My father spent 36 years, most of his adult life, working for the same company, Kennecott Utah Copper. From my vantage point up here in the 21st century, where my current job is about to become the longest one I’ve ever held at a mere six years in, that’s an almost unimaginable level of job security and stability. Nowadays, it seems like the corporate overlords are determined that everybody ought to be freelancers who can be popped in and out of jobs like disposable electronic components, owing nothing and with nothing owed to them. It didn’t used to be that way. There used to be more of a reciprocal relationship between employee and employer, and a lot more loyalty from both sides of the equation. There was an understanding that if you were good at your job, and you liked it well enough, you were going to be there for the long haul.
Still, even in those days before the world moved on, no working person was ever 100% secure. When the price of copper tumbled in the early 1980s, Kennecott responded by shutting down its Bingham Canyon copper mine — one of the largest open-pit mining operations in the world — for two years. A couple thousand workers, including my father, were laid off. Fortunately, he was far more resourceful than I imagine I would be under the circumstances. He could and would do just about anything to earn a buck, and because of this, our little family made it through those two years without too much pain. They were lean years, to be sure, but they were never truly bad. Not for us, anyhow.
Of all the myriad odd jobs he did to hold things together, the most memorable was his gig as a long-haul truck driver, ferrying massive wooden roof trusses across the western states. The trusses were built in our little rural home town and were destined for new LDS church houses that were springing up in California, Idaho, and Wyoming at the time. And the reason I so clearly remember Dad doing this particular job is because I got to ride along with him on the truck a few times. I don’t remember for sure if these trips coincided with summer break, or if Dad just took me out of school when I wanted to go, but those were magical experiences for me. I was around 12 or 13, and even though Smokey and the Bandit and the CB radio craze were long over by then, I still found the whole idea amazingly cool: traveling with my dad in a truck (not a full-blown 18-wheeler, but still bigger than all the traffic around us), a couple of manly men with the wide-open landscape unrolling in front of us and who knew what around the next bend.
