The Recollections of Ernest Everett "Sharkey" Rawles

Part III: 1920-1984
Transcribed by James W. Rawles from audio tapes recorded between 1977 and 1979

Transcriber's introductory notes:

Ernest E. Rawles was born January 27, 1897, at the Rawles Ranch, located in the Anderson Valley, just north of Boonville, in Mendocino County, California.

The Rawles family (with various spellings including Rawles, Rawls, Rawle, Rowle, Raule, Rawell, Raley, Rawley, Raleg, Ralegh, and Raleigh) has been traced to West Somerset, (with written references as early as 1267) and later St. Juliot, Cornwall, England. According to family historian and genealogist Henry W. Rawls of Montgomery, Alabama, the first members of the Rawle family to settle in America were most likely Francis Rawle and his son of the same name, who landed at Philadelphia, in the province of Pennsylvania, on the 23rd of June, 1686. They came on the ship Desire , which sailed from Plymouth, England. Franics Rawle, the elder, died in 1697. He was succeeded by Francis, Jr., and his descendants, who have been continuously located in Philadelphia ever since. One of the descendants of Francis Rawle later settled in South Carolina, thus establishing another major branch of the family. Yet another branch of the family settled in Pickaway County, Ohio, sometime before 1810. It is not clear whether this branch of the family originated with the Philadelphia or South Carolina Rawle contingents. At some point in time, most likely before 1800, the terminating letter "s" was added to the Rawle family name by members of the Ohio branch of the family.

Joseph Rawles (Ernest's grandfather) was born and raised in Pickaway County, Ohio, where he lived with his parents until age 20. (About 1828). He then moved to Indiana, where he raised livestock for 10 years (from about 1828 to about 1838). In 1830, while living in Indiana, he married Sintha Ann Bilderback. In about 1838, they moved to Missouri, where they ranched for 10 years (from about 1838 to about 1848). According to the book Grass Roots of Anderson Valley, they then moved to Iowa, then Nebraska, and then back to Iowa.

According to Ernest's account, Joseph and Sintha Rawles lived in Lebanon (Warren County), Ohio "before heading west" in about 1856. He said that they "left their land in someone else's charge." (One descendent, Joseph P. Rawles, who had a wife named Eloise, lived there as recently as 1916.) The town of Lebanon, Ohio was built up on the old Rawles home site.

According to Ernest's account, in about 1851, Joseph and Sintha Rawles moved to Springfield, (Sangamon County), Illinois. In about 1855 or 1856 they travelled to St. Joseph ("St. Joe"), Missouri, where their wagon joined an emigrant train that headed west (most likely in the spring) in either 1856 or 1857. (According to the book Grassroots of Anderson Valley, they left with a emigrant caravan from Mills County, Iowa.) According to oral history Ernest recounts hearing from his father, they crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains via the Donner Pass. The Rawles family settled in Boonville in 1857.

Ernest Everett Rawles was the second son of Robert Henry Rawles (about 1845-1911) Robert Rawles was the seventh child of Joseph and Sintha (Bilderback) Rawles. Robert was about 14 year old when his family made their overland trip west. His first wife, Margaret (Brown) Rawles died in childbirth only a year after they were married.

On Sept. 27, 1885, Robert Rawles married Delcena McAbee (1857-1951) Robert and Delcena Rawles had six children: Vernon Robert Rawles 1886-1948), Vera Winona (Rawles) Babcock (she later remarried, to a man named James Galway) (1889-1961), Lois Elaine (Rawles) Clow (1892-1960), Ernest Everett Rawles (1897-1985), Zelpha (Rawles) Michelson (1895-1956), and Thelma (Rawles) Faught (1899-1984).

Ernest married Jane Eloise Wallach (born January 29, 1897, Boonville, Ca.) in 1919. Eloise was the daughter of John E. Wallach (1869-1951) and Martha "Mattie" T. (Burger) Wallach (1879-1953). John Wallach was the son of William Wallach and Gertrude (Priller) Wallach. William Wallach was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia).

Eloise had one brother and one sister: Kent Burger Wallach (1893-1959) and Ermine Gertrude (Wallach) Turner (1911- ). Eloise died on March 3, 1976, in Oakdale, California.

Together, Ernest and Eloise had three children: Doris Gayle (Rawles) Brower (born August 14, 1920), John William Rawles (born April 28, 1928, died May 5, 1982), and Donald Robert Rawles (born December 24, 1930, died September 2, 1985).

This installment of E.E.R.'s oral history details his life from 1919 until his death. He retired after 42 years of service with the Hetch Hetchy Project. The first two installments covered the first 23 years of his life, including growing up in Boonville, California, and his experiences in Arizona. For general background on the Hetch Hetchy project, see: Hetch Hetchy and It's Dam Railroad by Ted Wurm, Howell-North Books, Berkeley, CA 1973.

Part III.

"My job was to keep people out of trouble, mostly."

I married Eloise [Wallach] in 1919. We had a regular church ceremony. We got in a car with her dad [John E. Wallach] and my brother [Vernon], and one of her dad's friends, and went to Santa Rosa. We got our [marriage] license. We went over to the Christian church, to the minister, and he married us. Her father and my brother went back home, and we went to San Francisco for our honeymoon. We stayed there a couple of days.

I went to look for a job. I knew two guys in San Francisco. One of them worked for the McDonaldy Motor Company, and the other one worked for the Standard Oil Company. I thought that I might like to work for the automobile people. At that time, automobiles were just coming in, and I thought that the big paying jobs ought to be with the automobile industry. I found out that the only job that I could get with McDonaldy's automobile place was as a 'grease monkey.' I'd be cleaning up and greasing automobiles. Neither Eloise or I liked the idea of me taking that job.

At that time, I didn't have a car. All we had was two suitcases. I had about $200, and I think Eloise had maybe $500. We moved over to Berkeley. We stayed in a rooming house over there for a couple of days, then I went over to Richmond to see my other friend, Bill Scott. He had said, 'When you come out to Richmond, we've got a ball team here. We haven't been able to win any ball games.'

In July [1919], I got a job as a surveyor for the Standard oil Company. It was more because of my skill at baseball than at surveying that got me the job. My friend took me up to see old man Russell. He said, 'This man tells me that you can play baseball.' I said, 'Well yes, I played down in Arizona. We played against some professional teams down there. I've played two or three years in pretty good company. I play pretty good baseball.' He says, 'Well, if you can play baseball, then you come out tonight to the first street grounds, and we'll give you a job.' He didn't ask me if I had any experience surveying or in engineering!

I come out to the grounds and played that night. I played right field. I think it was the first game that the engineers had won. We won [with a score of] 7 to 5. I was responsible in about four of the runs, and I made two or three sensational plays. I was in pretty good shape with the old chief engineer from then on.

Mr. Russell used to find me work on Saturdays with the test engineers in the refinery. I was recording [test results], and things like that. That way I got some overtime on Saturdays. He gave me time off on Friday afternoon for [baseball] practice. I had it pretty soft with him. We had a semi-retired man named Bradley. He was in charge of the surveyors. On rainy days, it was just like he was teaching school. We'd get out our textbooks and studied this and that. They had some [surveying] instruments there. He'd make you take the transit all apart and put it back together. We even put in the cross-hairs.

