POWER August 2010 - 68

CLASSIC MARMADUKE
Marmy, a Horse, and Compressors
Steve Elonka began chronicling the exploits of Marmaduke Surfaceblow-a
six-foot-four marine engineer with a steel brush mustache and a foghorn
voice-in POWER in 1948, when Marmaduke raised the wooden mast of
the SS Asia Sun with the help of two cobras and a case of Sandpaper Gin.
Marmy's simple solutions to seemingly intractable plant problems remain
timeless. This Classic Marmaduke story, originally published more than 50
years ago, illustrates that although solutions may be easy to identify, the
challenge is often in the implementation. Sometimes a little horse sense
is all that is necessary.
" A
ll hell broke loose in the quiet
little town of St. Mary's, Georgia,
one July morning in 1916.
" As I was saying, all hell broke loose that
morning in St. Mary's, but let me tell you
guys what I was doing in that dinky port in
the first place. Three of us engineers from
the SS Caribbean went ashore in Savannah
one evening after pulling in from Havana. We
burned up the town that night and next morning
I awoke in the local hotel at St Mary's.
Don't ask me how I got there. All I know is
that I was stone broke.
" Walking down to the water-front, I came
to the Pratt Refrigeration Co. A native told
me that Joshua Pratt was the big shot in town.
Fishermen brought their shrimp to his place
for icing and shipping. That guy owned half
the town and drove two of the finest horses
in those parts.
" Pratt was in his office and asked me what
in hell I wanted. When I told him I was a marine
engineer, he laughed, then motioned for
me to follow him into the plant. There I saw
three 3D-ton horizontal CO2
compressors
running at full speed.
" 'You call yourself an engineer,' he
cackled. 'Well, you got a job and we'll see
how good you really are.' Then he explained
that usually one or two compressors would
carry the load, but that lately all three had to
run. Trouble was the condenser was coated
with paraffin. Seemed that old Joshua had
tried to pinch pennies by using a paraffinbase
oil in the compressors instead of the
usual arctic oil.
" Pratt told me to hang up my coat and
start rigging up a makeshift condenser from
old piping so I could start cleaning the
fouled up condenser soon as it was ready.
His idea was to run the piping out into the
bay and back. But I knew that was easier
said than done.
" 'I'll get that gunk out of those tubes
without shutting down, tearing down, build68
" Everyone
was staring up openmouthed. Only the horse was calm. "
ing a new condenser or opening one piece of
equipment,' I promised.
" 'How?' asked Joshua, suddenly swallowing
his Adam's apple and staring blankly
at me.
" 'By shutting off the cooling water to the
condenser and getting the condenser so damn
hot that all that paraffin will melt out,' was
my answer.
" 'Over my dead body,' wheezed Pratt.
'You ain't gonna burn up my expensive plant
just to try a hair-brained theory. Operating refrigeration
equipment calls for horse sense,'
he added. And that was that.
" So I spent the day going through the motions
of sizing up the place for the jury-rig
condenser and scouting around for tools and
equipment. 'You can kill a hog without breaking
his legs and letting him bleed to death,' I
always said, and I was going to do that condenser
the easy way. In the meantime, I got
acquainted with the operator: Frank Peeler.
" That afternoon I told Frank my plans for
melting out that paraffin. But I let him know
that it was a two-man job and also that it
would have to be done after midnight.
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" Frank was skeptical, but after we polished
off a bottle of Sandpaper Gin at the local bar
that evening, he was with me.
" At midnight Frank and I entered Pratt's
stable. We unhitched one of his horses and
led him down the street to St Mary's Presbyterian
Church. Winding steps that weren't
too steep lead up to a belfry with a railing
around it.
" We blindfolded the nag and started him
up those steps. At first he balked, but after
Frank pulled on his halter from his bow-
while I did some pretty good convincing
from his stern-he finally got the idea and
arrived in good shape. But it wasn't easy.
" Next morning all hell popped loose.
" The day broke beautiful and clear. Then
the first early riser, one Jed Koster, passed
the church on the way to his shrimp boat as
he had done for years. But this morning he
heard the unmistakable neighing of a horse-
not from the usual direction of Joshua Pratt's
stable, but from directly above the church.
" Jed looked up, blinked his eyes, then
turned white as a ghost. He quickly glanced
up again, as if dreading to look. Yep, there
POWER | August 2010
http://www.powermag.com
POWER August 2010

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