Rick Williams

I look at 19-year-olds these days as kids, and that was my age when I opened a very small commercial sign shop. I had been working for a local shop all of a year of so, and I knew just enough about the business to make me dangerous.

And “dangerous” is probably the correct description, which makes it all the more amazing that I’m still here some 40 or so years later. I have forgotten half my brushes with mortality, but just the ones I remember would give me gray hair if I thought about them…uh oh, too late.

Some were just plain dumb, like cleaning out a spray gun with gasoline because I was out of thinner, and spraying it inside the shop with the air compressor running two or three steps away. When I realized what I was doing, working on the perfect air-fuel mixture with me in the combustion chamber, I set down the gun and ran for my life. Somehow the building, and the idiot fleeing it, avoided a fiery explosion.

The first old ladder-crane I bought was all winch operated and human powered. Even a simple but strong winch lifted the boom instead of a hydraulic ram. It was a great old machine, but when I bought it, I should have replaced every cable on it with new wire rope more than strong enough to do its job, but that would have made too much sense.

When that main cable broke, with the boom extended way out and me on the end of it, as luck (or providence) would have it, the tip of the boom was elevated all of 6” over a sloping metal awning, which was much easier to repair than I would have been. Why it hadn’t failed with me 30 feet in the air on any number of previous jobs only the good Lord knows.

Later I moved that tough old boom, the one with the new cables, over onto a slightly newer truck with a steel flatbed that sat off the ground about 3 1/2 feet. That truck had no rear bumper, but just a step made of heavy angle iron that could be used as a trailer hitch but usually had no ball.

I guess I was looking up at my work, and not down at my feet, when I backed off that truck bed and missed the step. The ground below was solid concrete and I was going to hit it hard, but somehow I knew to put my chin on my chest and flatten out before gravity had its way with me.

Whump! Like a bag of fertilizer I hit that pavement with all my weight, and every bone in my body cried out… shoulders, ribs, elbows and hips. Everything but my head, which I eased to the ground, then closed my eyes to do a mental inventory. I was too scared to look anyway.

The one witness who was nearby came running over and thought I was dead. After a minute or two, once I realized I could still move at least most of what usually moved, I opened my eyes and managed to sit up, still in one piece, and later had only one bruise, which covered 40 percent of my body.

All was forgotten in a week or two. Well, the pain was mostly forgotten, anyway. The story I remember well enough to tell it 25 years or so later. I would like to say that was the last of my near disasters that had threatened life and limb, but that would not be an honest accounting. However, I have tried to learn something from my experiences over the years, though I am no doubt a slow study.

My dad, still living and coughing after 70 years of smoking, figured he could teach me by extolling, “Do as I say, and not as I do.” He needn’t have bothered; the coughing was lesson enough. But I truly must have a talent, to be a better teacher than example, as no one who has ever worked for me, whoever they were over the past 35 years or so, has suffered hardly more than a paper cut, and I surely want to keep it that way. If they knew all my failings, and mostly they don’t, they might smirk when I tell them safety is job one, and two … and three.

I like the mission statement of one of our larger customers, which I’ve modified slightly to read like this: “Our job is to do all our work professionally and productively, meeting or exceeding customer expectations, and to go home safe to our families every night.” Past transgressions may make me a bit of a hypocrite, but I believe that more than ever, especially since some of my workforce is family, too.

That’s a good motto for any sign shop, anywhere. More than deadlines or profit, safety really is the top priority, at your shop or mine, and I hope my telling of the ridiculous times I’ve forgotten will help someone, at some sign shop somewhere, to remember just a little better.

Have a great month.