Sun Dec. 30 Monday Chp. 3,4, 5

Welllll, it's a Sun, yer busiest day. and then your going to look at how Jesus called the shots. Somewhere along the lines of David. And the giant.

But this is what I can't get over. You had just turned two when I went off the iron. No, you were a few months from two.

And then, when the Christmas Regalia of 1973 presented itself (and at last I know how I managed to have the pix of me on the soft chair in ma's living room so dressed up: I was sporting the look of what I thought would be the restaurant. The upscale eatery. It was post-hippie. Like just a notch up from the hippie casual to a little more pronounced better dressed look.

But that sure didn't help much. I saw St. Cyr at the Midway where his ma was a bartender and, wouldn't you know, it, we were wearing the exact same shirt!

It was probably the last time I was in the bar before headin' off the Big A.

But that's what I'm sayin': how could Jeremy be filled with anything for so long but input far away from me. It was like the boy that grew up among the wolves: it took his so long to get civilized and come back to normalcy.

We Just Pray, brother, brethren.

But let's speed our way to Chapter 3 of the second book.


Chapter 3 The UP Building

Safety Training

July 14 "Hartnett, Hartnett."
I looked over at a smiling somewhat round face with a yellow bandanna wrapped around his head.
It looked like a college student from Chicago or something who had, I remember, a stumped shoulder. I thought, 'How could this be, this guy was a Creighton grad.’
The voice boomed across the executive-type meeting room again. "What the hell ya doin' Hartnett?"
But then I looked in back of the row of other workers for a clue. Suddenly, I recognized him as the only ironworker I'd kept in touch with over the years on the level of giving him a call once in awhile. It’s been sometime since I called him; I knew he lived with his mother and, at one time, wanted to sell his Harley Davidson Sportster.
I, of course, was trying to make a good impression, especially as first-year, first-term carpenter apprentice. Joining the trades: it’s something I’d made up my mind up I was going to do.
But it didn't matter one wit to the ironworker, whom I'd worked with at an OPPD Coal Burning Power Station just south of Nebraska City—and who is in my first book—whether or not Julio, Holder’s Safety Inspector, would mind his calling out at me across the room. The room was filling quickly with carpenters and electricians. I tried to ignore the voice.
"What're ya doin', Hartnett?"
And Jerry Ellis was smiling. I finally thought of his name.
"Headin' for Nebraska City to building a Powerhouse," I finally said, both inanely and insanely. Like with most ironworker bs, it was time to start telling Paul Bunyan tales with Babe the Blue Ox.
This got little response and Julio, who is the chief safety inspector, continued to pass out large binders, talking in a thick Hispanic accent.
The safety meeting at the Union Pacific Project is the first order of business for new hires. We're in the mandatory meeting in the Brandies building. It's Holder Company, the General, i.e. main contractor, in charge of completing the $230 million project. The 20-story building will be the railroad’s national headquarters. I’d walked the two blocks from the job site with fellow journeyman carpenters Jay and Jack. I've been working with Jack since last Thursday when we were both at the new HyVee building in a growing—some would say sprawling—West O. After the first week, Journeyman Carpenter Jack and I were shipped to the UP project in Downtown Omaha.

A Smile In Every Aisle
July 7 I thought how I’d resumed my Joseph the Carpenter stint after a two-month layoff. Because I picked up a fairly steady stream of sub jobs, the gap between carpenter jobs didn’t bother me. In fact, in a way, I found myself distancing myself from the roar and clamor of construction: is this what I really and truly wanted to do?
Going to the required classes at the Carpenters Local Union 444 & Millwrongs Local Union 1463 Joint Apprenticeship & Training building for first-year apprentice kept me in the loop. First Aid/CPR certification (4 ½ hours); Power Actuated Tools license (4 hours) at least it got me to the training center; kept me in the carpenter game. But school was done; it was now well into summer. Ump gigs at $25 bucks a pop left me short.
Maybe face time at the carpenters’ picnic, with seven-year-old son Brendan dunking the carpenter in the pool and then racing with older brother Dylan in the sack race could be put to good use. Waiting for the sack race to commence, I went up to a tall and broad-shouldered Local 444 BA Steve McKuddy. I told Steve I hadn’t worked since the first week in April.
“Oh, yeah?” He looked at me. He looked like he didn’t recognize me.
“Yup. I went and got my CPR and my power tool classes out of the way.”
“Well,” he said, tossing a football back and forth in his hands, “things are starting to pick up. Why don’t you swing by the hall Monday.”
“Yeah, sure, great.”

