peeling wire

one of the things my dad would do to occupy his time was to sit up watching tv late at the night while "peeling wire". i should probably explain what this means.

my dad worked with his brother, my uncle johnny, who was a carpenter. my dad would wander around at work and pick up any left over wire that was laying around and bring it home. he would get particularly excited after the electricians came to install electrical wiring (ooh ooh ooh!!!) and he would go off searching for hours; finding all kinds of stuff and all kinds of different wire. sometimes the wire would be electrical cord wire (two small chambers of plastic with thin wire inside). sometimes it would be wire so thick it wouldn't bend when you held it up. but they were almost always covered in plastic to insulate and prevent electrocuting someone when used for the intended purpose.

for whatever reason, he would cut this casing off, and reveal the wire itself. first he would peel the outer plastic wrapping from a piece by slitting a long line down the side of a 4 to 6 inch piece of wire he had cut and just peel off the casing. and there were so many varieties of metals, brass, silver... but copper was usually the most common and was always my favorite.

when people asked him what he was doing he would say " i peeling my wire" or "don't touch my copper!"

then my mom would say "oh, you and your damn wire!" whenever he would decide to take off to go look for some.

he had a long piece of copper pipe with a bunch of thick tape wrapped around the bottom. after he had peeled a bunch of wire, he would wrap the wire round and round the pipe to form spiral rings. i have no clue how he came up with the method, but it was perfect for making rings. he would use pliers to make sure the rings were perfectly straight. and each thickness of wire had a different method.

he did this obsessively for years while watching tv late into the night. i'm going to reckon he could get 5 done in an hour (conservatively speaking) and estimate he worked on this around 4 hours a day. I think he must have done this for at least 10 years and with 52 weeks in a year, he must have made over 10,500 little wire rings in his lifetime. wow.

but what did we do with all these rings? we sold them to scrap metal places for extra money. my dad always called the money he made off the rings his "coast money" (to go fishing in corpus or rockport, he loved it there) but more often then not, we had to use the money for something else. i don't know if i have any of the rings he made.

i think eventually the electricians caught wind of what my dad was doing, and started saving their scraps more and more. so eventually he moved on to collecting cans and pull tabs.