The pay was $133 a month. Aside from my baseball ability, I basically bluffed my way into the job, saying that I was an experienced "level man," based on the little experience that I had in Arizona. My first assignment was to run a level over a steep hill on the Standard Oil Property there at Richmond. They were testing me out, I suppose.

When I started out that morning, I was flustered, because I knew how to run a level, all right, but I had never learned how to keep proper surveying notes. Hell, I didn't know anything about keeping the level notes, at all. Its a regular form you use. You keep your 'plus rods' and your 'minus rods' in different columns. You keep your 'turns' and you keep your elevations. I was starting out running this thing, and having a hell of a time.

Tom Dunlap, he was a pretty good guy. He took a liking to me. I learned a lot from Tom. He saw I was flustered and asked, 'Have you ever kept a level book?' I said, 'No!' He said, well you come over here and sit down with me, and I'll show you how to keep a level book. He took the level notes, and he said, 'Now you put your station in the first column. The next time, you put your plus rods. You start with the farthest column over, that's your elevation that you're starting from. Then the first rod--you put in this column here. And then you add that to your benchmark or your elevation--where you startin' from. Then that gives the 'H-I.' You put that up here in this column. That's the height of your instrument. Then your minus rod is in the other column, over here. Then you take that away from your H-I, and that's your elevation, again. Now be careful, and make very nice figures.'

I had a few guys with me, and they didn't know as much as I did. So, I was 'Chief of Party', right away. I wasn't a level-man. I had never run a level in my life--to do anything like this. We ran this up the hill, and down the other side. That night, I came in with this book to see old man Bradley, who was the chief engineer. Hell, it took me quite a long time. I said 'Chief, I haven't been doing this much lately, so it took me a little longer than I should have took. I had it all balanced out. He said, 'Did you know how much you missed the elevation?' I said no. He said, 'You're off a tenth and a half, coming over that hill. [approximately one foot error.]' He knew what the elevation was [on the far side] already before he ever sent me out there. There was a bench-mark there.

From then on, they kept pouring it on to me, and pouring it on to me. They promoted me to 'levelman.' I was running levels for another survey team. First thing I know, the old chief says, 'Have you ever run a transit?' 'No! I've never run a transit!' He said, 'We're making a map of the refinery, a 20-scale map.' (That's 20 feet to one inch on the map.) It has got to be very accurate. We have buildings around here that have just been stuck here, there, and everyplace, and we don't even know where they are. We have a big map, that they started years ago, but we haven't put in any new entries since before the war. We don't even know where a lot of this stuff really is. I'm going to get a copy of that map, and I'll sketch in the different buildings that I want you to locate.'

They started me in on making that survey, and they had this map on this big table, the table was ten feet long, and the map was on a roller. A fellow named Kitchner was the mapper. He was a good one. Boy! Those fellas could make the most beautiful figures.

I continued to do surveying work. I got pretty good with both a level and transit. I could lay out anything, like railroads, bridges, streets, pipelines and sewers. I had six promotions in two years. I was what they called a "Refiner's Surveyor." I had the big [survey] party, and I did most of the layout work [at the Richmond plant.] I did most all of the layout for a high pressure distillation system. There was one whole part of the refinery that they turned over to me entirely for all the layout work.

I was getting promotions because I was getting the work done. Some of the guys would goof-off and sit in the shade, or something, and not get their work done. They had four parties, I had just one of them, but mine was the only one that really progressed a hell of a lot. The other guys would work a while, and the next thing you know they'd be gone or working down in the pipe yard, or some other place.

Later, in 1920 and 1921, I had experience with marine work and wharf work out in the [San Francisco] bay. I laid out two different piers. I worked on extending the long wharf that you can see from the Richmond ferry. We did depth soundings, using two transits for alignment, and using flags for signals. It was tricky, because you also had to keep track of the time and the tide gauge, because the tide could throw off the soundings.

I also did a study of the currents and silting of a canal that went in from the other side of Point Orient. The canal went in to the north side of the refinery.

While I was with Standard Oil, another kid and I invented a device that would automatically drain the water that collected in the bottom of big fuel tanks. It had afloat arrangement. The other kid's name was Jack Horner. The float was designed so that it would float in water, but not in oil. Something like the control on a toilet. It would draw the water out until it got down to straight oil, and then she'd shut off. We wanted to get a patent on it. [The management said,] 'Oh no. You boys can't get a patent on it. You are working for us. [The patent rights belong to the company.]'

I had been with the Standard Oil Company for two years, and I got laid off. That was in June, 1921. This came at a bad time because Eloise had just gotten out of the hospital. She had been in the hospital for nine weeks and damned near died. She had a major operation. When I was laid off, we were broke. I went up to the ranch in Boonville for a few days, but couldn't find any work.

Then we heard from Frank Booth, Eloise's cousin, that I might be able to get a job working on the Hetch Hetchy project. At that point I would have taken any job. He thought he could get me a job as a mucker in the tunnel. They [Standard Oil] had said to come back after six weeks, but by that time, I was up in the mountains, and mad at them about the patent, so I didn't bother enquiring if I could get my old job back.

On the way, I wanted to stop in Modesto, to see if I could get a job as an engineer on the construction of Don Pedro reservoir. Getting there, I took a wrong turn. Going through Livermore, I made a wrong turn at the flag pole. Instead of turning left, I turned right. I got on a road and kept goin' and goin. That's the road that they now call East Avenue. I kept going, and came to the hills, and there was a road going up over the hill--and I knew it was going the right direction, but I wasn't on the highway at all.

I kept on going and got clear up on top of the hill. There was a little kind of station there--a corral for loading stock. There was some people there. I said. 'I guess I'm lost because this evidently isn't the right road going into the valley.' They said, 'You can make it. Go right on over the hill, an you'll hit the highway over on the other side. Well, I went over the hill, and finally found myself out in a big barley field. That was the end of the road. [Patterson Pass Road.] I could see cars out on the highway, down below from where I was. I just kept on going through the barley field, and went [cross country] until I got to the highway.

I got to Modesto, and it turned out that they hired engineers out of their office in Turlock. So I drove to Turlock. They asked me if I felt qualified to run the contour survey. I said, 'Well, I could give it a try.' They asked me to go up and look at the job. I drove up in our Model T Ford. This was in July, so it would boil over every so often.

I looked it over, and it looked like I could do it. So I drove back down to Turlock to talk with them again. I said I thought I could do it. I asked how much the job would pay. They said $75 a month. I asked, '$75 a month including board?' The man said, 'No the board will cost you $32.50.' So I said, 'I've been getting $208 with Standard Oil, so I think I'll pass.' We went on up to Hetch Hetchy.

When I first went up, I was an engineer of Camp [Adit] 5-6. There had been a kind of Division warehouse at what they called the Greek Camp, up on the hill, where the road turns down into [Adit] 5-6. I stayed there [in the warehouse] the first winter by myself. I had a stove, and a cot, and couple of rooms.

