During his senior year at Humboldt High, Dick Foster was a janitor at City Hall. Duties included sweeping the city streets on Friday nights. He even hand-dug a couple of graves at Mount Hope Cemetery.
When he graduated in 1953, a full-time job awaited.
He expected to be drafted anytime ? which came four years later. After his two-year obligation, including one in Korea, Dick returned to city employment. Dick worked for the City of Humboldt for 47 years, rising to the rank of superintendent of the water plant.
His remembrances of what occurred before and throughout his tenure would fill a book.
Dick Foster?s 47-year career working for the City of Humboldt included upgrading the dam just south of the Marsh arch bridge that spans the Neosho River at the west edge of Humboldt, shown below courtesy of Google Maps. REGISTER/BOB JOHNSON
DICK?S FATHER, Charlie, was also water plant super for years. The job was more demanding then, with the elder Foster working seven days a week. A crew of three kept the wheels turning at the water treatment plant.
During World War II, another was hired for security, for fear of sabotage.
He also gave the others a break. For years, Humboldt had no dispatch.
When a police officer was needed, telephone operators stationed in an office at the rear of the Bailey Hotel flipped a switch to turn on a red light atop the building.
The operators, who probably recited ?number please? in their sleep, also triggered the fire siren that summoned volunteers who raced to the fire barn just as they do today.
Winter weather often intervened.
Before the city purchased a salt spreader, ?we threw salt from buckets at the intersection of Ninth and Bridge streets,? the main intersection, and anywhere else ice or snow posed a problem.
Dick recalls the winter of 1986-87 when the mercury dropped to the teens and single digits and stayed there. Heavy snow fell on Christmas Eve. ?I was called out at 8 that night and Gene Reeves and I didn?t go home (much) for weeks,? working to keep the water mains open.
?Once I crawled behind a control panel, laid on the floor and slept for about an hour and a half.?
A year after he began full-time work, the old river dam, built originally of car-sized rocks, was upgraded to what it is today. The legendary 1954 drought was an advantage.
First chore was to pour concrete on the north side, ?as deep as we could dig.? When that concrete set, dirt was dumped into the river for a road so a compressor to run air tools was handy. ?I backed that compressor out on the road every day for two weeks,? Dick said.
After water below the dam was removed with an irrigation pump borrowed from the Works family, a 13-foot-deep footing was dug and the dam was faced with concrete. The boulders, backbone of the dam and worn slick by years of running water, also were covered with concrete.