Early Monday, another young apprentice and I were handed a yellow slip. We were told to report the next morning to Allied Construction, “located just outside Papillion.” We were told to make sure we got there by 7 a.m. I was so excited at the news. Finally I’d be working again; then, as a precautionary measure, I drive all the way out to the site. I wanted to make sure I could find Allied with no problems. And, of course, I’m glad I did. The company was a little further on down the road from where I’d stopped. An inquiry midst a gaggle of buildings that butted up to one another—all looking pretty much alike, gray single-story; slopping driveways and large bay doors opened—pointed me in gave me the right direction. And sure enough, a few more miles down the road, I saw Allied—a newer, slightly larger building with a lighter and more appealing off-white color tone. I now knew exactly where I had to go. I was fat and ready to begin my carpenter career anew.
Of course, the next morning, I find that this is just the shop. The office, I’m told by the shop foreman, who handed me a 50-foot blue power cord and a screw gun, was on down around the curve. That’s where I’d fill out the application; show my driver’s license and my “sosh.”
Then, after a morning safety video, after filling out a myriad of forms, I’m sent out with journeyman Will, who sat with his thick arms folded over his barrel chest throughout the presentation, not commenting, wearing a worn white hardhat (unlike mine, which was bright and white and new, straight from the factory, which I had to unwrap; also, there was a pair of clear safety glasses which I also had to unwrap—also straight from the factory looking), to the HyVee building off 180th and Q.

Driving what seemed to be a fairly long time, I’m immediately struck by how this Q street, the city pulled west by an escape to the great outdoors, more than a few miles hence, was the street I hopped on to sub teach at Millard West nee Wildcats. In fact, I’m surprised to see that where the New HyVee (where there’s a helpful smile in every aisle), which would be the anchor store of yet another striptease mall, was just a stone’s throw away from Wildcat High. This is where I sub taught a few times over the past year. A few of the teachers recognized me from years past via a nod and a smile. And I'd engage always in conversation with Terese, who taught Latin and with whom I'd sometimes share noon lunch with and to whom I'd given the first 100 pages or so of my Fell book of which she said, last year or so, that she'd read part of it and had since missplaced it. Like all teachers, tons of paper scattered everywhere and every which way so it was buried in, I'm thinking, some stack of papers somewhere.

And, I always thought to ask her about it. But then didn't want to call so much attention to myself even though i secretly wanted her admiration and praise. "Had I gotten anywhere with it?" she would remember to ask. This is relation to my saying how I'd send out query letters in hopes of getting it published. "No," I'd respond. "Nothing yet." In point of fact I'd stopped sending out queries becasue the copies I'd run and the stamps I'd paste and a few weeks later there'd be a "Dear author" response. But still, it was like we were on our own secret mission and had out own secret code even though I'm sure she forgot the minute I left the building for the day and then not see her for a few months.

There was one SPED teacher who, later, when I'd published a couple essays in the paper I gave to her. And then there was perhaps a modicum of surprise that yes, I was in the SPED adult category and therefore she could draw some comparisons.

And, because, in many ways, the Wildcat land was part of my old stomping grounds, I was able to draw not a few comparisons with my state of affairs when I was working to get in the Millard Mix as well as my daughter's running track at the school. In fact, I knew the school’s track was but a couple football fields away distance wise from where I’d be making my apprentice carpenter daytime debut with Allied Construction. It is also where daughters Kaitlin and Allison had run track: on the elevated JLG, which I’d help commandeer in my last days at HyVee, I could look out over the horizon and see the top of goal posts I knew a 400 meter black track circled around.