That first winter it snowed a lot. It came clear up to my coat-tails. I never have seen it like that since. They heaped good food at the cookhouse. I ate pretty well when I was there the first winter. We were hungry as hell after working in the tunnels, and hell there was nothing else to do but eat. When I arrived, I weighed 165. By that summer, I weighed 210. I hung on to that [place] until the next April, when Mother [Eloise] came up. When I went to put on my good clothes to go out and meet her, and hell, they wouldn't meet in the middle by four inches.

Eloise had been teaching school. As soon as she got out of school, she and Gayle came up. We lived there until I finished the tunnel at 5-6. That's just below Buck Meadows--the Greek Camp, we called it. It was a nice little camp we had there. Gayle used to go down and play in the small creek there and get mud from one end to the other. This was when she was about 18 months old.

The old Golden Rock ditch use to cross just above the Greek Camp there. It was an old miner's ditch. It had a valve on it. There was water in it--still working at that time. I used to go up there and open the valve, and there'd be trout down in there. They'd come out the valve and down this little creek, and all I'd have to do is go in and catch them with my hands. I'd get myself in fish. Nobody knew a thing about it, but me. Here I had fish, and never even go fishin'.

The first winter I was up in Tuolumne [County] there was an old trail that went down on the other side of the river, and we were up on the side of the mountain. After the first snow came in the higher region, those deer come down, you know. I counted as many as 500 deer coming down that trail in an hour! They'd be [strung out] all around the mountain. We'd see them going back up, as well.

[One of the families in the camp was named Bartlett.] The little Bartlett boy wasn't all there. He was retarded. The night before Christmas the boy wandered away, down the stream. They didn't know where he was. They come and routed me out and some other people, to go look for him. I decided right away that he would probably go down the stream--the stream that took off from Buck meadows, down toward Bauer [sp?] cave. So in the middle of the night, we were out looking for him. It was getting cold and about ready to snow.

I hiked down, following the creek. I heard a little whimper, I thought it was a pup, at first. I found him there, in a pool of water. He had gotten his pants down, and tangled around his feet in some brush and stuff there in the pool. He couldn't go any farther. He was about frozen. I got some blankets around him and got him home. He was all right. About six months later, when they were down in Groveland, he started across the road, and somebody ran him over--killed him. Poor little duffer.

A couple of nights after the Bartlett boy got lost, I got woken up at two in the morning by somebody pounding on the door. I had the only telephone at the Greek camp [at the warehouse]. It was a little girl She said, 'My momma is awful sick. I think she gonna have baby.' She was a little quarter-breed [Indian] girl. I said, 'Where's your dad?' She said, 'Oh my dad's down Oaka, down in city.' I routed the carpenter and his wife out. The lived in the tent just across the way. We went up there, and sure enough, she was going to have a baby.

I didn't know anything about having a baby, but this carpenter's wife knew something about it. Of course I went back and tried to get in touch with Doc Begman [sp?] right away, but he was over in Yosemite, some place. He didn't get there until the next day. I got firewood, and I got the kettle on the stove, and got water to boiling. The carpenter and his wife helped deliver the baby. I saw him a while back. A great big quarter-breed Indian boy. His name's Toots Warren. He's a cowboy. I should be his godfather. When you're out in the hills like that, you run into a lot of peculiar things.

When we moved to Second Garrotte, we lived in a tent house. It was a regular tent, with a [wooden] platform, and a stove. Sometimes we'd get eight or ten inches of snow. You had to get up at two o'clock in the morning sometimes and sweep the snow off the fly. Sometimes they put in a corrugated iron over the tents. Usually, my tents were not that way, because I moved them pretty often. I only stayed six or eight months in each place. They'd move me, tent and all, down to the next stop. That's the way Mother and I lived until we got down to the Junction [Hetch Hetchy Junction], and we lived in a tent there for about four years. When the headquarters moved down, then they built us a little house.

We had a nice house there. The headquarters moved down, and they left me in charge of that section. I was resident engineer for the Foothill Division and Mountain Division. This house was built on a little slope. On the upper end of it, it had a cooler, a little cupboard that went clear down to underneath the house. It had screen acrost it. The [cool] air from down under the house would come up through, and it made a nice little cooler [for perishable items.]

Eventually, this screen rusted out, got holes in it. In the spring of the year, she [Eloise] had put a box with some potatoes in it. She went out to get some potatoes, around the first of may sometime, there was a great big old [rattle]snake in the potato box. She hollered her head off. They snake got out of the box, and went under the house. There were some boards under the house--kind of a platform--and I didn't want to tear that up. He lived under there for quite little while. We could hear him rattlin.'

On day she and Gayle were out in the yard, and here was the big old snake, right under their feet. She commenced to scream, and a fellow came by. Well instead of getting a big club and killing the snake, he took a little rock and threw it at him, and the damned snake went back under the house. When I come home that night she said 'We're going to move!' I said, 'Well, where are we going to move?' She said, '[I don't know, but] we're not going to live here!'

I had been on the job a while, around 1925, when I got word from my sister Vera that the PG&E [Pacific Gas and Electric Co.] was putting a [power] transmission line through Anderson Valley. They needed my signature to grant a right-of-way for putting the line through the [Rawles] Ranch.

I was still mad at the PG&E because of trouble I had when I was living down at Richmond. I wanted to gas out to the little house that Mother and I had bought. We couldn't get gas out there unless we paid [for] so many feet of the [gas] main coming up there. There was something written into [the contract] that if the line were extended, and the other people got reimbursement, then I would get reimbursement.

So after I was up in the hills [working on the Hetch Hetchy project], I got a letter from one of my old neighbors in Richmond. In it, he said that he had finally gotten gas [service.] He asked, 'Did you ever get your refund?' I hadn't even heard from the PG&E. So I wrote down to Richmond, enquiring whether or not I could now be refunded fro the part of the line that I [paid to] put in. The wrote back, 'No, the way it is written up, when that line has reached its end, and is not going to be extended any further, then as the other people get paid, out beyond, then you'll get paid. I said to Hell with that. That's no way to treat a man. I was mad.

A short time later, my sister [Vera] wrote me. Her husband Sam [Babcock] was working with the PG&E at Auburn. She wrote, 'You're stubborn, I know, but they want to get a right-of-way for the line through the ranch. We have all signed up but you. You'll have to sign up.' I wrote back, 'Okay, I'll sign when the PG&E pays me for that gas extension down at Richmond.'

When I enquired to Vera where the PG&E headquarters were, she replied that they were at San Rafael, for that particular line. She gave me the name of the manager there. I wrote to the guy down at San Rafael. I said that as long as my brother is working and helping to get the line through Anderson valley, I won't be a stumbling block. However, I will not sign any agreement to put a transmission line through the ranch until you pay my [pending] claim on the gas line in Richmond.' They wrote back, saying, 'Oh no, that's a different proposition. We can't do it.'

