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13: MUTUAL RESPECT
Although contract negotiations could produce some tense moments between labor and management, there was also a substantial degree of mutual respect between union workers and management personnel at SMUD. This was due in part to the fact that many managers themselves at one time had worked as linemen and carried union cards.
Men like Hank Baumer, Smiley Barnes and John Lund "were all union members at one time," recalls Archie Horton, who came to SMUD in 1950 as an apprentice lineman, made journeyman in 1954, and eventually became line superintendent.
People who came up through the ranks made the best managers, in Horton’s opinion.
"A lot of the people at that time had been union members all their life. So they knew the circumstances [people work under] and they’d do everything they could to avoid grievances," says Horton. "Anytime you have people unhappy, you’ve created yourself a lot of problems."
Archie Horton, 1991
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14: REBUILDING THE G & H ALLEY
Work became something of a living theater, where managers and workers played out their roles, where relationships were defined in the course of the day-to-day jobs, where mutual trust was sometimes created and sometimes undermined.
Sometimes those work relationships could take on a comic air.
Klassen remembers jockeying with Baumer over rebuilding the G and H alley.
"Oh, I’ll tell you, you get in some messes there," Klassen recalls. "You see, that’s old construction down there. A lot of it’s old Great Western.
"And Hank, he come out after he was about through with his job, and he’d say, ‘Well, let me see, I got the G and H alley here to rebuild.’
"That is," Klassen explains, "from downtown clear out to Alhambra Boulevard. Rebuild the G and H alley. Poles on each side of the alley, and PG&E and Western construction on one side and two circuits of primary on each side.
"And we drove to that and looked at it a time or two. But old Baumer, he said, ‘I’m not going to give you that job. I’ve got another job over here.’
"So he’d give me another job for about two or three weeks, maybe a month. And then we’d get through with that and then [Baumer would say] ‘Well, Elmer, what am I going to do with you? I got the G and H alley.’
"We’d shudder, you know," Klassen recalls, smiling. "I didn’t want that durn job."
Then one day Baumer came out to where Klassen was finishing another job.
"He said, ‘Well, Elmer, I don’t know what I’m going to give you for a job.’
"I said, ‘Give me the G and H alley.’
"He said, ‘You mean you’re asking for that?’
"I said, ‘I don’t want you holding it over my head the rest of my life. I’m going to get it anyway.’"
SMUD crew installs new busses on a line into new
subdivision in 1956. (Sacramento Municipal Utility District)
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