Will, journeyman, immediate charge d’ affairs, tells me, near the back of the building with uneven floors, having yet to be paved, and were now a lumpy yellow subsoil, to go get some 12-foot track. He points to a far corner of the building. I take off, walking over soft chunky clay, not knowing what I’m exactly looking for. He calls to me. Get some 14-foot studs. I see a young Mexican standing near the gang box, Sergio, pulling out tools from the dull orange crate. I asked him if he knew; it was a new term for me. I had really no idea what I had to look for, where “the track” was, where were “the studs.” I, of course, was looking for a pile of wooden 2 x 4’s or 2 x 6’s—something I’d seen on the farm when Grandpa took down the town’s old hotel and kept all the word stored in the cattle shed that had its own remembrance of things past.

Sergio, like Will, pointed at two bundles of wrapped metal in the corner. Oh, so that’s what they are, I thought. Now I know. I then almost ran over to the pile of metal, eager to be of help, of service. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a tool from my ironwork days, my Klines—my tool from rod busting days I found I had trouble parting with—and I promptly snip the black bands with a biiiinng, the track and studs spilling every which way. Fortunately, they were in bands of five so it was easy to grab a bundle and lug the fairly light gauge metal over to Will’s direction.
With a degree of historical bent, I note my first official duty as a carpenter apprentice: lugging metal track and metal studs in a new HyVee that would anchor one of the many strip malls that spring up like square stubby single-story weeds, it seems, are now everywhere you turn, everywhere you look.

While I thought Will was fast and we had the small frame I found out later was to be the “cooler” section of the store up in a relatively short time, done after day two, Will was suddenly gone. I didn’t think it my place to ask what happened to him, where he went. Thus, just like that, I’m teamed up with Jack, who is attaching track and studs to the higher reaches of the store, spiriting about on a dull gray and red JLG. I’m proud to know what these are, the trac and the studs, and eagerly hand them up to him.

Moreover, I think we make a good pair. Jack, lean and medium height with salt-and-pepper hair, is laid back, almost to the point of being languid; generally, he smokes filter cigarettes in an attractive fashion and allows me to blunder and make mistakes that would drive most men nuts. Jack, however, throughout, is able to keep up the good mien. As we take the lift skyward and attach studs to track that’s attached to dark gray trusses—me acting as someone who hands up the track and studs—Jack as someone who screws, or “nails,” them in place.

