Afraid of Heights? Don't Even Consider Accepting This Job --- Climbing Telephone Poles Requires Strength, Guts; Avoiding Tarry Splinters
By Julie Amparano
NORRISTOWN, Pa. -- As the morning sun peeks over the rooftops, I am straining to keep my balance on my precarious perch 18 feet above the ground. My heart is pounding. Sweat pours down my neck. A thick leather belt loaded with wrenches, hammers and clamps tugs at my hips.
A few inches in front of my face is the top of the sticky, stinking telephone pole. The wind gusts again. The pole starts to creak and sway. All I can think about is getting down. But first, I have a few little chores to perform. This is my final test here at the telephone-pole climbing academy run by Bell of Pennsylvania. So far, I'm not doing very well. The only things keeping me from slamming to the ground are a three-inch-wide canvas "safety" belt, wrapped around the pole and hooked at my waist, and the inch-long steel spikes that are strapped to my boots. Joe Fortuna, a lanky veteran pole climber and one of the academy's chief instructors, calls up in reassuring tones: "Take a deep breath, Julie, and relax." That's easier said than done. I've already spent nearly a week at the academy, but my knees still wobble and my muscles ache. My boot spikes, which are also called climbers, don't seem to penetrate the pole deeply enough. So I pull them out, one at a time, and slam them in again. I teeter and slip. Still haunted by a four-foot tumble I took in class a few days before, I close my eyes and pray. When I signed up for climbing school, it seemed like a good idea. After all, pole climbing was once a cherished skill, and the people who could climb with gusto were admired. Besides, it used to be a kind of corporate ladder, at least in the telephone company. Among other executives, Delbert Staley, Jack MacAllister and Sam Ginn, the chairmen of Nynex Corp. in New York, U S West Inc. in Denver and Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco, respectively, all climbed poles early in their careers. In the old days, even management trainees at the telephone company started out in the field working on the telephone lines. Mr. Ginn recalls spending eight hours a day climbing poles 25 years ago. "I'd be so tired I'd skip lunch and sleep under a tree," he says. Now he brags about having kept his set of climbers. "They're going to be collectors' items one day," he predicts. U S West's Mr. MacAllister cites a practical benefit: His ability to scamper up a telephone pole saved him 38 years ago from the clutches of a burly, disgruntled cus- tomer and two hungry Doberman pinschers. But climbing isn't so revered anymore. Many repairmen would rather use a ladder, or hop aboard a cherry picker and get hoisted to the wires. "I'd rather slip-slide a mile across ice and snow, hauling a 75-pound ladder, than climb up a pole," one technician confesses. That's because pole climbing is a risky business. Working around high-voltage wires is all the more dangerous when you're clinging to a swaying pole. Oldtimers warn of the risks of "cutting out," which happens when your spikes slice though the wood and slip out of the pole. Sometimes, to break a fall, climbers bear-hug the pole on the way down; that's called "burning-out." It usually prevents broken bones -- but the pole's tarry splinters inflict another kind of torture. One climber's biceps have long scars from the splinters that slashed his arms as he slid down the pole. Nowadays, a repair crew can go months without having to climb a pole. New telephone cable generally isn't stretched from pole to pole anymore. Instead, it is buried underground. As a result, the U.S. pole population is steadily declining. The city of Philadelphia, for example, has about 50,000 poles now, about 10% fewer than in 1977. But climbing is still crucial to the phone business. Many poles, including those tucked away in back yards or on mountaintops, can't be reached by truck. When a pole is jammed in a tight spot, there's no room for a ladder. Skilled climbers are often needed in emergencies. After torrential rains flooded California's Napa Valley and washed out telephone cables, Pacific Bell equipped a climbing team with motor boats to scoot from pole to pole and restore phone service. For those reasons, Pole Climbing 101 is still a required course for the technicians who maintain the telephone lines. Here at the academy, my two classmates and I are ushered into room 119, a drafty and cavernous warehouse. We start our studies in a sunken chamber appropriately nicknamed "the pit," where 12-foot telephone poles and a few smaller ones rise out of black rubber padding. The poles, as splintered as cactuses, reek of chemical preservatives. After reading about climbing, inspecting our safety belts and learning how to wear our climbers, we head for the small "stroker" poles to practice the basic steps. In about 10 minutes, I've caught on. With my feet at the base of the pole and my hands gripping the back side, I confidently lift my right foot and give the pole a solid jab with my right spike about six inches up. I raise myself up on that foot, making certain to keep my knee locked, and stab the pole with the left spike. But other tasks don't come so easily. Ten feet above the ground, I'm having trouble getting my safety belt around the pole and hooked at my hips to the body belt that holds all my tools. Wobbling on my spikes, I must take one hand off the pole, grab the safety belt and pull it quickly around behind the pole. My sweaty hands feel like greased pistons inside my gloves. I can't get a good grip. My fingers ache from clinging to the splintery pole. Later, we learn how to test for termite infestation: smack the base of the pole with a mallet and listen for hollow thuds. And we're coached on the fine points of hand-held voltage meters, which are used to check for dangerous electrical charges in the wires. The standard method of descending is called "lock, rock and drop" -- which sounds reassuringly easy. The moves seem to come naturally -- until the last few feet, when I cut out and land flat on my derriere. I hit the rubber deck with such force that my hard hat pops off my head. Who would want to do this for a living? Kerry Ayers, for one. The 40-ish former drama teacher says he applied for a service