Freezing in the Zinc Plant Cell Room: Some Additions

My good friend Jim Etherton and I worked in the cell room at the same time.  He is a couple years older than I am, so when I broke in, he was a seasoned veteran of pulling, draining, replacing, trucking,spraying down, stripping, and stacking.

When I posted Freezing in the Zinc Plant Cell Room yesterday, Jim commented on Facebook with some observations and memories and he helped explained the place some more to my stepdaughter, Molly.

For one, what I called a sulfur dioxide fog, he more correctly described as a mist of diluted sulfuric acid.  He's right. That's more what it was, but I think I remember afternoons in the cell room when that mist got pretty thick (kind of like fog), but my memory might be playing tricks on me.  I might be remembering it as worse than it was as part of the ongoing "what a hell hole" story I always try to inform people about when it comes to the cell room.  (Yeah, but Tom Tierney wrote me and told me I was being too kind in calling the cell room a hell hole.)

Jim also riffed a little bit on nicknames and I'd like to make it very clear that in the anode shack when we referred to Dale Fattu as "Fail to Do" it was nothing more than a play on words.  He never failed to do.  Dale was a first-rate worker and I enjoyed working with him every shift we were together.

I think Kellogg Junior High band teacher Wayne Benson hung the name "Sparky" on Mike Jasberg.  Mike had some health problems, as I remember, in his early teen years and the nickname "Sparky" didn't reflect Mike's high energy, his spark, but the opposite.  It was typical of humor in Kellogg and we all took it pretty well.  By the time Mike was earning his "Bunker Hill Scholarship" by working weekends in the anode shack while going to the Univ. of Idaho, he was in good health and was an expert anode trimmer.   Those anodes that Fail to Do, Mike "Magilla Gorilla" Rieken, and I poured came out of the mold top heavy and had to be trimmed so they would fit properly in the electrolytic cells.  Mike worked at a machine I never wanted to get near and was a master trimmer.

Jim also reminded me of the late Rick Cameron's nickname.  John Cameron Swayze was one of the early hosts of the Today Show and, later, a guy who sold Timex watches on television.  Of course, then, if a guy's name was Cameron, like Rick, he would be Swayze, or Swayz, for short.

And why was Mike Rieken called "Magilla Gorilla"?  Well, he had the misfortune of resembling the cartoon character Magilla Gorilla and, then, after he survived a car accident in which his face catapulted throught the front windshield and cut him all up, he looked like Frankenstein, but that name never stuck.  For as long as I knew Mike he was "Magilla Gorilla",  "Magill", or "Gil".  Once in a while he would answer that nickname with a "Fuck You", but he usually took it pretty well.  He had one great defense.  Mike was really sharp-minded and could deal out shit to others as fast as anyone gave it to him.

(By the way, I wrote a more detailed account of nicknames back in December, 2006, here.)

Okay.  Back to the freezing cell room.

I had this fact in the back of my mind, and Jim Etherton reminded me that the real problem in the wash spray area was when the water did work, which was most of the time.

The wash spray area became an ice rink.  I don't remember ever having problems pulling my truck over the ice, but I do remember having a hard time keeping my footing and I remember the icicles hanging from the hose's valve and the ice wall the water sprayed onto on the other side of the truck of plates.

Jim, you might need to correct me on this.  I might have my directions mixed up.

The reason it was so cold in the wash spray area and the stripping room was that the huge opening, about the size of a double wide garage door, we used to enter this place when we came to work on the south side of the cell room/stripping room was always open.  I don't even know if there was a door to that opening.  The railroad tracks ran just outside this opening and so the forklift operators, from the Melting Department adjacent to the stripping room, went in and out this door to a ramp along the tracks, to load freight cars with zinc ingots. 

Fork lift operators took the wood pallets of zinc we stripped and stacked to the furnaces in the Melting Department where the zinc was liquified and poured into molds that formed the ingots.

I don't think the guys working in the Melting Department ever got cold, but they had to do some pretty skilled forklift driving when the floor away from the furnaces and the surface of the ramp got icy.

Here's the thing about the cell room:  it was just about at the bottom rung of the zinc plant job ladder. For the gyppos, there was some good money to be made, but, to my knowledge, not too many men were bidding to land jobs in the cell room.  Men did bid to get out.

This point reminds me of a night on graveyard.  The recently deceased Dana Bisaro came to work at the cell room, to break in, and before his shift was over, he walked out.  He was the next of many who worked a few hours in the cell room and said the hell with it.

I remember being in the lunch room when Dana walked.  Wiley Hathaway, a cell room lifer, wryly mused on Dana giving it up:  "You hit the road from here, there's no other road to walk on."

If a guy couldn't cut it in the cell room, at the bottom of the plant, no one else would want you. 

For all I know, maybe Dana landed a job elsewhere at another time at the Bunker Hill. 

I'm not sure.

But, that night, he had no other road to walk on.