Carpenter Cutups

July 15 I notice at UP ole Jack has a bandage on his hand this afternoon. He must've got cut. He must think I’m half-crazed ironworker because back at the HyVee job, I grabbed a hold of a stud that Sergio had just cut. It was still hot and smoking from the cut saw. At least I think that’s what it’s called. At any rate, I bent down with bare hands, working fast, and it literally jumps into my middle finger; a slice over the top of my index finger is immediately open. The blood starts gushing out; it’s bleeding all over the JLG, raised to the top near the trusses.
“Jesus Christ,” Jack said, turning to me, half smiling, half laughing, “you’re bleeding all over the place.” We both looked at the drops of blood scattered on the JLG's metal floor.
“Yeah.”
“Do you want anything for that?”
“Nah,” I said, half hoping he was right that I should go get a band aide. But I was always getting cut on tie wire rod busting on the bridge deck. I like to think my blood coagulates fast.
Now at UP, he sees me cut again. “When’s your birthday,” Jack said to me today after I grabbed the ½ inch metal plates that I’d cut up in 51-inch lengths to put between two columns. Somehow they’re heavier than I thought and I either lost hold of them or something because it went right to my right hand which did not bleed and then I thought, Hey, I hit that pretty hard, I thought I’d be bleeding by now and I’m not. But sure enough, a short time later, blood starts coming out of my thumb.
“Ah, September”
“I know what you should have your wife getcha.”
“What’s that?”
“A box of band aides,” Jack said with a smile.
“Oh yeah, right.”
So it’s pretty much how my left hand is cut up. I said right above but I meant left. I’m again back to the ironwork days when I cut myself all the time tying rebar. My fingers would be all full of it. Cuts that is. I heal fast. I guess maybe because I’m in good shape or something as soon my blood coagulates and I’m a-okay.
I thought how, later, perhaps out of sympathy, Jack lets me run the JLG at the HyVee job. It's a huge machine with small wheels that you climb up on and drive around like a go-cart except it will elevate itself quickly, all with a push of the button, a moving of the knob; three stories above the ground, in short order, if need be.
Now, downtown Big O, Jack and I are at the UP Project. It’s the building I remember watching as they dug the basement. Then, a little later, maybe six months, the first iron started going up. I wasn’t involved so I didn’t watch the ironworkers set the iron work but one time I saw how Jerry Bailey and Willie’s brother Steve unloading the 18-wheelers and rigging the iron. I stopped and gave them a big hullo, Bailey saying “Rodney’s been wanting you to come work for him.”
I didn’t know how Bailey ever knew my falling out with Screamin’ Rodney but ole Bailey, I reckon, doesn’t miss much.
At any rate, no problems getting there, not too far from home and I thought, as I drove by the Omaha Public School’s Teacher Administrative Center, career buster par excellence, how I’d finally found, with relief, a way to finish out a career—as a journeyman carpenter. At 6:15 a.m., the parking lot would be almost empty; I knew by 7:15, it’d be full. A few years back, that’s where my car would be, to hear once again how I couldn’t teach to district standards.
Running the UP job was Jon Lipincott—medium build, fairly broad shoulders with a ready smile. He sets me to applying caulking after I’d followed a stream of hardhatted mostly male workers of all colors shapes and sizes up three flights of stairs. A fairly long stroll past piles of metal and plywood and sheetrock takes us to three wooden shacks where the steamfitters, electricians, and carpenters meet up in the morning to enjoin day’s Herculean tasks. The ironworkers are down the corridor a little ways and have a shack of their own.
Gathering my tools, I’m motioned to follow Jon and Jack to the fourth floor that is, midJuly, a huge and empty room, the southern part of which loops around a large opening that resembles a courtyard, not unlike the average American mall, except its practically in the middle of the building. I also find, timeline wise, that construction is in the early part of Phase II—the iron is already up topped off, the drywall and curtain wall on the outside is slowly catching up, now pushing past the 17th Floor.
The pair of buckhoists on the building’s southeast and northwest corner, that I remember observing the up and down passage of, filled with hardhatted passengers men after I’d had my not-too-happy meeting with Voc Rehab case manager Pramila months before. She informed me that her supervisors didn’t think they’d finance any continuing ed say, at the University of Nebraska. Because of multi-tasking difficulties, as evidenced by short-term employ as a tech writer first at an insurance company then at an advertising firm, a certification, it was felt, would be of little use.
