Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 9

BUCKINGHAM'S and GRACE BUILDING ANECDOTES from DAVE RUTTER.

I thank Dave very, very much for not only providing the correction to what I had written about car-switch directions (see Part 2) but for also supplying the following bits of hilarity!

Apart from just editing the format for use herein, I haven't modified the information at all.

DAVE at BUCKINGHAM'S.

Roz.

A correction to Roz's proper name. Her name was Rosalie, not Roslyn.

For more than forty years, whenever Garth brought the subject up, Dave could never get him to understand that it wasn't "Roslyn". I obviously had the same problem.

The Ziehl-Abegg motors.

Dave says.....
"They were the quietest motors I have ever come across. In all my time with EPL they used a number of different brands of AC motors both single speed and pole changers such as Rotos, Bruncken and I can’t recall the others but they were never as quiet is the Ziehl-Abegg units. I even suggested to Ralph Ledwidge at one stage that they should install a flashing light in the machine room when any of them were running. That idea fell on deaf ears."

Arnold's Schwarzenegger.
Straight from the horses (Dave's) mouth.....
"Kurt Gahler and I were the first two to start at Buckinghams and Flange [George Farham], Ken Rousham and Alan Andrews followed to help with some of the mechanical work. Then the rest of the mob came along.

Young Kurt Gahler and Dave Rutter. (I don't think this was at Buck's.)

During this time, at lunch times I started to lift some test weights with the aid of a piece of 1-¼” conduit, one weight on each end. One lunch time Flange started to gee me up to try and lift 2 at each end.
Being young and invincible I fell for the bait.
Anyway, I got the weights up past my chest and on the way up in the air when I got the staggers and started dancing around the roof. (This was always done on the roof just outside the machine room).

Eventually one arm must have got tired or I lost balance and one weight on one side slid off the conduit and over the side wall of the building to the lane below. The remainders I just dropped to the deck.
Right below was a large butchers van delivering meat to the food section in the ground floor of Buckingham's.
We all just scarpered, but not before seeing the test weight embedded into the cobblestones about 6 inches from the tailboard lowered to the deck to allow the drivers to wheel the carcases off.

A few hours later we found the weight just sitting on the footpath up against the wall of the building.
Not a single word of it was mentioned to us.
From then on, Flange and Kurt nicknamed me the Strongest Boy in Arnolds.
Only last year I caught up with Kurt who now lives down at Busselton and the first thing he said when he saw me was “Here he is, the strongest boy in Arnolds”."

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DAVE at GRACE BUILDING.
Anyone can blow a fuse.....but this was a blown power station!!
Dave's words.....
"That was some place to work. There were 4800 people employed in the building and probably 80% were young women. I just loved working there. [As did we all! BK]

One incident of note apart from the improved love life was when Larry Evans and I were running some wiring in the machine room next to #3 the passenger lift. We were in the machine room pushing a 60 ft spring steel snake into a conduit and despite my telling Larry on numerous occasions to be very careful because there were exposed items of switch-gear everywhere, he typically was not paying close attention and giggling as he very often did and he allowed the snake to touch the two 480 volt terminals on the tappet switch.  They fused together and all lifts that were running stopped.

We immediately prised the damaged snake from the terminals and raced down and got anyone in any of the lifts out.
I then went down to the basement and checked the fuses and breakers to discover there was no 480 Volt power to the building. The White Bay Power Station had dropped out!
[You read it here first, folks! BK]

White Bay after Larry & Dave blew it up!

White Bay supplied all 480 Volt DC to the city. So, effectively it meant any of the older lifts still running on 480V DC anywhere in the city had stopped, with the possibility that there were passengers stuck everywhere.
We disappeared. Our passengers were all out and all the fuses and breakers in our building were set and ready to go. Problem belonged to somewhere else!!!!!

I never ever let Larry forget this incident though. I often wonder what he is doing these days."

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I am indebted to Dave for providing these snippets of Arnold's history and freely admit to bursting into laughter when reading the tale about White Bay! I had never heard that one before; he kept it pretty close to his chest for all those years.😀