Bob and Tim Gorline were "gone with the wind" before being caught trespassing. According to Bob, "Tim is in his Stan Laurel pose for the benefit of Cecil... just in case we got caught."

The photos show the ruins of the San Francisquito Dam failure with Tim for scale.

"When I graduated from Fremont High School in June 1938 I wore down the soles of my shoes walking around Los Angeles following up many employment ads. One August afternoon, while I was playing workup baseball on 92nd Street, a lightly travelled wide street, with the neighborhood kids, a stranger who had apparently been watching our game from his car, parked down the street, came up to my position in the outfield and asked me if I wanted a job. "Yes Sir" I said.

"Nathan B. [Bert] Smith was an engineering contractor whose specialty was pile driving. He had an acre fenced yard where he stored a complete set of antiquated equipment....a 3 drum steam donkey engine on wood skids, a Worley steam powered crawler crane, which always crawled straight until the operator stopped and got under and connected a chain to disengage one track so the other track could turn the crane to a new direction, then get out and use the chain to reengage the track so the machine could proceed. He had in his tool shed a complete dry diving suit outfit for underwater work, everything needed for railroad track work, steel building erection, and housemoving, etc. His work crew consisted, mostly of elderly seafaring men, experienced in ship rigging, happier to be working ashore.

"One was a New York Indian, a skyscraper steelworker, who taught me to catch and throw hot rivets, 10 stories up, all very loyal to Bert and defensive for me, the new apprentice who worked for 25 cents an hour, which was frowned upon by Mike Ryan, the Steelworker's Business Agent. Atop the cab of The Fageol flatbed truck, 2 Toggenberg goats presided over Bert's yard, exceeding the duties of the junkyard watchdog.

"When it became known that I had taken mechanical drawing courses in school, I was required to help making the cost estimates and prepare bids for contract opportunities. Since the region had experienced a disastrous flood the previous winter, we were successful in keeping busy with pile driving work repairing washed out bridges scattered around Southern California.

"When we ran out of bridges, we were bidding on jobs farther away, one on Wake Island, one on San Clemente Island for the foundation of a large airplane hangar, where we were obliged to cast our concrete pilings using seawater and beach sand. While we were driving one of those pilings, I was tending to my duty of firing the boiler with my back toward the 5 ton hammer when the pile head exploded, scattering large pieces of salty concrete in all directions, one of which struck me on the tailbone, paralyzing me from the waist, down.

"For several hours, Bert [there was no doctor] stuck pins in my toes, tickled me with feathers and pinched, but I felt nothing, then gradually, feeling and control returned, and all I had the next morning was a bruised sore back. The island was beset by stormy weather and we missed a payday, and one day the Navy had a boat going to San Diego, so Bert sent me on it to pick up the men’s payroll and bring it to the unhappy men on the island. When I got back to the dock in San Diego, the boat captain told me that the sea was too rough and I should come back the next morning when he predicted the sea would be calm.

"The next morning at 6:00 AM I found that he had sailed to the island during the night and that there would not be another boat for about 2 weeks. I returned to Los Angeles with the payroll and was thereupon fired. Bert was a farm boy from Nebraska who had joined the Navy and had experience in Deep Sea Diving, mostly on rescue and salvage. He told us about how he had rescued the ship's bell, which was bracketed on the flagpole at the San Clemente Island parade ground from his dive to the wreckage of the USS Bagaduce near the island dock, before retiring from the Navy.

"His other jobs included the pilings for the Henry Ford Bridge at Terminal Island, and moving a 5 story reinforced concrete building about 500 feet in downtown LA. Bert's hobby was grubstaking desert gold prospectors, and he welcomed my company on long Sunday drives to very isolated points out in the Desert where he would deliver boxes of grub and pick up samples to deliver to assayers back in LA.

"Bert lived with his 2 sisters on the street where he saw me playing baseball. The family had sold their farm in Nebraska to finance his contracting business. That year I was paid $12.50 for working 48 hours per week, enough to buy, for $25 my first automobile, a 1925 Nash convertible with 6 cylinders, rumble seat, cloth top, downdraft carburetor and 26-inch disc wheels. My father enjoyed helping me keeping it running, and together, we once pulled the crankshaft and poured new Babbit metal main bearings. While I was on San Clemente Island, I devised a plot, which was never carried out, to steal that beautiful bell from the flagpole. The plan included securing the bell over the side of the water barge with a wire and swimming out to the barge in San Diego Harbor, using my sister's surfboard, and smuggling it back to my bedroom in LA, but it never happened.

"Our first trip out to San Clemente Island from San Diego was on an old Destroyer, hulk stripped down to convert it into use as the water barge, towed regularly with loads of drinking water to the island, which had no reliable supply. All of our pile driving equipment was on the deck of this barge and our pile driving crew was sitting on the steel deck of the unfurnished focas'le with the door bolted to keep out the weather. About halfway over on this 4-hour ride the barge was rolling and pitching at the end of the tugboat tow line, and when the bow went down into a sea, the water loaded in the hold would surge forward, impacting under a vent hole in the forecastle deck making a spectacular geyser that soon flooded the focas'l deck, making our crew of 10 men, on the verge of seasickness, quite cold, uncomfortable, now standing trying to keep dry suddenly start vomiting, slipping in it and, as we were the only ones aboard, unable to communicate with the tugboat, were quite grateful to go ashore at Northwest Harbor."