technician's job "to prove myself." "I'm very terrified," the stocky blond says. "But I want to know that I can be rugged." Besides, service technicians make a comfortable living. Senior technicians can earn as much as $650 a week. For my final test, I've made my way to the top of a pole at dawn. Suspended, I have 20 minutes to perform my tasks. That sounds like an eternity. It isn't. First, I hoist a heavy metal bucket filled with nuts and bolts. Its weight threatens to dislodge me, but somehow I manage to yank it up and rest it against the safety belt. After lowering it back to the ground, I move on to the second task, driving a six-inch hook into the telephone pole. With strong, slow strokes, I pound away. Each blow of the hammer makes the pole shudder. Then comes the critical part: I have to "walk" around the top of the pole to the telephone wire and attach some clamps. I'm so nervous that I put the clamp on upside down and forget to tighten it. As I pull out my wrench and attempt to tighten the second one, I fumble with the unfamiliar tool. Suddenly, one of my boot spikes slips off the pole, sending a spray of splinters to the ground. But my other spike is wedged in so deeply that I don't budge. Finally, I'm finished. In fact, my performance manages to earn me a diploma. "You need more practice," Mr. Fortuna says. "That's the only way to feel comfortable with it." But Clinton Davis, a recent graduate who is back to practice climbing, pulls me aside. "You never get used to it," he scowls. "It's an unnatural act." Credit: The Wall Street Journal. 25 Nov 1988 |
BOOKS & AUTHORS: You Always Hurt the One You LoveBy JULIE AMPARANO, Associated Press Writer
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- A man who constantly professes love for his wife snaps one night. He grabs a knife and stabs her 15 times - once for every year of their marriage.
An overprotective mother, pre- paring to commit suicide, poisons and suffocates her two teen-age sons. She insists she didn't want them to be orphans - but never finds the nerve to take her own life. To Dr. Martin Blinder, these shocking and puzzling cases in which the killer loves the victim are the stuff of daily life. As a leading courtroom psychiatrist who has testified in a succession of cases, he has distilled 20 years of work with nearly 300 killers in his book, "Lovers, Killers, Husbands and Wives" (St. Martin's Press, $12.95). "In this country, the bedroom is second only to the highway as the scene of slaughter. Nothing that I had learned in psychiatry prepared me for that," Blinder said in an interview. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out why some bank robber blows away a guard that stands between him and the safe. But why, for heaven's sake, would a man kill the most important person in the world to him?" Blinder's best-known case was Dan White, who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. At White's trial, Blinder testified White was suffering from diminished capacity, in part because of the large amounts of junk food he was eating. The so-called "Twinkie defense" saved White from a murder conviction. He was found guilty of manslaughter, served about seven years in prison and committed suicide about a year after he was paroled. In his book, Blinder explains the force that drove White and Solly, the man who stabbed his wife 15 times, to kill people they loved and admired. Solly and White were not aware of any hostility toward their victims, Blinder said. Roslyn was the "perfect" wife and White respected Moscone and Milk, yet the killers felt they were being restricted by these people, he said. Both felt trapped in an intolerable situation, Blinder said. The situation precipitated a dramatic psychological escape in which the conscious minds goes blank and the unconscious takes over. Blinder categorized both men as dissociative killers, because the conscious mind becomes "dissociated" from feelings of anger. His book discusses four other categories of killers as well: Powerless killers; inspired, ironically, by feelings of utter impotence. Psychotic, or "crazy" killers; they invariably catch their victims completely by surprise, and are usually astonished at their actions when the episode passes. Masochistically dependent killers; people who feel they cannot live without someone, although the relationship is unsatisfactory. Psychopathic, or "cold-blooded" killers; people who simply have "a piece missing" in their minds, who feel no empathy for other people and feel no remorse for killing. In his book, the 47-year-old Blinder describes the lives of the killers, the events that caused them to snap and the crimes they committed. One of the most heinous of Blinder's cases involved Michael and Darlene, whose sadomaso-chistic sex play got out of hand one day when they decided to live out one of their gruesome fantasies, Blinder said. Michael had persuaded Darlene to help him murder her male friend, Corky. They went to his house, Darlene massaged Corky and, when he wasn't looking, Michael bashed in his skull with a hammer. They left several false clues, cut off his genitals and fled to the mountains. Darlene was a powerless killer, Blinder said. She had no self-esteem and existed only to make her man happy. When Blinder is not questioning killers, he teaches law at Hastings College of the Law and psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center. He also runs a family counseling practice. "But this is boring," Blinder said of those jobs. "These killers, though, they're not. They're fascinating." He found that the killers were not mutants or monsters. "These people were very normal. You would be surprised to learn that they were killers, as were their neighbors," he said. "Once their moment has passed, you can have a very ordinary conversation with them, except, of course, for a few." Most were eager to talk. "Unlike the criminal type, they are desperate to talk to someone, to learn about what they did," Blinder said. Years of experience have made him proficient in categorizing killers. "After speaking with a killer only 30 minutes, I can tell what classifi-cation he belongs in," Blinder said. "That's the easy part. The difficult part is treating him." Copyright 1986 Associated Press All Rights Reserved |
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