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With Rivers supervising our diagnoses and performance, we kept our local clientele happy and soon expanded widely. To our maintenance contracts around Cooperstown homes and country estates we added work on golf courses, cemeteries, the park and street trees of several towns and villages. We did roadside clearance for new highways and hazard removal throughout three counties. We had our own spray rig for pest control and with it we experimented —but only briefly, for the two don't mix—on brush control. In snowy winter we kept our men off the relief rolls by cutting and skidding sawlogs for lumber mills, pulpwood for paper companies, even elm planks for a casket factory out in Oneida which had "rough box" contracts for the war in Korea. Our proudest moment came when we were put in charge of the trees at General Electric's home plant in Schenectady, where the late Dr. Charles Steinmetz had planted many exotic species. (The little wizard used to do a lot of his best thinking up in a tree-house at his home.) Through such varied experience I could hardly escape becoming familiar with a broad spectrum of other tree-service practitioners, our competitors. They ranged from district crews of the biggest, nationally advertised companies, to the itinerant, unschooled "gypsies" who roam the land seasonally picking up small jobs from town to town. (As a regional representative in later years for one of the leading companies I learned that all too often there is little to choose between a "gypsy" and some of the boys the big advertisers hire but fail to train.) Companies doing line-clearance for public utilities—power and telephone-make a practice of paying their men minimum wages but letting them use the company trucks and tools to "buck" work over weekends for their own accounts. Trained only to hack trees back from poles and wires, most such operatives are strictly tree butchers, not surgeons, yet people will hire them just for their cheapness. Like the "gypsies," they are to be side-stepped if only because, despite what they will tell you, they can have no liability or compensation coverage. |
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