So I wrote back to them, I said that on a ceratin day, about ten days hence, I am putting this in the hands of my attorney in Ukiah. He will serve you with an injunction, and any further progress on work on the line will cease until you pay me for my claim.' I finally went down and talked to them at San Rafael. They said, 'We aren't paying anything for right-of-ways.' I said, 'I don't care whether you are paying for right-of-ways or not. I'm not going to sign the agreement until I get a just settlement of this other claim.

About two or three days later, I got a little check from them. They wrote, 'We investigated the case over in Richmond, and we find that you were indeed entitled to a refund.' It was about $75. I knew that they weren't going to hold the transmission line up for my signature, but they couldn't get a clear title to the right-of-way, either, until they had my signature.

Well, Gayle was through high school, so we moved to Oakdale, and Gayle went to college at Stockton [at the College of the Pacific.]

During the construction phase of the Hetch Hetchy project, they had different work gangs in competition with each other. They had the Swedes [working] in one tunnel [under Pete Peterson], and the 'Cousin Jacks' or Welshmen in another tunnel. They were pretty well segregated. They had Austrians and Slovenians and Italians, and few Mexicans. They kept the competition going to get more progress. They got progress bonuses. They had section bonuses--in other words if you could keep each section within prescribed lines so there wouldn't be too much overbreak. To begin with, most of the men came from the old Mother Lode mines in Tuolumne County. Gradually, other miners come in from other parts of the country. They also made miners right on the job.

At Red Mountain Bar, we had a [one-half-mile long] Lidgerwood cableway across the canyon, about 400 feet above the river. It was used to transport material across the river to the narrow gauge railway that took the material in to the camp. It was nearly half a mile across the canyon, and it made it across there in about a minute's time. On the cable, we had a big hook, perhaps eight inches across, suspended by a block on the main cable. We also had a platform [or 'skip'] with a railing on it for hauling passengers. We also strapped on fuel tanks or length of pipe. A lot of times, we didn't bother hooking up the skip to travel across the canyon. I'd just stick one leg in the hook and go sailing through the air across the river. That was quite a thrill. When you work around construction work, you so you're used to that sort of thing, and don't think a thing about it.

The guy who hooked the skips on the Lidgerwood was suspected of being the one who robbed the camp commissary. When the sheriff came out to talk with him, he said, 'I can't talk to you now, I've got to go across the river.' He got out in the middle and jumped or fell off the hook. They fished him out a couple of weeks later. I think he did it intentionally. Well, come to find out he had deserted from the German navy. He was a Dutchman. That was the thing that was worrying him as much [as the robbery]. A while later they found a lot of the stuff [loot] over on the east side [of the canyon] near the tail tower, where he had cached it in a pit. he was the one that robbed the commissary.

The guy who had the Groveland Hotel also had a bar and card games. The stiffs would come down there and get drunk. He had a toilet in the back of the bar-room. It had a window behind the seat. The stiffs would go in there, and he'd go around [and reach through the window] and whack them on the back of the neck with a billy club. When the guy would come to, he wouldn't have a dime! [laughs]. He did that for quite while. There were a lot of tough people up there. In Groveland, especially. It was a rough town. There were brawls twice every night. I didn't associate with any of those people.

The first day on the job, I came up to the [Adit] 8-9 Camp with Frank Booth. [See H.H. and Its Dam Railroad, p.110, bottom photo.] There had been a peddler who had come in the night before. He went to turn around, and--it must have been a shock--backed over the cliff. He had driven his car off the bluff. The road there is only 15 feet wide and then drops off a thousand feet down to the river. The wreckage was clear down to the river. Nobody had noticed it for a day or so. I happened to be looking down, and saw the top of the car. I climbed off down the canyon there, and I found him about half way down the hill. He was dead.

At the [Adit] 8-9 camp, they had a strike. Old Blackjack Jones, a strikebreaker from down in San Francisco [was called in] and brought a bunch of guys up there. They killed a guy at Camp 8-9. I don't remember all of the particulars. They had a guy locked up for it, but they didn't do anything to him [prosecute him].

The first big job I had was that siphon at Red Mountain Bar.

I once had a snake come after me at Red Mountain Bar. My wife and I were in a red pickup. We were driving down a road, and a snake leapt off the bank [at the truck.] I didn't see it, but I heard it hit the running board. I stopped thirty or forty feet down the road. I couldn't find anything to hit him with, so I started throwing rocks at it. he kept coming right toward me. I finally killed it with a rock. They'll sometimes do that. Ordinarily, they'll run from you, but once in a while, they get mad about something, and they'll take right after you.

My first car was a 1919 Model T Ford. We kept that car until 1923. Then I traded it in on a 1923 Buick, over in Sonora. It had fancy air shocks out in front. That was our first good car. I kept it until I got a 1928 Ford sedan. Then for $75 I bought a Star. That Star was the best little car I ever saw. It had a little Red Seal Continental 4-cylinder motor in it. The only thing was that I couldn't keep bolts in it to keep it bolted down to the frame. It would just keep shearing those bolts off. I finally put in some bigger bolts and washers, and got it so that the motor was cinched down on the frame, there. I kept that car for the job, because I didn't want to run the Buick up and down the hills.

In 1931 I bought a new Graham Page, put out by Grant Motors. We also had a '26 Ford. I bought a second hand 1928 Buick coupe, then I traded it in on a 1933 Buick. I sold the Star to a guy for $50. I had run it 10,000 miles or more. Meanwhile, Eloise still had the Graham Page. Later I had mainly Buicks and Chryslers. I had a 1933 Chrysler. We took the train and picked that car up at the factory in Lansing, Michigan. From there we took a tour of the east coast, saw the World's Fair, and went all the way down to Florida.

I put in a lot of miles in the Star. At that time we were putting in the [power] transmission lines across the [Central] Valley. Our section was from the San Joaquin River up to Mocassin. I got paid 15 cents a mile for the use of my automobile, so that actually worked out a bonus for my paycheck, because I logged do many miles driving back and forth across the valley. That car made me a thousand dollars or more. I used it to haul the survey party around, and later during the construction of the towers. I used to make almost as much out of the Star as I was making in wages.

The center line for the transmission had already gone in, but they still had to position the footings for the towers. I did no how to turn an angle with a transit. They were getting the darned angle towers turned wrong. Instead of splitting the angle, they'd have them turned almost all the way around. The old head surveyor said, 'You go down there and straighten Jimmy out, so he can stake those towers.' I did that satisfactorily. I came back, and the chief asked me to see if I couldn't get them started on digging the holes [for the tower footings.] I said 'Alright, I'll try it.' By then, you see, we were running out of work up on the job. I got some old tunnel stiffs [for the work.] They had bought a new compressor, and a drilling outfit. Those footings had to go down ten feet, some of them in solid rock. We had to blast. We started digging holes.

We got the holes dug, going across the valley. Then they said, you go back, and we need somebody to get the legs put in for those towers. That's quite a job. We got three templates made up--a frame. We'd center the frame, and that got the legs in the right position. Then Max says, 'Can you organize a concrete gang, and start pouring the footings?' Well, all that I originally was supposed to do was get the footings positioned right, and get the holes dug. The first thing I knew, I was building a transmission line. I had never even seen one built before.

