The Day Kenny Got The Shaft

Memoir 042008

Kenny was showing me how to operate a punch press. It had two buttons, one red, one green. The red one activated the press, but it wouldn’t work unless you pushed the green one, too. That was to make sure you had both hands out of the way when the punch came down. Our job was to press tooled steel shafts into steel gears to go into a grease box in a motor. The gear was already in the jig when he pushed the shaft up into the collar with one hand, holding it there with his finger. I didn’t know his other hand was on the red button. I leaned in to see what he was doing and hit the green button. The press pushed the shaft through his finger. When it went back up, as it was designed to do, he swung his arm in an arc, blood spurting several feet into the air. We wrapped his hand in gauze and I drove him to the hospital. The gauze was soaked through by the time we got there. I apologized, saying “I’m sorry,” over and over, until he finally told me, “I know, now would you shut up,” but it wasn’t a question. A couple of months later Kenny almost died when the stock car he was working under slipped off its blocks and crushed his face and chest. He lifted the car up, slid out and drove himself to the hospital. I saw him a couple of weeks after he got out of the hospital and he was still blue and green where the damage had been done. I’d say he was not only unrecognizable; he was someone you wouldn’t want to look at. He didn't come back to work, at least not while I was there, and I heard some time later he had died. He was a really nice guy, salt of the earth, working man, with a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought on himself, though not on purpose. I’m careful not to say it aloud anymore, but I'm still sorry I had a hand in putting that shaft through his finger.