Gravel, Draglines, and a Hidden Sweetheart

Massive excavations, tight quarters, and a secretly beloved excavator mark a chaotic yet pivotal rebuild in Gowanda.

Gowanda Zoar Rd., Quaker Road to Lone Road. Total rebuild of highway section with drainage.

This job had its share of poor soil, but George and crew now knew how to handle it well. At the start of the job, he was approached by a local landowner about buying a gravel pit a half mile off the project. They came to terms, and he was in the gravel business. Now, when he encountered bad soil, “undercut” was the solution. One fond memory was a particularly bad section just west of Gowanda Harley-Davidson. We started to dig out on Friday and soon exceeded the ability of the dozer and crawler loaders and had to switch to the Koehring 305 with dragline. It seemed the deeper we went, the worse it got. With George being the gravel supplier, we soon realized why we kept digging deeper; it was obvious it wasn’t getting any better. By noon Saturday, we had dug the new Grand Canyon of Erie County and started to fill the hole with Union Concrete gravel. I was the operator in the pit, which was a primo job with my new Hough 90C loader. But after working till dark Saturday and Monday with as many trucks as George could find, I began to wonder why I thought fighting to be one of the better loader operators was a good gig.

Now, being fresh off Frewsburg, it was decided to use the CMI Auto Grade Trimmer to fine grade the subbase. We soon found out that a 24-foot-wide trimmer with tracks, string line, and sensors was about 30 feet wide on a two-lane county road. That didn’t leave too much room for dump trucks and small pans to take away excess materials and feed the machine. Now try to control the residents’ traffic, who had no idea where the operation was working in relation to their homes after being at work all day. We concluded to never use this modern technology in tight quarters again.

A few additional tidbits on this job: a truck showed up with a George auction buy. It was a Hein-Warner C–15 hydraulic excavator, a first for UCC.
At the time, Jim Holland was the master mechanic, and he and John Pennell had some dispute going on. With no one having any idea what to expect of this machine, Jim assigned John to it for weeks. John would piss and moan about what a piece of shit it was, a terrible machine to run, until I finally told him to shut up and bite the bullet. It was that night that John told me it was a sweetheart to run, and he loved it. He knew if Jim found out, he would be back on the Koehring cable hoe, with someone else Jim favored on the hydraulic rig.

I’m pretty sure this was Gary’s first summer working every day. He was riding to work with Fred Gelz, the superintendent. Now, Gary had a work permit from the surveyors’ union, but he had no driver’s license or permit. Fred, who had a fondness for cold beer (along with the county engineer who had a stocked refrigerator in his office) would enjoy a few after work. One night, driving home, Fred asked Gary if he had a permit. Gary assumed he meant a permit in the operators’ union and told him yes. A few days later he told Gary to drive home. Gary figured it was safer for me to drive after he pounded down numerous beers. A shitstorm hit when George found out his kid with no license was driving his truck back and forth every to Gowanda every day.