1964-Working in a Foundry. These guys are handling the molten metal. They were called ‘Furnacemen’ and they were a different breed altogether. I’m pretty sure it was the heat that affected their brains. They couldn’t do anything about the clothes they wore every day. Full of holes and burns. The more they came in contact with the heat the crazier they got. The rest of the crew soon learned to give them ‘lots’ of space. When they weren’t pouring molten metal into molds they wandered around muttering and talking to themselves. They were well paid but didn’t last very long, perhaps two years and then they would quit.

I worked with a furnaceman at Bird Foundry. He told me he’d been working with heat for seven years! He was crazy.

I still needed a job so I went looking for work.  Got a job in an iron foundry on Nanaimo street in Vancouver. This was the old fashioned foundry I had learned about. The place was filled with smoke from the hot iron. The metal was carried by two guys. They would position the pot over the mold and slowly pour the iron into it.

Fortunately my background in foundry work allowed me to get the less stressful job of making cores. Cores where the sand innards of a piece. Like the inside of a cup or bottle. They were destroyed after the pour and the sand mold was chopped up. The inside core couldn’t be removed and used again. It had to be broken up. Hence my endless job.  It was an early morning job and while driving to work I would pick up a couple of guys who had no cars.

The workers were practically all East Indians which made lunch time lonely as I didn’t know the language. They were a good crowd and tried to tempt me with their food. (Some kind of gruel which they ate with their hands) no thanks.

I had a helper and he would supply me with the sand and took away the finished work. Unfortunately the bosses decided that they needed the cores first thing so moved my sign in time to 6 o’clock. I could do it but regretted missing out on my evening enjoyment. Not good enough they decided 2 o’clock was a better time for me to start. You can guess what happened next. I quit!

Got pretty good at quitting jobs after that.