Bob tells the story of the "Boilermaker":

"I once had a very dirty job as a helper replacing the fire tubes in the steam boiler of the Donkey. Bert had hired a free lancing boilermaker to do the work and, since it was a 2-man job, I was the other. The boiler was built to endure many years of use, the 5-foot diameter cylindrical sides and the top and bottom heads were of half inch thick steel plates, formed and closely riveted to hold tight several times the operating steam pressure.

"The 30 vertical fire tubes of 1/8-inch wall thickness, 5-feet long, yearly needed replacement, usually when the first leak caused by either the burning through by fire, or corrosion by the caustic boiler water was observed. The method of removing a tube was:

1. to drill a diagonal hole at the top head and insert a wire hook in the hole
2. on top and bottom,cold chisel a slit in the tube from the ends about 2-inches with a small air hammer,and hammer the projecting tube ends inward so that each end of a tube was loose in the head(without damaging the head).
3. with a chain hoist pull the tube completely out of the boiler. The tube holes in the boiler head were about 1/16th inch larger than the tubes,so installing in place the new tubes was not difficult. The top end of the tube had been flared wider so it held the tube in the vertical position. With an air hammer drill fitted with a tube roller, the ends of the tubes were tightly expanded into the head holes.

"After a hot day's work, I fully understood why they named the combination of a mug of beer to chase the slug of whiskey."

Bob describes the nature of the Worley Steam Crane he worked on:

"The crawling mechanism of the Worley Steam Crane I worked on was a simple preceder of the later Clutch differential gear Caterpillar crawlers. Each crawler track had a steel ratchet-dog positive clutch THE DOG, SPRUNG into the engaged position, had to be disengaged as follows if you needed to turn the vehicle....(you were going forward in a straight line,so stop!)....get down under between the tracks...take the hooked chain tied beneath the cab and hook your choice of either of the track dogs.... get back up and pull the lever throttle that turns the cab and boom, causing the chain to pull the dog out .... then pull the throttle lever that powers the crawler tracks to go either back or fore and the thing will turn so....To continue in the new direction, release tension on that chain and get under again and hit the dog with a sledge to reengage power to both crawler tracks. This was a great improvement over the method used to turn a donkey engine rig."

Another aspect of working with Bert is Bob's story of the Steam Donkey:

"The steam donkey that Bert Smith had consisted of a 3-drum steam hoist and a vertical firetube steam boiler mounted on a pair of 16" x16" x 20 foot timbers spaced about 6 feet. On the front was hinged a 50-foot A-frame boom leaning foreward on turnbuckled guywires.

"The top of the boom had a crownblock of several pulleys rigged to 2 of the drums, with a snatch block hook dangling. The rear of the boiler firebox door with an ising-glass window had a draft regulator and the firegrate was fed vast amounts of cut down to size wood scraps.

"It would take about half an hour to build up a 100psi head of steam and it required close attention to prevent a safety valve blowoff. Once you had a head of steam another job was to watch the water level in the vertical glass tube, keep an on board water tank filled and operate the water injector device to keep the water level in the boiler adjusted. This was the firemans duty.

"The drum gears were powered through a throttle valve by a 2 cylinder reciprocating engine, gears connected to the drums by disc clutches, drums holding the tensed cables with interconnected brakes, all of these under the control of the operating engineer. This ponderous rig was moved about on a plentiful supply of 6" x 8 foot wood rollers, rolling on overlapping timber tracks laid on the ground in the direction of travel. Usually the top of the boom was guyed to spaced "deadman" anchors by means of long ropes with 4 part pulleys. Motive force was supplied by small drums alongside the engine (called "niggerheads") where a man who made two rope turns around such drum could amplify his power immenselyby pulling his end snugger around the drum, the other end of that rope being anchored foreward. the whole apparatus being further anchored to deadmen to prevent undesired motion. Our use of this donkey was to rig it up for driving pilings."

Later that year, Bob recalls:

"On my 18th birthday, according to the promise my mother had made during the previous years, placating denied requests by me to learn to drive our family automobile, she finally gave me an around-the-block driving lesson which was followed by her getting out of the car and saying, "Now you drive it around the block." I was ready to drive, but with uncertainty, I blurted "You mean all by myself?" She answered, "Of course...You have been studying this problem for years, you are ready, now go!"

So , I made it around the block, and as I approached our front curb to park, my sister and my mother were cheering when Marian also shouted, "Go around again".

Suddenly indecisive, I turned the car too quickly into our alleyway, but, not sharply enough, and squarely hit with a loud "BANG" a power pole with the stout front bumper of our 1929 Essex, bouncing the car backward about 4-feet. It seemed, suddenly that the whole neighborhood gathered around the scene amazed that the bottom of the slightly dented pole had been forced sideways a full 2-inches through the soil and that there was no damage to the car or its embarrassed driver. This final part of that lesson uniquely inspired an attitude of attention and responsibility.