Just as the skip mysteriously disappeared three hours ago, it suddenly reappeared in the dark hoistway like something right out a Stephen King movie. On board were the same four behemoths as before. Bud said "Get on, time for lunch". The trip down was not the same as the trip up. To begin with, there was no room at the center this time and believe me, you didn�t want to grab on to one of the other guys. The first day on the job was not the time for lasting impressions. One of the guys had wrapped a length of rope around the rope falls four times and was holding each end. This was our descent velocity control. The less he pulled the ends, the faster we went. The harder he pulled, the slower we went. Pulling even harder caused us to stop. �Ok?� He said�and down we went� and fast. My first thought was "I'm going to die" but the other guys were looking at me and grinning�.. It must be OKAY, I guess.
The Elevator Business is a hazardous business. I have and will continue to tell our humorous, everyday stories but due to the nature of the business, I must include the personal tragedies.
The ropes were smoking as we traveled down the hoistway at Mach 10. A new guy, Roy, panicked and grabbed the whizzing ropes with both hands. With five ropes traveling faster than we were and moving in opposite directions to boot, it was the fast thinking of the guy with the rope controlling our speed to stop the skip before any serious damage was done to Roy's hands.
Haughton had recently hired five new 50 per centers. These new guys, like me, were all about 20 years of age with the exception of Rob. He had at least 10 to 15 years on the rest of us and was no ball of fire but the guy tried as hard as he could. Bud treated this poor guy like a Galley Slave and was on his ass for anything and everything. Roy was also accident prone and had already emptied out two of our first aid kits and was always covered with band aids. Earlier in the job Roy had incorrectly grabbed a rail on the end while it was being hoisted into the hoistway. He had his hands underneath the end when the center of the rail wedged in the top of the entrance. Roy's hands were now wedged between the sharp end of the rail and the unfinished raked concrete floor. The rail kept moving, peeling his knuckles off. Roy's safety record on the job wasn't the greatest, but we do know he must have had a stellar safety record on the freeway. More than once he was spotted driving to and from the job in his green and white Nash Metropolitan wearing his hard hat at a rakish tilt. We all felt he should be in another line of work. As it turns out he had a close relative that was an elevator inspector.
Later in the job, the shop asked for a crew to do a small job in Bakersfield so Bud, gleefully, sent Rob and a mechanic, Carl, to do the job. Carl weighed in at around 300 hundred pounds and could only sit and wire controllers. We would all get a kick when he grabbed his leather belt with both hands and loop it up over his belly just like a lineman climbing a telephone pole.
Rob somehow made mechanic as a service man years later at an independent elevator company in LA. In the �80s he was answering an overtime call and while working on the broken elevator he made a serious mistake that cost him his life.
As the story goes, he answered a call on a duplex. He entered the pit of the running car without turning it off, then reached in between the counter weight rails of the running elevator to work on the adjacent car. The weights came down and severed his arm. He lay in the pit and bled to death long before a family member called the company and reported him missing. The company finally dispatched another mechanic to check on Rob, it was way too late.
