Western Cable Services | Western Cable Enterprises | Action Flash Barricade

Photos my father took.  

These are some of the “fancy” trucks that my dad and his younger brother owned for their company, Western Cable Services.  They certainly weren’t at the point yet of buying new large equipment.  They usually picked up used vehicles and equipment at military or utility company auctions.  Not in the best shape, yet generally still useable and fixable.  

I remember the three trucks below and drove them all at some point.   

My dad and uncle chose tan as the company vehicle color, obviously with some exceptions.   If I recall correctly, the yellow one was purchased at a Southern California Edison auction.  They took it in to get a cheap tan paint job and were told there’s no way that tan paint could cover that yellow, so they had it repainted a similar yellow to cover scratches and such.

 The middle lineman’s/installer’s truck came from Pacific Telephone.  At the time, their trucks were originally painted dark green (what looks like a thin yellow cover is actually a canopy structure at a neighboring property behind the truck).  The utility bed on the back was interesting.   You can see a slight dome shape over the front of the bed.  The bed had an open design, but the metal roof had sections that slid open and closed.  Inside the bed along the sides were various sized metal storage cabinets and drawers.  There was a pipe rack added to it when it came to Western Cable.  You can see that brace coming up off the right front bumper.  The rack was used for two things.  First, it held conduit pieces that were used on telephone poles when the cable TV line ended at a pole and transitioned to underground.  The cable was put in the conduit and attached to the pole to protect it.  The rack also held boring pipe for when they had to bore under a street.   They removed the manual crank up extension ladder that had been mounted on the truck.  The little bump on top of the cab contained a sealed roof mirror that could be adjusted inside the cab.  When the crank up extension ladder was originally on the truck, this allowed the operator to raise and extend the ladder to generally line it up with a pole or somewhere mid-span, and then the operator could back up the truck, watching the mirror, to hit his target.   The mirror on this truck was essentially useless for our company’s needs.  They did have a couple trucks that left the ladder in place for use.  I just haven’t found any photos of them.   

The final truck of the three was a flatbed truck for general use.  One photo shows a fourth truck, a trusty old pickup truck.  I don’t remember that one.   Wouldn’t be a kick to own any of these now, restore them, and take them to car shows?  

I don’t know where in Southern California the photos below were taken, the location don’t look familiar to me, but I would have been in school when these were taken.   

I do remember the trucks and the old red air compressor.  

Although they ended up eventually buying at least a couple Ditch Witch trenchers (originally used, then new), I don’t know if the one pictured was owned by them or rented. 

I don’t remember when the Ford pickups were acquired, but it was probably sometime in late 1968 or early 1969.

 

My uncle and dad purchased or leased two identical new tan Ford pickup trucks (Maybe that’s why they picked tan for the other trucks?  I don’t know.)  They were standard models.  No air conditioning, AM radios, crank windows, 6 cylinder engines, no power anything, with a three-speed manual transmission stick on the column. 

These two Ford pickups are 5^th generation, which covered 1967-1972, and my dad bought a new 1969 Chevrolet El Camino (tan of course) after he needed to give his pickup truck to a foreman on large contract.  You were just a little thing, yet when we lived in Madera, dad loaned it to me and I drove it for a while, so the El Camino had to be at least eleven years or so old at that time.  Another car I wish I still had! 

After my dad and uncle went their separate ways, dad wanted a similar name as Western Cable Services and took my suggestion of Western Cable Enterprises.  He also changed the logo for his new company from a triangle to a series of three green overlapping boxes that contained the company name.  Nothing fancy, but it worked.   I think I saw one of his old business cards a couple weeks ago amongst all this stuff I’m going through but can’t find it at the moment (I have stacks of stuff around me I’m working through).  I'll edit this post should I find it, or a photo that includes it.   

