Lord, Give Us Gumption!

Last Friday’s blog reminded me that when I did work on that summer job back in 1964 I tried to help some other guys get jobs there too. Mr. Roy, the field superintendent, asked me if I knew of any other fellows who might be available to work. One was my cousin from Texas, Don. He was a junior in high school but I felt sure he would want to work in the summer. Don was the closest thing in our family to being a mountain man and he held his own with any other man on that pipeline job. Having Don come to work with us was a good thing. The other fellows I helped did not work out so well.

There were three guys I used to run around with who were available and the company was looking for some basic laborers so I reluctantly told Mr. Roy about them. They were what my grandparents called town boys which meant they mostly hung out around the small town sitting outside the barbershop or just walking around. It was these guys who actually encouraged me to go with them to a Church singing school to see the girls there. One of those girls I met that night turned out to be my future wife, therefore, I guess in some ways I owed them. I’m not sure how they felt about it because after I started dating my future wife I no longer ran with them.

At any rate, they signed up to do pipe end filing. The pipe lengths had been delivered out to the right of way and placed end to end for later welding. These guys were to get the ends of the pipe all filed and ready for our crew when we came along to do the welding. It was not so much of a difficult job but it was very hot and they had to carry a couple of boards to prop up the pipe so they could file it properly. These boys were not go getters in any sense of the word but it’s pretty hard to mess up what they had been hired to do.

Mr. Roy was by nature very suspicious and he lorded over and ruled the project with an iron fist. I could tell from the get go that he was not too keen on these new guys but he needed the help so he gave them a shot. Once they were trained they were then sent up ahead to do the filing and were more or less on their own. They had their tools, their lunch buckets, water, and other needed supplies.

My old buddies only lasted a few days and it all ended based on this one incident. Mr. Roy had given them a couple of hours head start and then he decided to slip up on this unsuspecting trio to find out if they were staying busy. He did find them and all three were taking a snooze under a big shade tree. Mr. Roy took out a note pad he carried in his pocket and wrote this message to the boys and laid it on one of the lunch buckets. “As long as you boys are asleep you have a job, when you wake up, you are fired!”

Over the years I’ve been very reluctant to recommend people for jobs. I have done it but only in those situations where I felt as comfortable as I did in recommending my cousin Don. Even at seventeen I learned a valuable lesson about trying to help people who lack what my grandfather used to call old fashioned gumption. This word is of Scottish origin and it’s still in the dictionary, and it still means the same thing, initiative and resourcefulness. May God help us all to have enough gumption today to prove our commitment to Him in the way we do our jobs. Amen. More later.