It used to be five bucks for a load of stone. The Penfield quarry now charges ten but it is still a steal. Peggi and I shoveled a ton (literally) of crushed stone into our neighbor’s pick-up yesterday. There are about ten different size stone piles here to choose from. We filled the truck bed with the finest grade and then loaded ten buckets or so of stone that was about two inches in diameter. We’ll use the crushed stone on our road and the course stone will go down in a drywell that we plan to dig for better drainage near our mailboxes.
I shoveled a lot of stone when I was working for Mitchell Construction Company in Bloomington. I was on a three man crew that built forms and poured concrete for garage floors and sidewalks. But before we finished any concrete we had to shovel dump truck loads of stone into the forms.
The boss of our crew was named “Frenchie.” He had a party boat that he and his wife rode in on one of Indiana’s manmade lakes in the summer. They drank tomato juice and beer cocktails. The other guy on my crew was named Wayne Anderson. He turned us onto Al Green. The only reason he was hired was because the 30 person company needed to have at least one black employee in order to bid on University jobs. I remember one of the guys on the carpentry crew asking me, “What’s it like working with a nigger?” The owner of the company drove a convertable Mercedes sports car like Robert Wagner in “Hart to Hart.”
All that came back to me while I was shoveling.
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