And so, basically, we decided to close my case. I remember how Voc Rehab got me through college at NYU; surely, would not Nebraska’s Voc Rehab do the same? For some reason, this bunch didn’t seem to have the same oomph. For sure, at Omaha Public Schools, Voc Rehab, perhaps unwittingly, took me in a different direction than I’d planned on going. I mistakenly thought they could bolster my case to keep teaching, doing a better job that the Omaha Education Association. But they really were a kitten, not a tiger—a meow, rather than a roar. Still, I couldn’t leave any stones unturned; I wanted to use all available resources.
To me, if was all fairly simple: I was a hard-working, educated guy who just wanted a steady job in a competitive work environment. Nothing more, nothing less. Was could be so difficult? Eating a hotdog from the vendor, I looked up at the up and down at the south buckhoists, watching men and women climb and descend, wondering what exactly I could do about my future.
And now, a short time later, less than a year later, I thought, Here I am, riding the very same buckhoist I stared at blankly, trying to see my future. And, because I was now on a definite career path, via the trades, could I not use Voc Rehab again? A backup, to use like a generator, to bolster new career path?
“That sounds like a plan,” India born Pramila would say, with a bright smile, flashing white teeth beneath a mop of black hair, a picture of a tiny dark baby on her desk, as I jumped out of teaching onto something new and improved. However, it was the usual rough waters in the job market. Now, I was off and running with yet another strategy to attack the windmills. I could just hear her if I told her what I’d decided to do: “That sounds like a plan.” And then she would bath me with her radiant Gandhi smile.
At any rate, Jon Lipincott, as part of my first duty as apprentice carpenter at UP Headquarters, handed me a caulking gun. I was to caulk the joints of the huge windows that ran at right angles about the building’s perimeter.
This I didn't do a very good job at. The caulking gun is much larger than I'm used to. Even though Jon shows me a couple times, I still manage to make several mistakes. I don't get it smoothly between the cracks—there’s a blob here, a too-small portion there. But I do my best and, between helping Jack, to whom I will hand up a sheet of cut drywall, it takes me pretty much all the day to get a couple sections done. I am exhausted and sweaty over what I consider to be futile efforts.
Jon comes by for a mid-afternoon discussion and tells Jack that, eventually, "he's looking for skilled people." He's able to deign from Jack that Jack is a finish carpenter. "I'm just seein' who I can line up with." I guess this means he will team up those workers, skilled/unskilled, and match them together.
Other UP Players: there was hair-to-shoulder, mid-40ish Steve rolling into Sol’s—where I learn the carpenters park in the morning so they don’t have to feed quarters into a parking meters across the street from the UP building or in front of main Omaha Public Library which is but one block due south—with his big ole Chevy van. I recognized Steve as the guy from the power tool class, (which you were required to take to run the Hilti gun, a gun that can shoot screws through iron) a couple months back. At the time I felt, well, I’m not working. I might as well get all the course work out of the way. I’d get my Hilti card; I’d get my CPR license.
I remembered how Apprentice President Jim Franks was the teacher conducting the Power Actuated Tool class. His instruction procedure was to have us take turns, all eight of us, reading from the accompanying manual. When it was Steve’s turn, came time for Steve to read his portion of the document, there'd be this…long…pause. It was like he was out in some never never land. Twice it came around for him for his turn to read. Everyone waited, silently, respectfully, as silence enveloped the small room in the basement of the Carpenter-Millwrong training center. Finally, after more than a few beats, he’d look up and go, “Oh, is it my turn?” and then start reading. It wasn't until the third time around that Steve didn’t forget his place.
"Here comes worthless," said a carpenter I didn’t recognize but I think had been on the UP job for a couple months. He was addressing Jack more than he was me. Steve may well have carried his degree of never never-land to the job.



