Summer Jobs with ARAMCO

The first summer I was a stock boy at the Dhahran Air Base PX. Through this job I learned about the exotic purchases of the military; the buyers went to Europe and brought back all manner of wonderful things. The Scandanavian Christmas candle carousel, the German 400 day clocks, and Italian shoes. Mr. Straghetti was my boss and he did the best he could to keep the older Italian workers from completely corrupting me. They were fantastic, teaching me about the finer points of life (not pasta!).

The next job was in the ARAMCO consolidated shops. Oh boy, I thought, this will be fun. WRONG! I was assigned to an outside yard used as a holding pen to gather parts. My domain was a series of scattered, wooden pallets. Everything was out there from toilets to acid bottles, linoleum to lath. It was horribly hot and I was always trying to figure a way to get out of the heat. My office was a big crate; the door was just a hole. My authority was a key to the yard. Finally luck smiled on me. One day a driver came to pick up some two inch pipe. He said, "Lazim jeeb bibe!" He held up two fingers. "Ithnain!" He had no chit (Everyone knows, you can't do business without a chit!). I showed him the bibe but would not let him take it. "Lazim chit!," I said. "Mo-lazin chit," he said. "Mafee Chit, mafee bibe," I said. This went on for a while. Finally, he left. The next day I was assigned to an office INSIDE the shops. They took my key and I learned that sometimes you CAN do business without a chit! I was grateful for this lesson (68F).

The next year it was the main commissary storehouse. I worked at inventory and stocking with Khalid. He showed me the ropes and as he gained English reading and writing skills our jobs reversed. When we started I read the bills and he stocked the shelves. By the end of the summer, he was reading the bills and I was stocking the shelves.

A few summers later I moved on to photogrammetry! We had an old, electric Burroughs adding machine and we computed theodolite (star) shots to nine places behind the decimal! The Burroughs would cycle yan-na-na, yan-na-na, yan-na-na and cough up the answer to our calculations in little windows. These fixes were tranlated to geographic points on the photographs, which overlapped one another. It was great to work on some of the first large ARAMCO maps produced by the Exploration department. I worked with Stan Elberg's dad and he was so patient. I also sorted all the aerial photographs taken of the peninsula. These were in the vault in North Admin. They were microfilmed and sent away for safe keeping. These photos were used with a stereoptic to draw the contour lines for the maps. That was the summer of 1958, my last summer in Dhahran until 1982.

I guess the most fun of these jobs was meeting my friends at the pool or Fiesta room after work. We would talk over our jobs and complain or rave depending. Our conversations always seemed to come around to school talk. One big topic was who was going to what boarding school and how we liked it. ARAMCO Schools did not extend beyond ninth grade so this was an important topic to the graduating ninth graders (they were graduated in late July, early August). They asked a lot of questions about the different boarding schools. I loaned my ACS annual (53/54) and it was lost.

I remember when I found out I was going to ACS, I asked the ACS summer students how it was? They scared the devil out of me with stories of hazing and who to look out for. The scare was worse than the actual events but I did see one student paddled. Luckily the sophomore class was huge that year and we hung together to avoid mistreatment.

I must tell you all that my classmate, Gary Cody ('56), sent me a copy of the 53/54 Al Manara last week. We established email contact (ARAMCO Brat directory) after years of silence. It was great to see pictures of all those folks after 44 years! God Bless you Gary Cody.

Rolf Christophersen'56