CLEARLAKE — Walking calmly along the AT&T fence on Old Highway 53 in the rain, the athletic, trim looking Bill Sauer with white hair and beard, looked to be in his 70s.
Sauer is an 84-year-old lineman (85 in July) who climbs 35-plus foot poles to work on fiber optics for AT&T. He was recently hired back to AT&T. He was recently hired back to AT&T on May 13. On his fourth day back on the job he was fixing a pole near Lower Lake that had fallen during a storm.
At age 20, Sauer went to work at the phone company, AT&T (then Pacific Telephone), but he was drafted by the Army at age 22 and stayed in for two years. He learned to maintain radio communications equipment and installed them into tanks, jeeps and armored personnel carriers, stationed in the Sacramento area but traveling all around California.
After the Army, Sauer went back to work at AT&T as a switchman, maintaining electronics equipment of the day and worked with them for 19 years in the Los Angeles area and then transferred to Lake County as a lineman. He said, laughing, “At that point I’d never climbed a pole, but I caught on quick. It’s just like walking up stairs, you don’t think much about it, you just do what you’re trying to do.”
Sauer spoke about how tall the poles he climbed were, saying, “The ones that we commonly work on are no taller than about 35 feet. But there have been times when I was working for a contractor, we had to climb poles that were freeway crossings, where the poles had to be very tall, 85 feet at the top. We didn’t go clear to the top, we were working at the 70 foot level. Power is on top and our cable is eight or 10 feet below that.”
Technology has changed quite a bit since Sauer first worked wth AT&T; from copper to fiber.
James Bernauer, 42, a maintenance splicer (one who goes out to residences for repairs and installations), poked his head into Sauer’s barebones office to congratulate him on being back on the job with AT&T. When asked if he would trust someone Sauer’s age to work with, Bernauer said, “If they had the knowledge and the experience that this guy has, in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with him. If Bill said he needed to handle something, I wouldn’t hesitate because he knows what he’s doing and he’s going to send me in the right direction and not going to put me in harm’s way.” Sauer laughed at the high praise, and was surprised to hear Bernauer say he’d been working with AT&T for 18 and a half years. “I can remember the day you walked in the door,” said Sauer. To which Bernauer responded, “And not knowing much of anything.”
Sheli Barnes, Sauer’s daughter, said that her father was, “One of seven people to have worked for 54 and a half years for the phone company. At the time of his retirement from AT&T, that’s what they told him. After he retired from the phone company, he worked for a contract company, as a lineman, doing contract work, funny enough, for AT&T. Retirement just didn’t suit him.”
Retirement kept Sauer busy, building a 1940 Ford. He bought two piles of parts and built the classic car out of those parts. He also took up hay farming to supply his daughter’s two horses with hay. Sauer said he enjoys working outdoor, building things, meeting new people. His favorite job is placing cable and least favorite is getting up in the middle of the night to work, but he does it.
According to Sauer, being a lineman is physically difficult. “We have to constantly be aware of physical and electrical dangers. To be a journeyman lineman, you have to be an all-weather lineman and be willing to work whenever your needed, even at 2 a.m.” He works a normal eight-hour day but is on call 24 hours, seven days a week.
During the time he worked for a contractor, Sauer worked all around California but he constantly applied to work back at AT&T so that he could work out of Lake County. He was finally hired back and began work, in Clearlake.
It’s not unusual to hire someone older, AT&T spokesperson, Ryan Oliver, said, “At AT&T a big part of our focus of the workforce is diversity. We have diversity in gender, race and age. It’s not unusual for us to have young folks and older folks at AT&T.”
Sauer told, in his calm, deep voice, how about one of the more difficult jobs in his career. It was when he worked in Paradise, after the fire. “I felt an incredible sadness to see a once beautiful area destroyed. It was like going into a war zone. We knew we had a job to do and so we started to work. It was total devastation. I had been there before the fire and I could hardly recognize it as the same area. We first were involved in removing the fire damaged cable and poles and then we started replacing the poles and the cables that were burned. We worked for two months with only a couple of days off. For awhile we stayed in Corning and just commuted up to the work area. Then we stayed in Oroville, it was the closest we could get.”
“I expect that fire will happen again somewhere this season. I don’t think it’s a matter of if, but a matter of where. And when that happens, we will do our best and get things back the way it was, or better than it was before.”
Sauer is constantly asked how long will it be before he retires for good and he always replies, “I’ll work until it’s not fun anymore.”
