Teaching

Most go through life and meet people that they never get to know or in some cases want to know. I try to go through life learning from the ones I meet. I am a firm believer that each of us has attributes that we can give to or should acquirer from the people we come in contact with. This is about Mike Connolly whom I learned a great deal from.


Mike taught me the importance of training your crews and the people under you to do their jobs your way. The better you prepare them the smoother the job. I relieved Mike a couple of times on projects and the truth of the matter, I wasn't needed at all. Mike had his crew so well trained that they ran themselves.

I first met Mike on the Gerbus Brothers Clock Tower project. This particular project was to build a shopping center on land that once was used for a railroad round house. We were having trouble meeting the compaction density.

After scrutinized the soils reports and found nothing in them that would keep us meeting the requirements I went out to the jobsite to meet with the superintendent. The superintendent was not on site so I talked to Mike, who was an operator at that time. He told me the very detailed characteristics of the compaction failing.

Back at the office I placed a call to Jerry Linsey at H.C. Nutting. I figured I would get better advise from him than Don Theland who had made the reports. You see Don Theland and Rudy Gerbus had gone nose to nose in an argument just a few days earlier out at the Florence Wal-Mart job. With Rudy pushing Don in the chest with his finger, Jerry Linsey was my best bet for advise.

Jerry told me with what I had described the soil was probably contaminated with diesel fuel. Even though you could not smell it he would bet on it. When I told Rudy he told me I was full of, you know what. A few days later Rudy was pretty happy when he told me that Theland had tested the soil for diesel fuel and all of our compaction problems stemmed from that and now we can develop a game plan to finish the job

Before the job ended Rudy drove up on the site and told Mike he was the new superintendent, his truck was on the way out there. Mike had never wanted the job, now it was thrust on him.

The next spring Rudy calls me to stop by Widows Creek Power Plant. Again not knowing why I was there I saw Mike who was the superintendent. Riding around the site he tells me about a sub bid to move the dirt. The price was eighty five cents a yard, our historical cost at the time was a buck twenty to a buck twenty five.

Asking when the sub is going to start, Mike told me that Bob Gerbus told him that “we are dirt movers, if they can move it for eighty five cents then so can we.” My first thought was that this was a bad idea. We have historical cost for moving dirt in Cincinnati, this project is in Stephenson, Alabama plus it is TVA which means it is a union project, and a strong union that does not always play by the book. Mike was caught by the short hairs, I was his way out.

The next day, Rudy asked me about the project and I told him about the eighty five cent dirt. He called in Bob, we talked and he told me to write the contract.

More about Widows Creek in future blogs.