Flagman
Chapter 21 from Bill Owens' upcoming book "Chicken Heads"
Summer of 1960.
I was working construction and living with my Dad in his house trailer. To get a Laborers’ Union card, you had to get a job, and you couldn’t get a job without a Union Card. Dad did help me get a union card.
My first job was laying sewer pipes in a housing development. Then, later that summer I was a highway traffic flagman and I seriously sunburned my nose.
Thirty years later, I developed basal cell carcinoma, skin cancer on my nose. The doctor said that to remove the cancer cells, he would have to remove a large piece of skin from my nose. He asked if he could graft skin from my butt to cover the missing piece of nose skin. I said “No” because it would be embarrassing to wear butt skin on my nose. He was able to stretch the existing skin and sew up the area.
That summer, I received a letter from Chico State College. It stated that I was no longer eligible to take classes because I had not taken the required English 1A classes. I didn’t care about Chico because my college roommate, Jim McCullough, had discussed going to Europe. So when I did fail College English, I thought that when I was in Paris, I could learn to speak French.
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