T h e a u d ie n c e h a d listened with fixed attention to the dark-haired young man on the platform. His account of life and death had brought him a notoriety quite different from his earlier popularity as a prep basketball player. The question shot up from the teen-age group, as it had from so many other listeners. “What is it like to be buried alive, Paul?” Paul Turley had been a determined young athlete in Watsonville, California — determined to let nights of city-league basketball and after-game drinking parties set the pace for his post-high-school life. Until several summers ago no thought of death, let alone the word, had ever crossed his mind or dimmed his pleasure in the popularity burning so brightly in his future. Then, suddenly, at 3:30 on the afternoon of July 30, 1957, death became more than a thought to avoid. Next
day newspapers carried the headline: “WORKER BURIED ALIVE IN SAND PIT NEAR DEATH.” An employee at Granite Construction Company’s Monterey Supply Depot, Paul had busied himself that day with one of the production crews in the yard. He bogged along in one of the mammoth storage bins that feeds tons o f fine sandlike granite dust into the jaws of a hot mixing vat used in producing highway surfacing blacktop. “ I remember that an occasional glance at the large gas torches, used for drying the dust, would remind me of things a couple of ‘preachy’ friends used on me, all about hell and punishment. The sight seemed to visual ize their sermons.” Trodding knee-deep in the dense, dry dust beneath him, Paul probed with a long pole into the slow-moving mountain in an attempt to detect objects below the sur face which might clog the conveyer machinery.
14
THE K IN G 'S BUSINESS
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