Safeway Salvage
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Summer jobs as a teenager were not always so good,
But we had to make some money so we did what we could.
This poem describes one of summer jobs I did in the heat,
That sometimes would knock me right off of my feet.
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Safeway Salvage
The summer when I was 17, I got a job at Safeway Salvage,
Who was salvaging Borger Refinery units that were old age.
They were supposed to save the best stuff for Phillips reuse,
But they hid the good stuff and sold it to Oklahoma City Jews.
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We cut off the pipe and sold it for scrap metal by the ton,
And saved all the valves to be rebuilt to nearly new ones,
I drove a small cherry picker with a small winch behind,
To carry the valves and sort them in areas by size and by kind.
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Once we saw a rabbit run right into an eight inch pipe of steel.
One of the welders put acetylene from his torch in for a while.
Then placed his striker near and lit off the mixture with a big boom.
The poor rabbit shot out the other end like a fur ball from his tomb.
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There was a guy that worked there that operated the crane,
When the boss left he would put his car in the gasoline lane.
And fill it up from the company owned equipment gasoline tank.
We never ratted him out because he was an ex Army Ranger, I think.
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On the hottest day of summer, we cleaned old mortar from bricks,
And then stacked them in the back of a truck so hot I was just sick.
We worked all day long filling the truck out in that terrible heat,
By the end of that day, I felt like a dehydrated chunk of dead meat.
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One time I was hooking valves on the cherry picker winch hook,
When a 300 pound valve handle broke and my body just shook.
The load shifted and had mashed my thumb with the weight,
It hurt so bad I thought my thumb would never again be straight.
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When we got the weight off, the thumb was bloody looking bad
I headed for the ER where they said it was not broken and I was glad.
So I went on back to work, with my thumb all bandaged up,
And drove the cherry picker the rest of day like a wounded pup.
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All of the good motor valves and instruments we hid on a rack
And a truck from Oklahoma City would pick them up in the back.
So the main equipment items Phillips was paying them to recover,
Was being sold for top dollar for the use of many others.
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I guess this kind of dirty business must go on everywhere,
But I never expected to find this kind of internal theft here.
If I had known I would later go to work for Phillips Petroleum,
I might have done the right thing and just ratted on them.
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For the 3 months that summer, I was making the minimum wage,
This at that time was $1.15 per hour for that blood, sweat, and rage.
That was $46 per week, which makes me seem like a fool,
But things were much cheaper then, and I saved it for school.
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By Bill
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Thanks for reading Safeway Salvage.
Bill