Holder’s Safety Meeting At Brandies
July 15 And as we shook out in the morning, I tried to hang next to Jack because I didn't want to get hooked up with anyone else. We walked the next day together to the safety meeting. I learned that Tuesday was the day the new hires had to troop to the Brandies building. Pushing through revolving doors, it’s a quick escalator ride to the first floor. A door along a carpeted the corridor opens to and there’s a long conference table filled with executive chairs; one feels at once elevated and slightly out of place with hardhat and sleeveless shirt in the well-lit room.
Jack and I took the escalator down. Together we could see the polished marble ground floor of the Brandies building fill with suit and tied and well-dressed personages that suddenly, because it was noon and Tuesday in downtown Omaha, spilled out of the walls and buildings and offices of the Brandies and other adjacent buildings without much comment while the carpenters respectfully carried their hardhats in their hand and then cutting through the crowd.


4th Floor
Afternoon Jon looked a bit askance at the amount of caulking I had done. The caulking, as they say, I had failed to do. I wound up smearing it on with my hands, trying to make it look right; this just made it look worse. In other portions, unable to get the gun to work right, to make an even steady bead.
What I mean is my problems with the caulking. Really, I just had it all over the place. I just couldn’t get a bead on it to save my life. No, the beads I did get on it were just either too narrow or too wide and so it bubbled all over the place. I tried to smooth it with my hands—and that’s exactly how it looked like it was done, by hand, like a child’s finger paint—but it set fast, turning to a hard paste. I then wiped the stuff on my pants and then found a rag so I could get the goop from off my hands.
I don’t know why Jon just doesn’t run me off the job.


















