Once A Welder

Apprentice welder Jimmy McKee admires one of the steel fortresses he and his fellow-tradesmen restore for a living.

Second year apprentice Jimmy McKee leans over a safety rail protecting an access hole that drops forty feet to the steel hull of a navy destroyer watching a crane lift a bucket containing the charred remains of what had been a painter fifteen minutes earlier.

The image described in the opening scene of Once A Welder is drawn from an experience I had as a nineteen-year-old apprentice working on the USS Belknap. It is one of two deaths I witnessed that have remained with me decades later, scenes that influence the narratives that make up my stories.