For entertainment during the summer we played volleyball in old buildings that was used for storage and warehousing. (Raft trip I was on the lead raft with beau my roommate, I am on the back) We had a big annual raft race that my roommate beau and I won the very first race. The race was through drainage tubes under the road and it finally ended just before the Arctic Ocean. The water was pretty cold but as long as it was moving fast it was not that bad, friction seemed to warm it up. At least that's what we used to say until we stopped. Making the rafts and our own paddles was quite a challenge. Another time I got to swim in the Arctic Ocean, not long mind you, just long enough to jump out as far as I could from the dock and then jump right back up again and strip off my cloths. That was the coldest water I had ever been in. It did get a laugh from the rest of the guys who let me go first to see how bad it was. During the summer months we used to talk with some of the scientist that were doing some studies up there. They showed us some things we would never have seen if they would not have pointed it out to us. Like the small fish and shrimp that freeze in the ice and go into hibernation, then wake up the next year and do it all over again. There was a lot more sea life than I would have ever guessed. The arctic char looked just like a rainbow trout and tasted just as good. We went fishing a few times in the summer and the camp cook make us a treat.

      We even had a free concert one summer day by John Denver as he was passing through with Jacque Cousteau and he wanted to see the oil fields and the pipeline. He offered us a concert so they pulled a few flat bed trailers together and then he sang his heart out. We did not have amps just his vocals and his guitar, it was GREAT and he was a super performer with tons of energy.

       Shoot we even had a couple of good old boys from Louisiana who made a still, damn they made some good shine. If anyone wanted to gamble there was about anything you could want up there. I worked to hard for my money to waste on another mans game. There were some very good guitar-playing singers up there too and we had our own little concerts every night. Beer was too expensive to ship up there so the drink of the day was a little rum, vodka or whisky

Here I am in the Carpenter Shop Foreman's Office.

     At the job site the carpenter shop we stored all our lumber and scaffolding for the site. It was also our duty to keep an inventory on where everything was and how much we had in reserve. We not only kept track of the work, we also had to keep track of the materials, tools, and man-hours. I was in charge of the Utiliways so I had to keep a good set of redlines (that is where I draw over the existing drawings how we actually built it) this way we could make a good asbuilt set of prints when we finished. Since carpenters had to supply their own tools they were one of the few trades who had their our own lunchroom and lockers. Every trade on the job site had a different color hard hat so you could tell just who was what. Electricians had Yellow hats, Ironworkers had red, and teamsters had black, carpenters blue, laborers white, Insulators gray, Painters brown, and Pipe fitters had green. The foremen of every craft had a triangle on the side of their hard hat, and the general foremen had squares. The main supervision all wore gold hard hats. The company I worked for was ACI (Alaska Constructors Inc.) Which was a branch of Brown & Root. Every thing we got up there had the letters BPANSP because we were building the gathering centers for the British Petroleum Company. It stood for British Petroleum Alaskan North Slope Project. The execs that came up there stayed in a special man camp called the BP Hilton. It had an indoor swimming pool, trees, and a putting green. Only the supervision and the oil execs could stay there. That's where the doctor was if you got hurt or sick.