The 2300 volt breakers on the Enid Power Plant had no disconnects on them and of course we couldn't interrupt the service so they had to be inspected hot.  The generator breaker and sometimes the high line breakers, we didn't even dare to disconnect those so we very, very, very carefully lowered the oil tank down and looked at the contacts to see if they were hot or any signs of anything wrong with them.  That was a very risky thing to do.  

 

One time when Lester Coleman were working on one of those, in some manner, I guess when we disconnected the potential lead, the phase that had the potential lead on it, he and I both got in series with that potential coil, which took considerable current thru it for a man, I would say.  Any way, we both got a terrific shock that leveled us down, we couldn't work for a little while after that.  We had little burns on our hands.  Incidentally, we were doing all of this with bare hands too.  Many times, I worked in metering equipment at 2300, changing out current transformers, etc. with bare hands standing on a dry board.  Linemen in those days never used rubber gloves.

 

I remember one thing that I used to do after I got my climbing tools was to climb up on one pole and go across the street on the telephone messenger cable hand over hand over the street to the next pole and come down on the  next pole.  That didn't seem like much of a trick to me, as a matter of fact, the linemen did that quite a bit when they had a chance to save coming up and down the pole.  Incidentally, I used my climbing tools for many years, even some after I came to Oklahoma City on 1930.  In Enid and Sapulpa there was all kinds of work that would come up and a person had to climb sometimes.  Although I never was classed as a lineman, I have done almost every kind of line work that there was in those days.