When I woke up the morning and headed outside for work, the mountains here in West Virginia were all ready hot and humid. Reminded me of the days of summer vacation and working at the Quaker State Oil Refinery located just south of Newell. My first summer of employment there I worked with Dick Johnston and my last summer I worked with Danny.
Quaker State would hire the sons and daughters of it's employees and make a crew to do the dirty, hot and sweaty jobs the "regular" employees wouldn't do. Cut grass, pick up trash, mop up spilled oil from the gravel bed pipelines and even oil that was escaping down the creek (or crick as we called it here in WV).
The pay was very good though. Some did as Danny wrote, "stab your brother in the back and pick up you're paycheck" but mostly we had a decent group of young college students working there. Infact "Frankenstein and the beauty queen" worked there. Tuna Ketchup worked there. Bill Johnston was what we called a white hat. Which means he was a boss and wore a white hardhat. My dad was a chemist working in the Refinery lab.
I remember Danny very well from that time. He would sit there during our half hour lunch break in the "club house" which was actually the storage room for asbestos/cellulous pipe insulation, and draw. Everyday he would draw. The summer crew consisted of about 15 college students and by the end of the summer Danny had drawn charactures of all of us in his notebook. But Tuna Ketchup was the fortunate one. Danny would bring numerous pictures to present to her. Numerous. I still have the characture of me he gave to me on my last day before heading to Dental School.
And as Syd had done in "Never Relaxed" while sitting in detention, Danny drew funny pictures on the wall, on the pipes, on the tanks, in the barrel house, on the dock, well, just about everywhere you could imagine. I'm sure there are still some "dead dog eyeballs" hiding some places there.
I miss summer vacation.
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