Anyway, I got to thinking about a gin-pole, for putting up a tower. You see, I remember an episode when I was in high school, when I had put a barrel up over the top of the flag-pole in the school yard. I figured that I could use the same principal to raise the towers. I made a gin-pole of pipe. It was a telescoping mast. I started with a 4-inch pipe, then a 4-1/2, then a 4, one pipe inside the other. Then I had a push stick. We had an old dump truck with a dump-body on it. So I took the dump-body off and put a flat bed on it. I mounted the mast on the back of the bed and had it laying over the cab in a little fork. The hydraulic dump would stick the mast up into the air.

We had guy [wire]s on the thing, and that would give us about a 20-foot mast. We put pins out, and guyed it there, and I'd have myself a 20-foot mast. Then I'd have this push stick along-side, and I'd run out another length of pipe. A fellow would go up in a boatswain's chair (we'd have a pulley and a rope on that), and he'd put a pin in the hole, and he'd come back down, and we'd tie that off. We had two sets of guys in, and we'd have a 50-foot mast.

We had the towers laid out at right-angles to the footings. We had a crew out ahead bolting the towers together. They'd leave the side braces just hanging loose with one bolt. I'd tip one side up, and then tip the other side up, and then four fellows would go up, one up each leg, and they threw those braces across. Then a bridle into the section where the tower goes straight up. The two more sections of mast went up, with the sides of the tower laying out on each side. We'd hook them all together. Another guy would come along with a little short gin-pole, and he put the cross-arms on.

We got so that we could put up three 97-foot towers in eight hours time, and they can't do that today. The only trouble was that we ran out of towers. We put up 63 towers in 31 days. I had a bunch of kids working for me, and they didn't know any more about power lines than I did. Going up, they'd put the bolts in. Each one of those bolts has got to be center-punched, and tightened up tight with lock-washers. Coming back down, they tightened them up and center punched them [the threads] so they couldn't back off.

The Model T didn't have a gas pump. It used gravity feed. This created some difficulties on the steep grades in the Sierras. As sort of an expedient, I attached a bicycle pump--an air pump for tires--to the gas tank to create pressure. I mounted a valve stem on the gas cap. The pump was kept under the seat. When I went up a steep hill, the engine would be higher than the tank. So to persuade it a bit, I'd hook up the tire pump, give it a shot or two, and away I'd go. All of people living up in the mountains did that in those days.

Eloise came up to Buck Meadows in April. She had been up there all summer, and wanted to get home. It was Labor Day, as I recall. We got up at two o'clock in the morning, and we started down the mountain. We got going pretty fast, and for some reason, one tire came clear off. The tire passed us. That damned tire went for a quarter of a mile down the side of one of those hills. I got stopped. I finally got the tire, and brought it back up to the car, and got it bolted back on.

We drove all day, until we got to Penn Grove, near Santa Rosa. (The old road didn't go through Santa Rosa, it went through Penn Grove.) We got there, and I blew out a dog-gone connecting rod. The thing went 'Wangity-wangity-wangity...' I tried to find a garage, but there were no garages open on Labor Day. We stopped under a tree, but there wasn't much shade at all. A guy by, an old farmer. He asked what was wrong, and I explained that it had broken down. By that time, I had the thing pretty well torn down. He says, 'You know boy, I know where there's one of those engines, down on the dump.' I had broken the crank shaft. I had the pan off the bottom of it, and had it all un-hooked, and had the crank shaft loose.

I went down there, and sure enough, there was Model T engine laying there, with the same kind of crank shaft. So I unbolted it off of the block, and brought it back up. I put it in the Ford, cinched up the connecting rod, got the thing going, and that same crank shaft was in two years later, when I traded the Ford. I suppose the bearings just sort of burnt themselves in.

Where I lived was up at the top of the hill, by the railroad. It was we called the Greek Camp. The Tunnel Camp was down the side of the mountain, perhaps 1000 feet lower. There was a road that ran between the two. I was coming up this road one afternoon, coming home, an a big slide came off the hill. The slide was caused by the spring thaw. It took road an all, right in front of me. That was a humbling experience.

It was only a short time later, up at South Fork, I was working with a survey party. There, the camp was in the bottom of a narrow canyon with straight walls. It was so cramped there that the only place that they could build the camp building was right over the river. They put the trusses right across the width of the river.

I recall when we were there eating lunch one day [11 Nov. 1922]. An electrician [John J. Marshall] was sitting almost across from me at the table [at the South Fork Camp cook house], and there was a surveyor sitting on either side of him. A big boulder came through the roof and hit this electrician, and hit him on the top of the head. It pushed him right down through the floor, and killed him dead--instantly, right in front of me. [This cook house can be seen on page 106 of the book Hetch Hetchy and its Dam Railroad.]

There was a bunk house that was in another bad spot. One man was killed when a big rock came through the roof an hit the foot of the bed. It was a metal framed cot, and flipped it straight up. It pushed the end of the cot down through the floor, and he slid down with it. Broke his back when he hit down below.

There were a lot of men killed during the construction. The biggest number were lost in Livermore. They were killed in gas explosions in the tunnel--the Mocho shaft. One time they had an explosion that killed whole shift. At the time, the Livermore tunnel was supposed to be the longest tunnel in the world.

I almost got sucked into that. I knew that they were having trouble with gas, and they wanted me to come down and be in charge of the safety end of it. Old man O'Shaughnessy said 'Well, we'll send you over to the university to take a short course. We've got to have men that know about gas.' I told him that I perfectly satisfied right where I was [in the Mountain Division.]

Mr. O'Shaughnessy was quite a nice old man. Although he was actually responsible for the whole construction, other people took the credit. The sad thing was, just before they got the water in, they had a change of administration, and put the old man on the shelf. Old [Manager of Utilities Edward J.] Cahill, and some more of those politicians took over. They hadn't been there but four or five months and to hear them you'd think by God, they built the whole project. They didn't have anything to do with it at all. O'Shaughnessy had been there about 15 years. The old man died [on Oct. 12, 1934] just two week before we put the water through [the full length of the system to San Francisco for the first time.] A lot of people say that he died of a broken heart.

My first experience in tunnel construction was at the tunnel camp. [See H.H. and its Dam Railroad, p. 108.] I was a resident engineer for the tunnel construction. I enjoyed it. I did something different practically every day. My job was to keep people out of trouble, mostly. I kept the tunnels running in the right direction, kept the quantities up, kept the daily level reports, and reports on the amount of explosives being used.

There were a lot of details that I had to take care of. We ran cross-sections the tunnels, figure the quantities where we were going to concrete it. We took a section about every five feet of tunnel. We plotted those on up, and kept, and kept the areas and amount of overbreak--in other words the amount of rock that they took outside of the prescribed line. They didn't like to take out any more rock than they had to, but some places in blocky ground, that meant that they had to take out a lot of extra rock.

