My apprentice years were filled with a wide exposure to all manner of plumbing and heating jobs. At that time, F. W. Behler had just four seasoned employees who had been with the company for many years. Paul Strayer was an outstanding retrofit plumber with an abundance of patience — he tolerated me after all! Smoke, whose real name was Elton Rehmeyer, was the expert repair technician for all things from faucets to steam boiler controls. We discovered, many years later during a company Christmas party, that it was his uncle who was murdered in an infamous crime known as the Hex Murder of Rehmeyer’s Hollow. Smoke was just a young boy when he and an uncle discovered the body. Beyond that, there were two younger men who handled larger installations and new construction jobs.
Working with Smoke was, for me, a real treat and presented the opportunity to learn the finer art of top-notch repair work. No one — and I’ll repeat that — no one was better at repairing faucets and toilets than Smoke. Smoke, like all the other seasoned veterans working at Behler, gave me loads of opportunities to participate in expanding my skills by jumping in with both feet to tackle the more advanced work, with supervision, naturally.