Sibling Assignment #94: A Commendation on Your Record

InlandEmpireGirl stayed with the rhythms of the Christian calendar and asked us to write about a vivid Easter. InlandEmpireGirl's piece about her church in the country is here and Silver Valley Girl's exploration of her marriage as a source of renewal and resurrection is here.

During my freshman year at North Idaho College, I worked weekends at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant. Sometimes I stripped zinc in the cell room and sometimes I poured anodes with Sparky Jasburg, Mike Rieken, and Dale Fattu out in the anode shack.

Working weekends at the Zinc Plant was a good gig. I earned plenty of rent and spending money for the month and I was good enough at both pouring anodes and stripping zinc that I could come to work hungover or still kind of drunk, let the sulfuric acid fumes sober me up, grab a couple of naps during the shift, and get all my work done.

In the spring of 1973, I was working in the cell room, and I was on a lunch break, and into the lunch room strolled the Plant Superintendent, Bob Bird. I nearly shit my salami sandwich. I'd never seen Bob Bird in the lunch room before. I'd seen him stroll through the cell room a few times, but he was always talking with a shift boss or some other manager: he never talked to us workers.

I still don't understand why Bob Bird took on the matter he raised in the lunch room. I don't understand why he was at the plant on a weekend. It was close to Easter, either the weekend before or the weekend of. Easter was a paid holiday and the cell room was short-handed. That's kind of weird, actually, because working a paid holiday meant earning double time and a half.

Bob Bird explained the situation and asked if anyone would be available and willing to work on Easter Sunday. Now looking back, I wonder if there was some kind of labor action informally taking place. Looking back, I wonder if the strippers were trying to slow down production and make the company hurt a bit.

I don't know now and sure didn't know then.

I volunteered. Almost immediately.

I broad smile filled Bob Bird's face. He thanked me for my willingness to give up my Easter Sunday for the good of the Zinc Plant and, furthermore, exclaimed, "I will put a commendation on your record."

He said this in front of all my fellow workers.

I felt like the biggest ass kiss in the whole plant. I volunteered for the double time and half. I wasn't thinking about giving up my Easter and I didn't even know I had a record onto which a commendation could be entered.

Bob Bird left.

Bob Casady said, "Not bad, man. A fucking commendation on your record." He was sticking the needle in pretty deep.

The Easter Day shift came and went, I got my fat paycheck, and my life went down the track of earning a college degree, going to grad school, and picking up a two year temporary full-time job at Whitworth College in 1982-84.

In the spring of '84 I came home from Spokane for Easter. On Holy Saturday, Dad and I went to Dirty Ernie's uptown and got really drunk, so drunk the cops had to drive us home, and I had to walk uptown on Easter morning and get the car.

We got drunk with Bob Casady and the first words out of his mouth, after not having seen me for over ten years, were, "I will put a commendation on your record."

I about died and we laughed and laughed and drank schooner after schooner of draft lager beers and remembered how much fun we'd had at the Zinc Plant and laughed about all the psychos we worked with.

A couple or three years ago, I went to the University of Idaho to be a guest speaker in an American Studies course taught by Bob Bird's son, my friend for nearly fifty years, Kenton Bird.

Kenton had arranged for me to look at Bunker Hill records and artifacts in the afternoon. The University of Idaho holds these Bunker Hill records and artifacts.

I looked at different things for about an hour, and then I thought, "Hmmm, I wonder.....", but alas, search as I did, not only did I not find my Zinc Plant record, I didn't find my commendation either.