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The day after I graduated high school, I went to Gainesville to live with Grandma and Lewter while I decided what I would do with my life. I worked one day at a flower store before I decided that was not the way I wanted to earn a living. Uncle Warren was now working at an artificial fertilizer plant and let me know that they were hiring laborers. I needed a job so I took it. I was helping to load sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite and other chemicals into a hopper which then loaded large trucks. This fertilizer wasn't for home use. Rather, it was for large farms of thousands of acres. I seem to remember Butch working there also. Since most of the fertilizer was sodium nitrate, the supervisor kept telling me that this is what caused the explosion at Texas City, Texas, and destroyed most of the town. I knew about the explosion and wondered about what could cause such a massive disaster. They would pile tons and tons of that fertilizer into a storage building and then push it out via conveyor belts whenever trucks were being filled. They kept telling me that it was harmless until you put it under pressure but I'm still not too sure it I believe them. My first experience with concrete was while working here. They were replacing the concrete pad that was in front of the loading dock. A back hoe had been used to tear up and pull out the old concrete and then we had to dig out the area where the pad was being set. Then, we took all sorts of metal pipes and rebar and chunked them into the hole. That was to keep the concrete from cracking after it dried. I think we had two trucks of concrete pour their load into that hole and I had to wade through it to keep the concrete level. After being treated like a slave and being paid below minimum wage for two months, I quit and returned to West Texas.
Next section Taken from the manuscript "Out of the Deep", by Robert L. Goehring. Published 1995, 1998.
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