DARK CITIES - by  Clay Brown

synopsis

Where were you when they hung an innocent man?

    These words caromed off every part of Glade Elliott’s skull as he drove through the dark, rainy morning toward the meeting which he knew would place blame on him. He just could not rid himself of that haunting melody.

    Glade Elliott had began this journey almost forty years earlier when he simply climbed a pole in the yard of the Irrigation District in Liston, Oregon. From that simple beginning, the young man had been taken under the wing and tutelage of Mecham. The old foreman had spent most of his life in the early years of power linemen, a trade that did not exist until Edison’s light changed lifestyles forever.

    When Glade finished his apprenticeship and received the coveted "Journeyman Card", he felt he had the world by the tail on a downhill drag. But the very day he graduated his apprenticeship was the day he received the news of Mecham’s death.

    Elliott moved on, feeling that Mecham had passed the torch to him. Glade felt a deep responsibility to the trade and his fellow linehands.

    However, the next few months took him another direction. Influenced by his friend, Duke Driscoll, the young lineman enrolled in some night courses in a small college near his current job. In doing so, he decided to take some time off and get an electrical engineering degree. He also knew that he was nearing a momentous fork in his road. A contract lineman, or "boomer" is always on the move, going from job to job. A utility lineman usually works in one area, raises a family, and leads a different life.

    This brings Elliott to a utility company and a new life. His education and natural ability soon move him "inside". Into management. His life is never as satisfying again. He is away from the tools and the men he is at home with.

    Glade is thrust into the corporate politics, facing the greed, envy, and competition of the ivory tower. This is also the time that his life takes another lurch. His new wife suddenly leaves him and takes all his savings with her. Something he was just too naïve to see coming.

    As this happens, Elliott sees the greater problems of the industry. New power sources cease to be built. Environmental influences, regulatory roadblocks, and massive growth in the use of electricity tell everyone in the industry that the day of reckoning is getting close.

    Worse yet is the massive mergers and poor management that go with those mergers. Glade has always felt the business is a three legged stool—one leg being the consumer, another the stockholder or those paying the bills, and the third being the workers. When any or all of these legs are cut off, the stool will fall.

    Vast mergers cause an altogether new set of problems, as slick business people invent ways to take advantage of being middlemen, and the result is a house of cards, which must fall.

    In the wake of this huge jumble of flailing failure, someone must take the fall. Glade Elliott has a bulls-eye on his backside.

  Interested?

email  Clay@darkcities.biz

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