Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/232

 GEORGE W. GOETHALS 213 day, ' * he would tell the foreman, say at Pedro Miguel. * * You aren^t going to let Gatun beat you, are youT*' A fierce rivalry grew up over amounts of excavation done, cement used, iron work put in, and the results were published from week to week in the Canal Record, The struggle has come to infect all classes of workmen. A story is told (and ihey swear it is true!) of a man on the Atlantic division em- ployed at the upper end of a huge drainage pipe used to carry water out of the hydraulic fill at Gatun dam. It was a long tunnel with a curve in the middle, and this man's job con- sisted in keeping the entrance free from obstruction. One day he inconsiderately fell into the pipe and was caught up and swept through with the torrent. They picked him up for dead, but presently, opening his eyes, he said, * * They couldn 't do that on the Pacific division I * * Similarly Goethals stirred rivalry among the steam-shovel men as to which crew could dig the most dirt day by day and week by week, and this contest, the results of which also ap- pear regularly in the Record^ is one of the real interests upon the zone. The steam-shovel scores are as eagerly scanned as the baseball records! Here, for example, is part of a monthly steam-shovel record as it appears in the Canal Record. 208, working 25 days in the Culebra district, which excavated 54,866 cubic yards of rock and earth. The second best record for the month was made by shovel No. 207, working 25 days in IJie Culebra district, which excavated 54,356 cubic yards of rock. high record for one day by excavating 3,040 cubic yards of earth on July 26th. '^ Having thus established records in many lines — excavat- ing, cement-work and so on — Goethals and his aids encour- aged the workmen to beat them. 'a hear No. 300 took out 14,000 cubic yards last week,'* <}k>etha]s tells a shovel man; **you ought to beat that!*'
 * * They are putting in concrete at Gatun at so many yards a
 * The high record for the month was made by shovel No.
 * Shovel No. 260, working in the Culebra district, made a