Sky Cowboys: They Sit Tall on the Pole

Robert Rickey, his spurs dug into a pole 22 feet above the ground, tossed a basketball back and forth with four other young men hanging from nearby poles while an instructor watched intently.

“I didn’t know basketball would be a prerequisite for this job,” Rickey said.

At least no one was asking him to dribble.

Rickey and the other airborne trainees were students at a two-week pole-climbing school conducted by GTE California in Marina del Rey. Their goal: certification as “installer-maintainers,” those intrepid souls who start telephone service for residents and businesses.

Once they were known as “linemen.” Now, 39 of the company’s 1,389 pole people are women.

Boots and Spurs

Wearing holsters (for their tools), chaps and boots with spurs, or gaffes, they resemble “cowboys of the sky,” as GTE spokesman Larry Cox called them.

Some of the wooden poles have steps these days, and some lines are buried. But where naked poles have to be scaled, “they do it the same way they were doing it 50 years ago,” instructor Rich Mellor said.

That is, one step at a time, digging the gaffes into the wood, while hanging on to a safety belt looped around the pole.

The GTE classroom, in the rear of a utility yard, was a giant sand box housing several genuine telephone poles--except none bore garage-sale notices.

The basketball exercise is an important part of the curriculum, Mellor said, because it shows the students they can safely perform tasks with both hands, such as attaching clamps to the poles to hold the drop wires.

Relaxing after a morning workout, the sweating pupils allowed as how they have a greater love of heights than the average earthling.

“I always liked to jump off roofs, that sort of thing,” Rickey said nonchalantly.

Shave Poles

Rickey’s class had a 100% graduation rate, meaning that they were granted the right to take part in the traditional final ceremony, shaving their poles with a double-handled draw-knife to remove the splinters on 22 feet of surface.

About 20% of the pupils flunk out at GTE’s school, which is one of half a dozen or so run by utilities and private companies in the Southland.

“Every once in a while we get someone who’ll get scared up there (on the pole) and a couple of times I’ve had to go up there and walk them down,” Mellor said.

He laughed as he remembered one bragging student--an eventual graduate--who climbed to the 22-foot point (the average level for telephone lines) and suddenly not only stopped talking but said he couldn’t come down.

“I told him I was leaving to find a chain saw,” Mellor said. “I went around a corner and peered back. He was coming down.”