Never Give Up by Tom Brokaw

Author:Tom Brokaw [Brokaw, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Mother and her uncle

Later, Grandma visited a Minneapolis school friend she had not seen in half a century. The friend had an elegant beachfront home in La Jolla, California. As they embraced, I thought of all Grandma had been through without a complaint. The Depression on the farm. The Army base. Living in a trailer house with little money. But here she was with her wealthy friend, laughing and recalling their Minneapolis childhood as if it were yesterday.

In 1950, Dad bought his first new car after a long line of used cars dating back to Ford’s Model T. The new car was a standard Chevrolet sedan, battleship gray, no radio, with four doors and a GM small engine. He still had little use for bells and whistles.

America went through a sharp recession in 1949, but it had little effect on the Fort Randall Dam construction or the twenty-four-seven shifts of workers. Western Construction Company took big projects to a new level by buying a fleet of massive dump trucks, the largest in the world, and an equally impressive array of gigantic electronic shovels to fill them. The shovels scooped up truckloads of dirt with one bite and offloaded it into the waiting trucks, which had enough capacity to level a river bluff within a week. The trucks were called Ukes, short for Euclid. It took two rail flatcars to transport just one truck, which had a sticker price of $70,000.

Western bought twenty of the first models, which were powered by two 300-horsepower engines running simultaneously. They were so mechanically efficient it took new drivers just a few days to master the hydraulic steering wheel, and the clutch was automatic. At the end of a ten-hour shift, seventy-six grease fittings were checked and every four weeks there was another inspection to tighten bolts loosened by the rocky rides. One tire cost $1,400. The equally impressive electric shovels, which cost $150,000 apiece, could fill a truck with just four bites.

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