Chapter 4 The Friendly Apprentice

Can’t Manage the Job
July 27th And of course we can’t get anything going because the material is scattered over 20 floors. By the time we find the material there’s a couple hours gone. One time, after our small crew had started working on the Copper Wall, I told Rod—smiling, self-effacing, a young carpenter for many moons—I knew exactly where some 12-foot studs were. I’d bring them right up. Yet, by the time I’m down to ground floor, where there’s a veritable army of dark 4-inch metal, I find they’re only 14-footers. Hmmm, I think. Where they down in the basement where the electricians are working? Of course, they’d been dropped off by an 18-wheeler long before the iron was set, before it the building was closed in. So there was a pile in the basement and a huge pile on the ground floor. But no, after I zigged and zagged, opening closed wooden temporary doors, pushing past temporary walls and finally finding the pile that I thought were 12 footers, they were the wrong gauge.
This I reported to Rod, working and talking with Russ, our newest member, laying out the Copper Wall. I’d been looking most of the morning and had come up empty. He didn’t say anything but promptly took off. I did what Rod was doing, plumb bobbing, setting chalk lines, measuring out for the cantilever. Suddenly, out of nowhere almost, here comes Rod with a bundle of the 12-foot studs we needed.
Was it enough? No, it wasn’t near enough. The order hadn’t come in yet. Rod, making a quick decision, just had me grab the DeWitt chop saw marked in crude black letters “Copper Wall.” Head down to the ground floor. Sure. We then set up and made quick work of cutting two feet off the 14-foot studs. We proudly bundled up a handful and marched up three floors and dropped ‘em down in the hallway that led to The Wall.
We’d do this, Rod said, until the order came in.
Today, I think that 6th floor is a hot place because that’s where Ron St. John (I call him the pope, says Foreman Jon who, I find, was at E & K for these last seven years and then somewhere else and then was called by Craig at Allied to come work) is with a crew of journeymen carpenters. St. John is Lipincott’s second in command. Unlike Lipincott, St. John always has his tool belt on; even though he’s the assistant foreman, moves about the building unraveling trouble spots, can be seen talking many times with the Holder folks in their shiny blue hardhats, it doesn’t mean he’s going to stand around and watch. I usually see Ron standing near doors that need be hung, special ceiling dilemmas that need be solved, a trouble-shooter. I found later that Ron was like Russ: working as a carpenter “out West” but couldn’t compete any longer with the swarm of help coming from “across the border.”
Jon— who tends to be slightly on the loquacious side—is tellin’ about a fall of a guy who went down eight stories and walked out of the hospital a few days later. “I had to go down there,” he said, “and it was one of my guys and my heart just went to my throat.”
He was tellin’ this to a couple KC boomers. Because there’s a lot of trades folk around, and because I can recognize ironworkers perhaps best of all, yesterday I tried to converse with a none-too-talkative ironworker, a boomer, tryin’ to get a take on how much work there was around. Where a lot of the ironworkers from around the country here?
“They’re all over the place,” he said, his eyes looking up as the west buckhoist started coming down. No, he didn’t think there were that many boomers in town.
I heard Jon—it’s one of his more loquacious mornings, which surprises me, to some extent, and to which I’m surprised that generally speaking, the carpenters are a generally friendlier bunch—say that there was “a bunch of skilled people around and all he had to do was match them up. He also had to think of an easier way to get the materials up to the brethren.
I’m an apprentice, I almost gleefully admit, just so there’s no confusion or mistake. Somehow I feel I should explain why I’m always being told what I have to do. No one, however, ponders these thoughts perhaps as deeply as I do.
I also wonder who walked on these old steps of the former buildings where UP is the new brash kid on the block. What was here and who worked here. Did they know some day they’d be a hungry railroad’s national headquarters? And yes, I do remember not too long ago this block between Douglas and Dodge was a hole in the ground and then last summer how I talked with Jerry Bailey and Steve Wiley…and shook their hands. That’s when I was coming back from my Florida outings, when I was a trainer for a touch-screen voting company. While exciting, it turned out to be another job with its own mysterious half-life.
Well, Jon, I thought, carrying studs from ground to 4th Floor, I could add a historical footnote to the ole fall story--my own fall, now more than 30 years removed. I explained it all in the paper last month. Did you not get a chance to read it?
And now, here I stand, hardhat on my head, hammer in my hand. Well, Jon, it’s Monday, and I’m working. And darn glad of it.
Well actually, these days, it’s not a hammer but a screw gun. In fact, down by the 3rd Floor shack, there’re all these boxes of screws, boxes of special colored screws—for the amount of hole to be shot through the iron with the Hilti gun. But I just stood there on my ground, ready to load on another bundle, what I will call myself today and hereafter:
“The Friendly Apprentice”
But it was pretty much a lot of walking up and down the stairs of the UP building, waiting for the elevator. Just weeks ago I had a new meeting with the folks at Voc Rehab: suddenly, there was a new career in place. No, not a tech writer. No, not a trainer. No, not a teacher. Lower your sites a notch—let’s shoot for apprentice carpenter. Julie Johnson, blond and smiley, your new case manager. There’s a friendly wave at Pramila a corridor away; she waves back, flashing me her radiant smile.
It’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.
I tell Julie about the 4-year apprenticeship. Could Voc Rehab perhaps defray textbook and materials costs? No, she didn’t think so, but she’d sure look into it. We will, however, update your files. When were you here? I’ll have to look that up and see what records we have. I’ll be getting in touch with you.
We’ll meet every month; you get back to me how things are going.
Oh yes, I told her, I would. In fact, I can easily walk here. I’m working just a few blocks away.
Fine. That should really work out.
Oh yeah, I said. I think it will.
We had a plan.
I’m the friendly apprentice.

