Scary stories I tell my children to stay in school

[David S. Sharp]

Now that my children and step children are grown up, I no longer read them stories like when they were little. My wife and I do that with the grand children now. I still preach at them and tell them stories of acidents I've seen other people have when working a labor job when I was younger, and why they should get or finish that degree.

It starts with a story of I'm still in High School and one summer job I took with a couple of buddies was to mow lawns at the local city cemetary. There were all kinds of stones about the place from big monuments to the kind that are an inch tall and covered with overgrown grass. They made us wear steal toed boots, for obvious reasons, and on more that one occasion I saw a kid trip while backing up his mower and pull the mower on top of him. (Bzzzz.)

Or having been a sailor in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam war, I witnessed many an industrial accident. My rating was a Store Keeper on the USS Ticonderoga (Essex class aircraft carrier) and we would load supplies with cranes, fork lifts wenches, etc. I was lucky someone found out I could type and I got to work in the office after a while, with the reorders and data processing. (No one ever looked at my really high clerical score on my entrance test.) On a time while on an Apollo recovery mission, we had to get supplies at sea, we toodled around the south Pacific for a very long time waiting for that thing to drop from the sky. We all had to turn out on the flight deck for loading supplies from cargo helicopters. Fork lifts came up from the hanger bay and some forty of us stood waiting at the perimeter of the unloading area. Pallets on thick steal cables going to pallet bars were taken from the supply ship. The deck of the ship would roll with that elevator feeling you get when going up and down great distances, but standing still. We would rush in the second the pallet landed and kick out the bars, hold an index finger up in the air and make a circle for the pilot to take it up and get more material. As the helicopters made a fourth pass a fellow in our division ran along the edge of the flight deck and the prop wash from the choper blew his feet out from under him and overboard he went even clearing the cat walks around the ship. He was gone so fast we saw him briefly at a great distance, since the ship moves along at thirty-five miles an hour and the waves also roll in the opposite direction about as fast. The ships com system said, "Man overboard" and the ship prepared to turn around and go back along the track looking for one lone sailor. I should say it takes five miles to turn a thing around like that and go back, the flight deck was occupied with the unload and it was some minutes before they could get one of their own small chopers in the air. To make a long story short, no Joey! (That was his name.)

When I came home from the navy I again went to work at a scrap metal recorvery facility with five or six of my high school friends. We all got degrees later so we learned our lesson. While working there several things happened that would scare you good. We used to load small aluminum air craft wings into a large cylindrical furnace by setting them on top and the furnace would melt a hole in the wing and from either side we would fold it and push the remaining halves into the furnace top. On one occasion my co-worker on the furnace caught a piece of molten metal in the eye. We wore plastic face shields, but the flapping edges of the melted hole, let loose with a large drop and as fate would have it, it flew under the face shield to land in his eye. On another occasion a large metal ships boiler sat on its side in one section of the yard and the fork lifts would go by and one time the 2X4 got run over that the boiler had sat upon, and it started to roll ever so slightly. Just as one fellow came walking by on his way somewhere it rolled over the toe of his boot and threw him on the ground it rolled all the way up to the apex of his chest and rolled off. He was rushed to the hospital and by some miracle he lived through having his lung, ribs, pelvis, arm and leg all crushed on one side.

Many years later a foolish nieghbor worked for a munitions plant, he was a obsessive compulsive sort that mowed his lawn in four directions and trimed the edges every day with his trimmer. You could hear it grind the cement every morning about 6:30 am. He talked one of my other neighbors, whose Ponderosa Pine hung over his fence, into climbing into the tree without tack or climbing harness to lop off branches with a small chain saw. While up there it began to rain and my neighbor that owned the tree took a fall that sent him to the back specialist for several years.
Meanwhile next year as the obsessive compulsive neighbor was cutting 2 X 4's for his new grape arbor on one cold December night. He caught his Parka in the radial arm saw and cut off his left arm. Paramedics rushed to the place and I saw one come back out with a bloody bundle and dump it onto the concrete side walk and run back into the house. Two weeks later I saw him up on his roof nailing nails and holding the nail with his new claw, he missed the nail to pound his prosthetic devise a good one. He still drives a car and while holding the wheel with his hook he goes down the road wiping the inside windshield all the while. I just hope someone else doesn't have to pay for his foolishness. "The kind of funny you don't laugh at," as a fiddler friend of mine would say.

Needless to say the kids (well they're actually young men and women) look at me with a sardonic look whenever I launch into one of my sermons. So now I'll say, "you know, lecture number 37." I think some of it sinks in whether they want it to or not.

Dave Sharp
Glastonbury duo

[Brother Wolf]

Holly Flat bed - batman
These stoires scare the bejefez out of me!
I'm glad to her your alive today!
Brother Wolf