We had different kinds of bonuses. We had one for driving a neat section. If the men kept the overbreak within a certain amount-- I think 2-1\4 yards per foot. They had a progress bonus. They also had a bonus to get the men to stay through. That made it tough on the engineers, because a lot of times there would be overbreak and they couldn't give them the bonus because the tunnel had broken rough. There were always arguments between the engineers and the foremen [disagreements on actual progress, et cetera]. The bonuses could make as much as 25 percent difference in pay.

The drills they used were all run by compressed air. At times the rock was so hard that the machine operators would have to change the drill bits two times in a foot. It would take the gauge right off the bit. It was quite an act. Sometimes the granite would drill pretty good, but transversely, sometimes the stuff wouldn't break. You'd have to pour the powder to it to break it! Other places, it might drill hard but then it usually broke pretty well [when blasted].

It was hard to hold a tunnel to alignment and grade. It was black, dirty, soaking wet work. The fall in the tunnel is only a foot and a half per thousand [feet]. You had to keep your alignment up too, so you'd hit the tunnel coming in from the other direction. And we had very good luck [in assuring proper alignment].

One time I was doing an inspection of a tunnel while a [Myers-Whalley] mucking machine was working. [See H.H. and its Dam Railroad, p. 109.] When I was going right beside the mucking machine, while it was mucking under the platform. It hit a charge that had failed to go off. The charge went off under the [mucking machine] bucket. It lifted the thing [the machine], and pinned us right beside the side of the bank, but it didn't catch me or the machine operator. If there hadn't been an opening, caused by some overbreak, right where I was standing both me and the guy operating the machine would have cut us in two.

In the Mountain Division, we often had tunnels that went distances as far as a mile and a half to meet a heading from a tunnel being dug from the other direction. To check our course, vertical shafts, sometimes 700 or 800 feet were dug from the surface. Pairs of plumb-bobs were lowered on wires down these shaft. Because their [the wires'] length were so long, they'd never come to a complete rest. So we hung the plumb bobs in buckets of oil to dampen their oscillating. By using an engineer's scale, where they swung, we could catch two points, with a needle. We'd split that. That give you two points down to the tunnel level. Then you took your transit, and go in on that line, and that gives you your course to start the tunnel. When the two tunnels came to a heading, the closure was a little less than a tenth of a foot from our calculations. The elevations were even closer than that, usually.

The first tunnel that I was involved with was [Adit] 5-6. It was short tunnel. We had two headings coming together. Of course, I was a little bit anxious about it [that my calculations were correct], because I had never had that experiences before. You could hear them drilling from each side. One day it was sound like they were off to the right of you, the next day, it would sound like they were down to the left of you. The old miners, they were trying to give me a hard time. 'Oh you missed by fifteen feet,' they'd tell me. We were all ready to break through the next morning. 'I said, you guys are so smart. I'll take you down to the shop, and we'll cut the rails for the muck cars.'

I'd take a station on the rail on the ends of both tunnels, and figured out the rail length to make the closure. With the rails, you had a little slop in the fish plates--they had slots in them so the rails could contract [with temperature changes]. That gave me a little leeway. I took them down to the shop, and we cut the rails that afternoon--to make the closure. I said, well, you should at least me slot the holes in the rails, I ought to have that much leeway.' The next day, after the breakthrough, when we put the rails in, we didn't even need to use the slotting. They fit exactly.

You couldn't imagine that kind of country where we ran the overhead [survey] line. [To do the surveys], we were hiking up over cliffs 150 or 250 feet high, and down the other side, and around the side of the mountain. They were a very difficult surveys. Although we usually did it three or four different ways, so we usually knew we were exactly right.

Of course they had longer tunnels down at Livermore [as much as 25 miles], in the Mountain Division, we put in one tunnel that was 19 miles long, and another that was 16 miles long. Most all of this was through solid rock.

Drilling tunnels was tricky work, especially in blocky ground [rock]. If the powder charges didn't go off just right there was always the risk that the next time that the drillers went back into [drilling] the face, they might drill in and hit what we called a 'bootleg.' As I recall, we lost three shifts of men that way.

There are now three [Hetch Hetchy Project] pipelines and two power lines running across the valley, all on the same right-of-way. The first pipeline that went in was 60-inch [diameter]. [See page 206, H.H. and its Dam Railroad]. I wasn't on that particular job. I was on the tunnels, up above.

I took one trip back home to Boonville, after I had been away for about 8 or 10 years, and wanted to do some deer hunting. I got up real early--about 3 a.m. I went up this little canyon to my favorite stand. It was a place that I knew I could always find a buck. We went out and camped out on the back end of the range. I thought I'd be smart--I wanted to get myself a buck before anybody else. So I got out there, and the brush had grown up on the ridge. I had to crawl for about a mile. I got out there to my favorite stand, and I sat down, waiting for the daylight to come. All at once a rooster crowed. A guy had moved in there and had a homestead! I was right in his back yard. It got daylight, and looked acrossed there, and there was a cabin.

At Second Garrotte, [See H.H. and Its Dam Railroad, p. 115 and page 202, top picture.] The [vertical] shaft was there at Second Garrotte. It went down about 600 feet. There was 1,500 gallons a minute coming in [to the shaft from aquifers that it had bisected.], water coming down the shaft. It had to be pumped out continuously. They had a place where the water was coming in, about half way up, that they put in a catch basin. They pumped from the bottom up to it, and they also caught water there and pumped it up the rest of the way.

When they were sinking that shaft, they had what they called a sinker pump, hung on a cable. They'd get down there and pump for maybe two or three days before they got a round [explosive charge] in, and then they'd shoot that round. If you didn't get the pump back down and hooked back up and started pumping within a half an hour after the shot went off, the water would be 30 or 40 feet up the shaft--that deep. Then you'd pump, and pump, and pump, and finally get back down [to the original level], and then put another round in.

There were regular passenger buses that were run on the railroad tracks. They were mostly old White trucks, that were converted. [See H.H. and its Dam Railroad, p. 153-153-154]. The road wheels were taken off of these vehicles, and railroad flange wheels were mounted, so they could run on railroad tracks. The mechanism of the steering wheel was changed so that when it was turned, it activated the brakes. Of course, all of the equipment down in the tunnels ran on storage batteries. They were clean running.

One day [September 13, 1922] there was a wreck on the Hetch Hetchy line, [at Six Bit Gulch] and I was about the first person on the scene. It was an engine pushing and pulling cement cars [starting downgrade from Red Mountain Bar toward Six Bit trestle.] [See page 173-174, H.H. and its Dam Railroad.] When the train came down the mountain, four of the cars were ahead of the engine, and five behind. I could see the train coming down the mountain--the engine--I believe it was Number 4--was running wild. They didn't get the brake [line]s hooked up [to the forward cars].

[Thomas P.] Fleming [novice brakeman] was on top of one of these cars, trying to set a hand brake. I was looking to see if there was anyone around. I found one boy down the gulch. He had gone off the top of one of these cars. He hit the wire fence, and the wire caught between his fingers. The wire sliced back practically all the way to his wrists. Otherwise, he wasn't hurt. I'm there in the picture [on page 174.] I'm third from the left, there, in the white shirt, and wearing the [white straw] hat with the dark band.

