but there was no problem.

There was one memorable day.  Normally temperate Portland hit 107F, a record at the time.  Due to climate change, that record has been obliterated, but then it was incredibly hot.  I normally closed the panel truck to keep the wind from affecting the scales, but I tried it with the van open that day to keep from being knocked out by the heat.

Despite being happier in the Portland area with friends and family around, something much worse happened in the area than happened around Gold Beach.  We spent some time in a quarry that produced rock for the roadbed.  The rock crusher broke up big rocks into various sized stones which were separated by various filters.  A crane operator hit one of the high voltage lines powering the crushers and was electrocuted.

I’d stop at a Dairy Queen in those days that is still there today.  We frequently drive this route to get to my Boring cousin’s place.  He thinks that he lives in Sandy, but the post office says it is Boring.

During those days I masqueraded as a working man. I lived in the basement of a friend’s house and would drink a lot after work and sometimes urinated in an empty garage as I stumbled home.

As I left Portland State for graduate work at the University of Oregon, my neighborhood was being demolished for Portland State expansion, urban renewal, and I-405.  Summer jobs were behind me.