Dam Project

A Freak’s Journey 

The Life and Times of a

Six-Year-Old Circus Runaway

By Steven R Roberts

James ran from the love of two mothers

and the girl denied him by his own demons.

The Dam Project

Did you ever meet a guy who had a good job and you couldn’t for the life of you figure how he got it?  I’m David Wood and I remember well such a man. He was the Army Engineering Director responsible for one of the largest infrastructure projects of the pre-WWII era, the Indian Rock Dam near York, Pennsylvania. With eight civil engineers reporting to him along with the crews of 12 private contractors, the army’s man on the job was responsible for the government’s sign-off on the engineering, cost, pumping, and finishing of 300,000 cubic yards of cement, four times that used nine years earlier to build the Empire State Building. The position was also responsible for insuring the proper installation of the mechanical portion of the project including the dam gates, all electrical and massive dirt movements for the dam’s earthen berms.

While every phase of the project required the Army Engineer’s official signoff, within two days on the job I knew he wasn’t an engineer and couldn’t read a blueprint. Within a week, I was convinced he couldn’t read anything. In another week, I wasn’t even sure he was in the army. It was a mystery how the man was appointed to such an important position.

The Indian Rock Dam project had been approved for $5.1 million, after a lengthy congressional process, to protect the city of York from the kind of flooding that occurred seven years earlier when six to 12 feet of floodwater streamed through the heart of town. The eighth tropical storm of 1933, known in the area as the Chesapeake and Potomac Hurricane, brought 14 inches of rain in four days to the watershed area of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries, causing destructive flooding and deaths in eastern Pennsylvania, including the cities of York and Reading. The work we did that year on the Codorus River three miles north of York is still protecting the city nearly 70 years later.

As a young graduate civil engineer, I was working as the cement superintendent for the largest outside contractor. In my new job I came in daily contact with the on-site Army Engineering Director, James Stockley. The army boss was an imposing man, around 5’ 10” in height, stout in body and rough in manner. He carried a rolled-up blueprint in one hand each day and walked heavily up and down the dam site. Squinting his eyes and maintaining a facial expression of disappointment in what he saw, “the Boss,” as we called him, seemed to find things each day that made him madder than hell. The younger superintendents on the job joked that it must have been a technique the older man used to stay awake after lunch. Whatever the rationale, Stockley would often find a reason to yell at one of us or one of our workers at least once a day over what seemed to be an incident that could have been better handled in a calmer tone. He had a vertical scar down the right side of his forehead that turned red when he worked himself into a frenzy.  

One day the boss noticed that a crew was double wrapping the junctions where the rebars crossed. This actually held the rebar more stable while the cement was poured, but a single wire wrap was specified.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at the supervisor one afternoon, as one of the men told me later. “This is not a Goddamn craft project. There’s a process for doing the job. Do it! There’s a line of guys waiting at the union hall that can follow a simple process chart. You got that?”

Stockley was said to have paused and grabbed his hat, slapping it against his thigh, and narrowing his black-eyed stare at the tall slender supervisor standing a foot in front of him. “You’re not trembling!” he sputtered. “If you value your job I suggest you learn to tremble when I talk to you.” With that, the wide-awake army boss turned and walked down the berm toward his truck.    

 “I don’t give a damn,” he said in another of his rages later that month, “whether it rained for five days last week. I don’t care about the lorry of rebar being hit by a rubbish collector. And I don’t want to hear that somebody’s bitch dog died. We’re going to pour every day. Lads, I’m not going back to Washington telling them we made a cock-up of this job.”

I guess I forgot to mention, it was clear that our American army boss appeared to be from someplace other than the U.S., possibly Britain or maybe Australia, we thought.  We doubted he was a U.S. citizen but we weren’t about to ask.

 “Good morning,” I said one overcast day in late September as the boss climbed up the face of the earthen berm we were finishing. I was standing with Roy Kelly, another young civil engineer, the superintendent of the earth moving and landscaping part of the dam project.

“What the hell are those scrapers doing this morning?” We were used to the lack of any form of greeting from the boss. “Have you seen the east end of the berm? I guess not. Well it stinks,” Stockley said, looking at Roy and me as if he didn’t know which one of us was in charge of the earth moving work.

The scrapers were responsible for bringing dirt up to the earth berm and spreading it two feet thick to hide some of the cement buttresses in back of the dam. Stockley didn’t agree with the way the scrapers were doing the work. Without another word to us, he walked over and waved down one of the scrapers.

“You’ve got the whole berm screwed up,” Stockley shouted up to the driver. “You’re dumping too much dirt on top of the dam.”

“Hey, you ain’t the king?” the driver said. He worked for one of the contractors we were using and he hadn’t met Stockley. “I’m spreading according to the instruction Kelly gave us this morning.” The driver’s sizable upper left arm was making a statement as he leaned over the side of the open window and looked down. “I don’t work for you. In fact I wouldn’t work for somebody so stupid. I’ll do my job and you do your so-called job, whatever the hell that might be,” the driver said as he restarted the engine.

“Lad!” Stockley shouted over the sound of the engine. “If you’ll step down off that cat I think I can straighten out this little misunderstanding.”

The driver laughed as he switched off the engine, turned from his seat and jumped down. He landed very close to the shorter man, causing a cloud of dust to rise around them.