One time during the [deer] rutting season when I was running some levels between [Adits] 5-6 and 8-9, coming up a trail, and I came across two great big bucks that had their antlers firmly locked together. They were both big bucks--four or five pointers, with big heavy horns. They were both lying on the ground, completely exhausted. One of them was just about dead. I tried to pry them apart, and I couldn't pry them apart. Finally, I took an axe and cut one horn off. All that I had to do was knock the eye guards loose, which is where the horns were locked up. One of them got up, and away he went. The other one was still laying there. A couple of days later we came back and he was gone. I guess he had regained his strength and walked off.

Sometimes in the winter-time, the road would wash out and they'd have to shut to shut the tunnels down for a little while. We wouldn't be driving any tunnels. At times like these, I'd go work with the survey parties, checking the overhead. I was walking around on the boardwalk on top of an old mining flume, which we still used for construction purposes. All at once the flume commenced to shake, and I couldn't figure what the Dickens was the matter. I thought it was an earthquake. I looked down under my feet and there was a half-grown black bear [inside the flume, under the boardwalk] right under me feet. He had heard me coming, and was trying to get up out of the flume, but the boardwalk was in the way. He must have been in there catching trout.

One summer at Red Mountain Bar, I was walking in to where the pipeline--the Red Mountain Bar siphon--went into the tunnel. There was a little leak that caused a cool spot. This must of attracted a big buck, who had a bed there under the pipe. I started to walk in this narrow cut, and here come an old buck out of there with his bristles turned the wrong way. He couldn't go up the hill because there was a steep cut, and there was of course the pipe on the other side. I thought that he was going to hook me. He came within a foot of me at a full gallop, mad as hell. Luckily, there was a power pole there, and I stepped behind it just before he came by. If it hadn't been for that pole, I think that he would have gored me. He was a good-sized three point buck.

Just up above Hetch Hetchy Dam, I took a bad fall off of a cliff. I had just finished a survey for changing the railroad over to make it into a paved highway. We were searching out a large water supply for the camp. We went off back of Colenta [sp?] Rock, up a gully, to find where we could hook up with some water. I was going around the top of a cliff, over some rubble, and I stepped on a big boulder, and it turned over, and threw me over the bluff. I only fell about 15 feet, down a trough in the rock. As I fell, I could see a big boulder about 4 or 5 feet [in diameter], coming down behind me. I flipped over to my side, and it went right by me.

I was at the penstock at Moccasin, when it broke. [On Sunday, June 7, 1925, see H.H. and its Dam Railroad, p. 191.] The water came down the hill and went through the power house. [In the half hour before the water could be shut off], it filled the power house half full with debris. I was coming up the road and saw the first spout of water, shooting up out of the water line, when it broke, and I drove the quarter mile to yell and warn everyone. At first, they wouldn't believe me. They were first starting up the power house [at the time], and I thought that someone had left a pass hole plug out of it. [According to the City's report, a main valve was opened without opening a by-pass.]

When they were filling O'Shaughnessy reservoir [for the first time], a tremendous number of rattlesnakes could be seen around the edge of the water. They moved uphill as the water rose. There were hundreds, thousands of them. They were also congregated on the driftwood out in the lake, itself. I never saw so many snakes in my life. We clubbed them. It took about two years to fill the reservoir completely.

In the 1920's, California was having a drought. When we went through with the tunnel, it was awfully easy for the farmers and ranchers to believe that their springs had been tapped [by the tunneling.] They'd get a dry year, and the damned springs would dry up anyway, but they wanted to blame it on the project.

In most of that area, the pipeline was fairly close to the surface, and through solid rock. We just didn't encounter that much water. We worked with these farmers and ranchers, [to build up good will, and to reduce the risk of lawsuits.] I built a little reservoir for one rancher, in conjunction with a road-building contractor. He wanted water out of the pipeline, but I couldn't give it to him. So I put in a little dam for him. I eventually put in a lot of little dams--treated these fellows right. Now they have more water than they know what to do with.

In 1922, I put in [supervised the construction] of one half of the pipeline that goes under the river, [at Red Mountain Bar]. [See page 197 and 199, H.H. and its Dam Railroad]. Those are 114-inch diameter pipes. Our part went nearly up to high water line. We had this thing [pictured] out in the middle of the river. We diverted the river first on one side, and we got the pipe in, and then [diverted again to put in the pipe on] the other side. I came back in 1932, to put in the rest of it.

Gayle's picture can be seen on page 201 [of H.H. and its Dam Railroad]. That is her school picture, at Hetch Hetchy Junction. That picture is of the entire school, not just her class.

Up at the [Hetch Hetchy] Junction, when John [Rawles] was a kid, he often got into mischief. He was always getting bunged-up. He was a little reckless, I guess. When he was about 3 or 4, I had bought him a little axe for Christmas. He'd get up early, before we'd ever thought about getting up, and I'd hear hip hacking away, up on the hillside above where our house was. One morning, he came down and got me out of bed. He said, 'I got it all ready to fall.' I went up there, and he had a fir tree about a foot and a half through and maybe 30 or 40 feet high. He had cut all the way around it, just like a beaver! He was right. I only had to hit it twice with the axe, and down it come. He was already into things like that.

We got him a cowboy outfit with a big hat and vest, and lasso rope He was particularly fond of lassoing things. The electricians came by one time, and they had a trailer with a long pole on the back of it. They came by, and John had his lasso rope out, and he lassoed the end of the pole [as they drove by]. Lucky he didn't have it tied to him, because they went ten miles up the mountain, before one of the guys notice the rope dragging behind.

When Don was about three and John was about five or six, they were playing down by the creek. There had been old frame of some kind, the foundation for an old cabin or something. It was about a foot above the water, but there was a hole under it. The water had dropped down. Don was fooling around there, and a board broke, and he went down in this hole. I could hear John hollerin' and hollerin.' I went down there--and the water was deep under this platform. John had reached down, and had got Don by the hair, and he was holding him by the hair. Don would have drowned in the hole if he hadn't kept him up. He [John] was lucky that he didn't fall in himself.

We made it through the Depression all right. I was fortunate I stayed [working] right through. I was very lucky--some of the people didn't get to stay through. I was lucky that I had charge of the division, keeping records of things, so we could weather the storm.For a year or more, we did have [in effect] a cut in pay, however. We had to buy bonds at a certain price, which was a discount from what the bonds were worth. We had to take part of our money in bonds, but we never got to see the bonds. It was credited out of our wages. It amounted to us taking a [pay] cut, is what it amounted to. They turned around and sold the bonds at a discount, and paid us with checks.

One time, Eloise had a little mishap with the car. The house was on a hillside. I was off with the boys for the day [in the other car], doing something. We didn't get back in time to take Gayle to the dance, that night. So Eloise went out and got the car out and was going to take Gayle to the dance, herself. After she got it out of the garage, she left it parked out by the front gate. I got home about 9 O'clock, and Gayle was sitting there crying.

She was upset because I had come and taken the car [leaving her with no way to get to the dance.] I said, 'I didn't take the car!'. 'Yes, it's gone, and nobody stole it. You took the car.' I said, 'No!'.

