Dhahran Diary®

Title: Summer Jobs

DD24

The first summer I was allowed to work out of the house, I was a stock boy at the Dhahran Air Base PX. Through this job I learned about the exotic purchases of the military; the buyers went to Europe and brought back all manner of wonderful things. The Scandinavian Christmas candle carousel, the German 400 day clocks, and Italian shoes. Mr.Straghetti, was my boss and he did the best he could to keep the older Italian workers from completely corrupting me. They were fantastic, teaching me about the finer points of life (not pasta!).

The next summer I was employed in the ARAMCO consolidated shops. Oh boy, I thought, this will be fun. WRONG! I was assigned to an outside yard used as a holding pen to gather parts for contracting construction in the main camp residences. My domain was a series of scattered, wooden pallets. Everything was out there from toilets to acid bottles, linoleum to lath. It was horribly hot and I was always trying to figure a way to get out of the heat. My office was a big crate; the entry had no door. My authority was a key to the yard. Finally luck smiled on me. One day a driver came to pick up some two inch pipe. He said, "Lazim jeeb bibe!" He held up two fingers. "Ithnain!" He had no chit (Everyone knows, you can't do business without a chit!). I showed him the bibe but would not let him take it. "Lazim chit!," I said. "Mo-lazin chit," he said. "Mafee Chit, mafee bibe," I said. This went on for a while. Finally, he left. The next day I was assigned to an office INSIDE the shops. They took my key and I learned that sometimes you CAN do business without a chit! I was grateful for this lesson (68F).

The next year it was the main commissary storehouse for me. I worked at inventory and stocking with Khalid. He showed me the ropes and as he gained English reading and writing skills our jobs reversed. When we started I read the bills and he stocked the shelves. By the end of the summer, he was reading the bills and I was stocking the shelves.

The new Pepsi bottling plant was housed in the commissary storehouse so I got to see a lot of Quentin Keith 'Dutch' Morgan. He had it nice, clean facilities and no hauling. The worst part of his job was sitting behind a huge magnifying glass, inspecting bottles for cleanliness just before they went through the filling cycle.

Steve Furman got a rotten job one summer. I think he was working at reclamation. He was sorting pipe flanges! There were all sizes. We used to kid him after work by asking him questions like how many eight inch flanges were there? Some of those flanges were too big to carry by hand. At the end of the day, Steve looked hot and dusty! It made the swimming pool feel all the better at five P.M.

A few summers later I moved on to photogrammetry in North Admin! My first job was to design a large shelf to store drill cores. These cores were about three feet long and kept in a special wooden box. I made a three dimensional drawing and gave it to my boss. A few weeks later, he took me over to the storage facility and showed me the completed shelves full of cores. That was right next to the retail commissary. It gave me a boost to see a drawing of mine turned into a real world article.

We had an old,electric Burroughs adding machine and we computed theodolite (star) shots to nine places behind the decimal! The Burroughs would cycle yan-na-na, yan-na-na, yan-na-na, and cough up the answer to our calculations in little windows. These fixes were translated to geographic points on aerial photographs, which overlapped one another. It was great to work on some of the first large ARAMCO maps produced by the Exploration Department. I worked with Stan Elberg's dad and he was so patient. I also sorted all the aerial photographs taken of the peninsula. These were in a huge walk-in vault. After collating, they were microfilmed and the negatives were sent away to the states for safe keeping. These photos were used with a stereoptic to draw the contour lines, figure out drainage patterns, and other features for the maps. That was the summer of 1958, my last summer in Dhahran for 35 years!

Bob Zinser worked with me in photogrammetry. He handled the adding machine too. Somehow he got out of the job of computation. At least four of us had to run the numbers independently. Stan's dad would compare the results and decide which figures to believe.

Mary Covell worked in the technical Library downstairs. In the afternoon, I'd slip down there and we'd lean against the end of the stacks and talk. There were seldom any borrowers, so we had the place to ourselves. She was a good friend and we chatted over stuff. She was going to college in the east and we compared notes and told stories.

Malcolm MacKenzie turned his job into full time employment. He worked in the instrument shop. He had a good mentor there and after Beirut, Malcolm worked there for a year before going back to the states.

I guess the most fun of these jobs was meeting my friends at the pool or Fiesta room after work. We would talk over our jobs and complain or rave depending. Our conversations always seemed to come around to school talk. One big topic was who was going to what boarding school and how we liked it. ARAMCO Schools did not extend beyond ninth grade so this was an important topic to the graduating ninth graders (we were graduated in late July, early August). We asked a lot of questions about the different boarding schools. I recall that when the third trimester began in Dhahran, the departing students for Beirut did not have to leave until early October. It was nice having the camp to ourselves during the day.

I remember when I found out I was going to ACS, I asked the ACS summer students how it was? They scared the devil out of me with stories of hazing and for whom to avoid. Luckily the sophomore class was huge that year and we hung together to avoid mistreatment. The year after I attended ACS, I loaned my ACS annual (53/54) to inquisitive students and it was lost. My ACS classmate, Gary Cody ('56), sent me a copy of the 53/54 Al Manara recently.

ARAMCO initiated a professional development program (called PDP). Some American student took advantage of this program in the early years. They left the Dhahran Senior Staff School upon graduation, went off somewhere to finish high school and college. During summers, they came back to the field and were employed in their area of study; upon graduation from college, they were employed by ARAMCO. Eventually the program was adjusted and extended to Saudi Arabs. It has been very successful. The company is now staffed with hundreds of U. S. college graduates who were at one time PDPs.

Copyright ©1999-2006 Rolf A. Christophersen
All Rights Reserved.