Never too old: Bryce Rumph is 96 and for hire
Never too old: Bryce Rumph is 96 and for hire
By Jake Goodrick
Gillette News Record
Via Wyoming News Exchange
GILLETTE — Bryce Rumph sat on the edge of the bed in his spare bedroom next to a pile of harmonicas.
A few guitars stood propped throughout the room, as well as a small guitar amp and a microphone stand amid the nonmusical odds and ends scattered around.
The white-haired man picked up a harmonica and brought it to his lips as the afternoon sun poked through the blinds and reflected off of his gold wedding band.
Cuffing the silver instrument in his palms, he moved his head and hands at a rhythm all his own as his lungs filled with air and the air filled with melodic, harmonic shrills.
He knew the song but not its name. Like most in his repertoire, he learned it decades ago, when his wife Sharon was still around to lend an ear to his music.
He didn’t have much to do on this weekday afternoon, so he sat and played.
Like many in the state, Rumph moved to Wyoming for work. Unlike many in the state, he made that move about 75 years ago.
Now, after a life of surveying that brought him across Montana, California and Wyoming, he finds himself in Gillette once again, still looking for work.
In an age when there is a shortage of workers, Rumph, 96, is for hire.
“The reason I want to work is not because I want the money, so much as I want to be doing something,” Rumph said. “Something that I can contribute to something. I still feel like I’ve got some ability to contribute to civilization. I’m not ready to crawl in a hole somewhere or just sit and watch television.”
For better or worse, a person’s job is often tied to his or her sense of purpose. It’s an identifier even for those who don’t define their lives by the way they make a living. Labels are reductive, but people still stamp themselves with one when asked what it is they do.
Rumph had a few titles throughout the years. He was a husband, father and a surveyor, in no particular order.
Staring down his looming centennial on this earth, he wants to add another label to that list.
He wants a job. He just isn’t sure which one.
Work means different things to different people. For some, it brings dread. For others, it brings fulfillment. Most find that it is entangled with necessity, to some extent.
But Rumpf doesn’t need to work. He even retired once before, almost 20 years ago.
There are other means of joy or fulfillment, but for those who find it through a job, it’s a guaranteed source for feelings that are otherwise hard to obtain.
“Satisfaction,” he said, about what he gets from working. “To do a good job. I was always told by my parents to do a good job.”
In that regard, he had a strong role model.
Rumph was born in 1925, just before the start of the Great Depression. His mother never had the opportunity to complete her education, but always found ways to hold down a job. She took classes and learned to do bookkeeping, which made her employable wherever his family moved in those years.
Even in the midst of the Depression, he remembers her lugging around her typewriter, instantly employable when the country at large was out of work. He remembers the typewriter but also what it represented: a job and a purpose.
Rumph stumbled onto surveying by chance more than seven decades ago. Fresh out of the military after serving in World War II, he needed work. The Bureau of Reclamation was hiring, he heard. Not that he knew what that entailed, but they needed bodies, which he had.
So he found himself on a survey crew in Broadus, Montana, where on his first day, he was offered another surveying job in Buffalo, Wyoming. Well, he wasn’t exactly sought out. The rest of the crew he was with balked at the thought of moving across the state line.
But not Rumph. That’s how he found himself making his first of many moves across the West, following work and finding life along the way.
He bounced around Wyoming, Montana and California, finding and leaving jobs for work elsewhere more than once. He left California down and out, married with two daughters at that time.
“I was dead broke when I moved here,” he said.
That changed not long after. After spending time with a local survey crew in Gillette, he branched out and started his own survey company. The venture went well enough to tide him over until retirement at 78.
Looking back now, with a want for work still in him, he said he doesn’t remember why he ever stopped in the first place.
His wife died in 2018. He said she wouldn’t have wanted him going back to work. He always liked to work and always worked a lot.
“Probably too much,” he said.
But if she was around, he wouldn’t be thinking about it.
“It’s just that I ...” he hesitated. “I’m not ready to crawl in a hole somewhere. You know?”
If Rumph had his way, he would still survey. But in his twilight years, he is open to exploring what else the job market has to offer.
“I don’t even necessarily want to get paid,” he said.
He’s an ideal job candidate in that respect. But his low salary demand is not his only selling point. Don’t let his age fool you. He easily passes as 20 years younger and claims to have the abilities of a younger man, too.
“If I could get a job driving a vehicle,” he said. “I’m a good driver. They think ‘God, he’s so old. 96.’ But my reflexes are just as good as they were 20 years ago.”
But early on in his job search, Rumph hasn’t sent out any job applications. He’s weighing his options, and balancing his desire to reenter the workforce with his lack of a need to.
“I don’t really have any certain talents, other than playing the guitar and playing my harmonica,” he said. “I could do something like that, I guess.”
With or without a job, the plan is more or less the same. He will keep on waking up and going to bed, with some music and trips to the Senior Center in between.
In an age when businesses can’t find enough workers, Rumph is more than willing.
So for any prospective employers, you know where to find him: with a guitar on his lap and a harmonica in his hand, still waiting on the right offer to come around.
This story was published on Jan. 22, 2022.