It turned out that when Eloise parked it out front, she didn't leave it in gear. The [parking] brake came off, and it rolled down the hill. It went down through the oaks--and you couldn't hardly drive a car through that without hitting an oak tree--and went straight down the hill. There was big old barrel sitting there, and it hit that. That [barrel] turned it off about 15 or 20 degrees, and it jumped across the wagon road and hit the fence above the railroad. The railroad was about 20 feet in a cut, down below. There was the car, hanging out over the bank [over the tracks], half of it sticking over the bank. All that was holding it was this woven wire fence.

In later years, When Don and John were fourteen or fifteen years old, we hunted in the Modoc country [in north-eastern California]. One place we used to make our camp in Lassen County, I believe it was called Willow Creek, there were a number of hot springs coming up in it. One spot would have warm water, and then a ways further upstream, it would be ice cold. There were also cold springs coming in farther down stream. It was queer having hot and cold water in such close proximity.

One time I was hunting with John and Don, and as I recall, Don was young enough that he didn't have a gun, but John did. I suppose Don was about 12. They were down below me, and spooked out two bucks, running like rabbits. One of them came by me, and I took a shot at him, and he kept right on going. The second one came by me, and he on going, too. I thought that I had missed them both.

We went up to where they had been when I had shot at them, and I couldn't find any blood. The boys kept saying, 'oh no, you didn't miss them.' I was sure that I had missed them completely. We kept taking circles out through the chapparal there, and pretty soon we found one of them. I thought, well heck, I hit that one, I might of hit the other one too, so we went a little deeper. Darned if we didn't find that one down, as well. They'd both been hit in about the same spot, just behind the shoulder, through the lungs.

John and Don had a little fox terrier that loved to hunt. One time it ran out a big buck. After I had shot it the little dog ran in and latched on to the buck's ear. The dog was lifted clear up off the ground, and the deer was running off with him.

I used to hunt with an old Indian chief and his two sons, in Tuolumne county. They worked at the Rozasko [sp.?] ranch, in the Jawbone country, on the other side of Tuolumne. I hunted with this old chief. He said 'You hunt just like us fellows. I like to hunt with you.' I didn't realize it, but the old chief was sitting on a stand up on an high rock just up above where I was going through a brush patch. I jumped a great big old buck out of this brush and he took off like a rocket. He went tearing around the hill. As he went by a little cedar, I took a snap shot with my Model 94 Winchester, and hit him right butt of the ear, and down he went. The old chief up on the rock yelled, 'Where he go, where he go?' He had his sights on the deer, just waiting for him to get closer, and, without realizing it, [I] shot the deer before the chief had chance to shoot.

I also did quite a bit of bird hunting, down in the central valley. For federal regulation, of course, I had my Model 97 [magazine] plugged so that the gun would only hold three rounds--one in the chamber and two in the magazine. One time I was out hunting and took a passing shot at a duck. Down he went. The noise of that scared up a pheasant, behind me, and I hit him too. Then I heard another duck coming over, from over my left shoulder--'quack-quack-quack.' I turned and knocked him down, too. That was all within about five or six seconds. The guys with me joked about it. They said, 'We're going home. Just can't compete with a shot like this.'

I was with the Hetch Hetchy project, of course, all through World War II. There was considerable fear of Japanese sabotage [of Hetch Hetchy facilities], at the time. We were issued guns by the City and County [of San Francisco]. I was issued a Winchester Model 12, 12 gauge pump shotgun, it was a sawed-off affair, the barrel was cut off just ahead of the magazine, and a .30-30 Winchester carbine, and a Colt .32 automatic pistol. That was what I carried in my car to ward off saboteurs. (laughs). I got pretty good with that pistol. I could hit a beer can three times out of four at up to about 40 feet, you know, just keep it dancing along the ground.

I should have stolen that pistol--everybody else kept theirs--but I turned mine back in.

During the war used to listen in on my big General Electric [multi-band] radio to Tokyo Rose, over in Tokyo. I heard a lot of those broadcasts. In one of them, they had on a prisoner [of war], and he was talking about how things were over here [in the U.S.] he was from 'Two-oh-loom [Tuolumne] county, California,' so I knew it was a lot of hooey. I'd get up in the mornings, early, and turn that on, and I could bring Japan in, just like local stations.

There was several pilot training bases in the Central Valley. It might have been the one out at Crow's Landing. There was also one just south of the transmission line, at Vernallis. The pilots used to weave in and out of the power poles, like they were pylons on a slalom course, crazy stunts like that. They even did it after the lines were up.

One Marine pilot in crashed doing that. He was flying a Brewster Buffalo. He hit a little hill near Oakdale, on the other side of Cashman Creek, where there are two knobs that stick up. He hit one of those. The plane stopped on the hill, but the engine went over the top of hill and landed damned near a quarter of mile farther along. They went up there and piled up all of the parts of him. We went up there afterward, and found his foot in a shoe.

The war caused some shortages, particularly of steel, copper, and lead. When they put in the aluminum plant at Riverbank, they couldn't get copper for the bus bars, so they used silver. They had more silver than they did copper, so they took these solid silver plates, about a half inch thick by about 8 inches. They had those the full length of that long building for bus bars, where they hooked these electrical connections in for processing the aluminum. They took the place of the copper bus bars. After the war, of course, they replaced those bus bars with copper ones. I would have been happy just to get the punchings out of those plates [laughs.] They actually drilled them, just like regular bus bars, but of course they saved all the drillings.

Up at Willow Creek, in Modoc County, I would go hunting with the boys [John and Don]. One place we camped on Willow Creek, there were two springs there. One comes out of the ground so hot you cant put your hands in it. About 20 feet down the creek, there's another spring that runs just about the same size, and it runs so cold that you can't put your hands in it. We'd bathe in a spot where the two mixed together, where the temperature was just right. Sooner or later, they'll drill that whole thermal belt on the east side of the Sierras, [to put in geothermal power plants.] That's where they'll get a lot of power.

As far as my life is concerned, I'm not disappointed with my life. I did a lot of hard work, but I helped to accomplish a lot of things that will be here for a long time for somebody else. Not that I got rich doing it. If you try to do what's right, and things will come right sooner or later, to you.

I'm glad you're making these tapes. It's as much fun for me as it is you, hearing these stories. Reminds me of the poem The Battle of Bunker Hill: " 'Tis like stirring living embers, when at eighty one remembers..."

Editor's notes:

E.E. Rawles retired from the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power System in 1962 after 42 years of service. For many years, Ernest and Eloise lived in a house on Second Street in Oakdale, California. When his son John completed the construction of a ranch house outside of Oakdale in about 1968, Ernest and Eloise purchased and moved to John's previous home on Magnolia Avenue in Oakdale. It was there that they lived the remaining years of their lives.

Ernest was a member of the Oakdale Masonic Lodge F&AM, Scottish Rite Bodies of Stockton, AAHMES Shrine of Oakland, and the Oakdale Shrine Club. He died at the age of 88 following a prolonged battle with cancer.

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