During construction projects, they rented barricades to put along the road in the construction site.  They were pretty darn basic at the time.  These days you see orange barrels or the thin plastic delineators with a heavy base blocking off lanes.  Western Cable even occasionally used some of the original road flares, which were basically metal round balls with a flat bottom, filled with non-explosive fuel (diesel fuel maybe) with a very thick wick on the top.  You could light them at the end of the day, and they would burn a flame all night long, acting like warning lights along the construction zone.  They were stinky and smokey, to the point the heavy black smoke sometimes negated their safety factor.   

As the products improved, they got safer.  In the picture here, you can see in the background one of the more standard barricades of the time.  

The original version was made of wood, designed like a sawhorse, and was extremely heavy.  The next generation were like this one and used angle metal for the frame/legs rather than heavy full 3”x4” wooden frames.  About the time my dad and uncle decided to go their separate ways, my dad came up with a way to hopefully save money and make a little extra too.  I mentioned renting the barricades was normal, but it was costly, and my dad didn’t like some of the renters.  So, he decided to start his own barricade company too.  This allowed him to purchase barricades from the manufacturer at a discounted price and occasionally rent them out if his construction business was slow.

I don’t remember the name of the former barricade company in Ventura that my dad didn’t like, but the name started with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet.  Calling dad’s barricade company something like “Western Barricade” didn’t cut it for him.  Why?  Because of the telephone book.  Companies were listed by category in the yellow pages, then alphabetically.  He didn’t want to be listed after the competitor, especially being a new company.  He was searching for names, and I (as a brilliant Junior High school student, hahaha!) came up with the name, Action Flash Barricade.  The name put it at the beginning of the yellow pages category listing, and my dad used it.   The barricade above was one of the original ones he purchased.  The removable blinking light on top took two lantern batteries.  Barricades without lights were fine only for day use.  Ones with flashers needed to be used at night, and were rented at a higher cost.  There was a small hole on the side of the weather resistant battery case where you could stick a long skinny poker (like the long end of an Allen wrench, only with a loop to use on keyrings) through the hole to push a switch to turn the blinking light on when used at night, and off when the sun was out.  Although, most workers never bothered to turn them on and off, so the batteries wore out faster than they should.  Stealing the blinking lights themselves became a thing then, so a security bolt was created to hold it onto the barricade.  I had a couple of new ones in my bedroom that flashed constantly 24 hours.  So cool….hahaha!  Also, on the one above, the name and phone number for Action Flash Barricade were painted below the word “CAUTION.”  This allowed law enforcement or public works to contact us at any time in case one got damaged, stolen, or needed to be replaced or serviced.  On the lower panel, it was a routine thing to stencil the name of the company renting the barricade.  Here, it says dad’s company name, Western Cable. 

Later, my dad started purchasing a different type of barricade.  The new ones were pretty fancy for the time.  The one shown here is the only photo I have found of one.  

It was made of all metal and was much lighter than the wood ones.  Plus, they were slimmer so more could be stacked onto a truck or trailer.  The top panel was a piece of sheet metal with the blinker light built into it, so there wasn’t a removable blinker to steal.  The metal legs spread like the original ones to allow for stability.  The small box on top held a single lantern battery for the blinking lamp.   A countersunk Allen screw secured the battery in the box.  Plus, it had a sensor to turn the blinker light on and off automatically for night and day. 

While working for my dad, one of my unpaid tasks included maintaining these barricades.  This included repainting the yellow bottom panel and stenciling the names of renters on it if they were rented out to someone else.  If my dad lost a cable tv construction contract to a competitor, he’d usually offer them a cut rate for renting barricades from us so he could reap a little income off the contract, plus it gave him an excuse to go to their job site and watch the competitor work.  If the barricades were in a reasonable driving distance of our home in Ventura, it was usually me going out to a job site after school or weekends as needed.  I’d sometimes go out and drive through after dark to ensure the lights were working, the barricades weren’t pulled out of place, and replace batteries or whole barricades as needed.  We also rented construction signs and traffic cones.  In fact, just a year or so ago, I donated the last dozen or so old traffic cones to our church in Clovis.