Back in the 1960’s, I owned an ironworker’s union operated steel erection company called Suburban Steel Erection. I put steel in buildings all over the state from school houses in Kansas City and Independence to the Huck FinnShopping Center in Hannibal. But I mostly did steel erection in the central Missouri area,Jefferson City, Columbia, and Sedalia. InColumbia, I had the Parkade Plaza Shopping Center between I-70 and 40 Highway when entering Columbia from the west.
I set the structural steel and bar joists, and was putting corrugated decking covering the bar joists on the first floor so they could pour concrete. I was walking on the corrugated decking which hadn’t been welded down yet and stepped between two bar joists where the workers had failed to extend the decking to the next bar joist. Down I went. It was twenty feet to the basement floor, which luckily had not been poured yet. I landed in the mud and was not hurt, but lo and behold here came two sheets of decking down with me. One of them hit the palm of my hand and sliced it open.
I wrapped a handkerchief around my hand, got in my El Camino and headed to a clinic where my local workers said I could get it sewed up. I couldn’t find the clinic and was stopped for a red light at an intersection where I asked a black gentleman who was walking across the street where the clinic was. He saw the handkerchief wrapped around my hand soaked in blood and asked what had happened. I opened the handkerchief up and told him I had fallen off a building. When he saw the cut in the palm of my hand, he said, “Oh my!”, his eyes rolled up in the back of his head, and he passed out on the street.
I got out of the car and was dragging him to the sidewalk when a man in another car stopped, saw my problem, and said he would take care of the man lying on the street and sent me on to the clinic.
Jack can be reached at PO Box 40, Oak Grove, MO 64075 or jackremembers@aol.com
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