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PLSO Issue 2 2015 March April

The continuing saga of Robert Plumb „ Lee Spurgeon, PLS THE CONTINUING SAGA OF ROBERT PLUMB A few issues back I had written a 7 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org story called “The String Broke” which explained how I entered the surveying profession. The lead character of the story was a gentleman by the name of Robert Plumb. I received a lot of feedback from the story and it generally fell into two different categories. The first category was that of suspended belief. Many individuals believed Robert Plumb was nothing more than a fictional character I created in order to get a laugh out of you. Now mind you, I truly believe that any story told can and ought to be told better. I also believe that history is stories which are brought to life in a way that can be related to the audience. Basically, history should be Truth’s more interesting and attractive sister. If you want the Truth, she is generally available on any given Friday night. The second category of response I got from the article was to have several people come up to me and actually guess the real life identity of Robert Plumb. Their response was that I had hit the nail squarely on the head in my story. Many actually said this in front of witnesses so it kind of ruins my chances at a career in writing fiction. Oh well. During the course of conversation with a dozen or so people whose Venn diagram circle of life encounters intersected the circle of Robert Plumb’s, shared their stories and recollections of a man who I may have unfairly maligned, but I will get to that at the end of this article. The stories which were related to me included such things as the color of purple that Robert Plumb would become when he got angry, which was a fairly frequent occurrence. Is there a color more purple than just ordinary purple? You are asking me that question? I hope not. I once made the ludicrous mistake of telling my wife there was actually only three shades of lipstick; red, light red, and dark red. I know, what was I thinking? I also heard that working for Robert Plumb was essentially like a Marine Corps boot camp for young surveyors. There were several stories I heard about Robert Plumb’s martial arts abilities but I will sum them up into a brief synopsis: Robert Plumb’s main strategy was to hit his opponent in the fist very hard with his face until he tired his opponent out. But the best story I heard was the story of Robert Plumb staking BPA transmission lines in the deserts of Eastern Washington. Robert Plumb had gotten a contract to stake out several miles of centerline for placing BPA high tension power line towers. The lines were going through some fairly rocky and hard scrabbled areas in the vicinity of Dusty, Washington. The chainman was having an extremely difficult time hammering stakes into the ground at all, much less getting them perfectly vertical and having the width of the lath parallel with the centerline. Mr. Plumb was a man of strictly uncompromising quality and if the chainman had to dig a hole, filter out all the big rocks from his digging and then set the stake with the filtered out dirt, then so be it. That is all well and good in the best of conditions, but in 100 degree heat with gusty winds blowing dust everywhere, after about 10 hours of staking the quality control level of the chainman and Robert Plumb began to diverge. By diverge, I mean that the chainman set a lath that was leaning something like five degrees or less off plumb and he proclaimed that was good enough. Mr. Plumb disagreed and an argument ensued in » continues on page 9 »


PLSO Issue 2 2015 March April
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