Celebrity Book Building High Lines
- Posted on 16th August 2018
- in Celebrity book, celebrity books, entertainment books, Hollywood story
- by Ben
While telling tales with a friend recently I realized that I’d let slip yet another story from my first (so called “Celebrity Book”) Three Stages.
1949
After a year or so of living in Los Angeles – long before meeting our first movie stars, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans – my Dad, Bish (short for Bishop) gave up on the business he’d entered into with my uncle Joe and took a job with the L A Department of Water & Power. He was an experienced “hot-wire” lineman and men like him were in great demand. L A was growing and spreading like a plague over the formerly pristine Southern California bowl. The need for electric power was increasing exponentially and new “high lines” were being built. Linemen were needed to hang the cables and double pay was the incentive for these men (No women linemen yet existed.) to go out into the mountains and desserts and risk their lives bringing power to the swelling metropolis.
High Line Steel Tower
“High voltage electrical transmission lines” is the proper name for these constructions. The ones my Dad helped to wire ran on steel towers up to four hundred feet tall. They carried high voltage “juice”, typically 345,000 volts, over long distances between the power generation plant and customers. In Bish’s case from Boulder Dam near Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Once the towers were finished the linemen’s job was pulling in and hanging the cables that carry the electricity.
But this tale is not about the juice. It’s about the height. This was not a job for sissies (or acrophobes).
Dad loved climbing and height. I remember as a kid in Bristol how excited he’d be when the radio station would call and let him know that a bulb on top of their 350 foot antenna needed to be replaced. He was the only lineman in town who relished the job. Other guys would do it but all his colleagues and the the radio station management knew that Bish Bryant loved the job.
Back to California and the high line, the operative word being “high”.
The terrain between Hoover (aka Boulder) Dam and L A is mountainous and rugged.
Hoover Dam via Google Earth
Ridges bordering deep ravines are common and in many places the steel towers stood atop these ridges so that on one side they were 400 feet high and on the other it could be 1,000 or more feet to the earth. This was no problem for Bish but for some of his partners (they always worked in pairs) the altitude was daunting.
On one particular day Dad and his partner were on the ravine-side arm attaching the large porcelain insulators that hold the cables and they were standing on a steel beam about ten inches wide suspended 1,200 or more feet over terra-firma. My pop called to his partner for a tool and got no response. As he described it:
“The guy was gripping the cross beam with both hands, his eyes sort of bugging out and he was as still as a statue.
I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.”
After several futile minutes of trying to get the frozen fellow to move to the center ladder and begin the climb down he used his radio to the ground crew and they sent up two more lineman with a safety harness. It took Bish and another lineman using their large screwdrivers several minutes to pry his partner’s hands off the beam to which he was attached with a death grip. After another agonizing struggle they got him into the harness and began slowly walking him down the ladder. One guy below pulling his feet from rung to ring while Dad maintained the support of the harness.
It took the rest of the afternoon to get the hapless fellow to the ground where he collapsed in (what was then known as) nervous exhaustion. After an overnight stay in the nearest hospital Dad’s erstwhile partner returned to L A never again to climb over fifty feet up a pole.
There are a lot of ways to get high. This way is not recommended.
Coda: My friend Scott Catlett, world class diver in 1960 had a similar – somewhat less life threatening – experience with a fellow springboard diver who froze on a ten-meter platform. Scott’s description of the guy’s face is strikingly similar to Bish’s description of his fellow lineman. They got the recalcitrant diver off the tower with a bit less fuss. From then on he dived only from springboards.
For some actual celebrity stories click here and get Three Stages.
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