Sol Brothers
July 16th This morning, I’m told to “Climb on the back end of the pickup” with the other carpenters. They scooted up further into the short box of Jon Lipincott’s tan truck and we were hence chauffeured to the UP building, pigeons swooping in and out buildings, watching our every moved.
Yesterday I missed the ride because I just more or less just stood around, not quite knowing that this was a ride to the job site. I could just hop in. And, if I get there early enough, slide in next to a quickly filling parking lot behind Sol’s Pawn Shop. If I get there before 6:35, you can bet there’s a place for me to park. Then, a few minutes leaning against trucks watching journeyman carpenters bs and smoke, Jon or Bob comes by and we can pile in and head for the plant.
It’s a few moments of delicious early morning freedom in Downtown Omaha and we enjoy it immensely. We just want to keep driving, keep talking, maybe pick up a twelve-pack of cold beer.


A Crew Takes Shape
July 18 Well, whatever I was concerned with over the fairly, even-for-me, strange turn of events in general, Voc Rehab in the specific, has been quickly abated by the most recent turn of events, which finds me in a bit of a distinct elevation in my career as carpenter.
The crew of Rod1 and Greg and Jack and, later, Rod2, I are making our way up to the fourth floor. We tear down the “mock” wall that will be the atrium. This is another new term for me, “mock.” It’s something temporary. This means that Holder will have, for instance, different shades of carpet on a floor—to see which one is most amenable to the taste of UP officials, the interior decorators.
I thought how the four of us sped up to the 19th Floor and put up a “mock” wall. And really, because I’d been traipsing about the building’s lower tier, I not only had not been up to the top but found myself slightly unnerved by the prospect. However, assignment ahead, I jumped into the buckhoist with the crew and we flew what seemed to be very high in the air, toe the 19th Floor. I buried my feelings of apprhension; it was hard for me not to look down as the street and people and traffic below got smaller and smaller. When the lift finally stopped, and the young female unlatched the bay doors and opened them, the top half going up, the bottom half going down, we were now, in many ways, on top of the world. The light was brighter, the air was cleaner and we had a commanding view of the countryside.
And, stepping into the 19th Floor, the Penthouse, it was a surprising flurry of activity with ironworkers finishing out the inner beams, carpenters setting up the drywall, the electricians from Capital Electric running wire. This meant that not a few piles of drywall and iron and conduit had to be moved out of the way. But, with four of us working, the crafts pitching in to move their material, we were done after half a day. The next day, we could get the studs and track up there and start, under the guidance of Rod1, begin to throw it together.
So, basically, we were putting up a “mock” wall. It was basically a small 20 x 20-foot office of track and studs stationed in the west facing section of the Penthouse. I heard this is where Union Pacific’s CEO will have his office, special office for special people.
The “office” was up but for a couple days; it was examined, commented on, taken down. The same was true for the lower floors of what I’ve come to learn is the Copper Wall. There were 3 x 7 sheets of copper, all in different hues of light gold and dark brown attached to plywood. This also stayed up until it was looked at; a certain pattern was then chosen, then taken down. That morning, getting tooled up for the day, ready to take walls down or lug studs, Rod1 comes up to me.
I get the strange notion he’s going to put his arms around me. He starts talking. Jon likes you. He likes your attitude. Oh yeah? I thought. This was hard to believe. Always it was how bad things were. Larry Heck at OPS always, a glint in his brown eyes, his combed-back black hair, talking about the U for unsatisfactory I’d get for my “demeanor.” “Do you understand Ron,” Dr. Heck would say, “do you understand why we’re here.” I guess I understood that I didn’t exhibit an air of confidence in the classroom. Was this the same thing I was now being praised for?
A couple days before, Foreman Lipincott had slapped me on the back. Like a buddy he’d known and worked with for years instead of a couple days. I looked at him and he smiled. Maybe it’s because I’m so bright eyed and bushy-tailed. Thanks to Stu’s older brother—the ironworkers always called Pineapple (and Stu had written on his white hard hat with black permanent marker, Don’t Call Me Pineapple) as he hailed from Hawaii (and was called Paul after Stu’s death)—pushing water off the steamboat early one morning. I saw that Paul, a big wheel with Davis Erection, who Screamin’ Rodney said was the best ironworker out of the hall, picking up a squeegee and start pushing the morning dew off the deck. From that day forward, I told myself I’d always sweep; I’d always stay busy. I wouldn’t bitch.

What’s On Second?
July 27th Funny Greg LeGrand. “There’s two out, no runners on and you’re down 3-1.” He’s got all the names for his pitches—the black diamond, the speed express. Brother Rod and he have this baseball game they play off their video. They’ll go on and on about it. Who was ahead. Who was behind. Maybe it was fantasy baseball, I’m not sure.
At any rae, 4th Floor, I’m walking behind Rod1 who, it turns out, will be leaving in a few minutes so he shows me how to put the clips back in the caulk gun and how to steady it over the glue. I’m still plenty slow but at least I can stop whipping it on my hands.
I think it’s all going to be a computer floor, Rod said. He also said he’s been “doing frames” since he was a little kid. And I expressed, after he told me how much Jon liked me, my pleasure of being a carpenter, how I really like doing the job.
Well, I’m certainly with the best partner on the planet to start out with.
But at this late afternoon juncture, and this crew of Jack, Rod, Greg, and I command the 4th floor. I’m just thinkin’ whether or not the possibility is I’d stay with this crew. I certainly hope I do.



Who’s On First?

July 19 Go ump. The coaches are coming out of their shells.
I got a couple thank yous later on. But I missed a call at first base. For some reason I had the batter-runner out; then I waited a split second. I forgot what I’d seen and waved my hands in “safe” position. Otherwise, I felt like we made it okay.
I’m glad it brings me a little extra cash. The not quite $400 on the check after a hard weeks toil doesn’t seem hardly worth it. Plus Rod1 wants to know how he can ump. So our conversation sometimes switches to baseball. Rod1 imagines himself as being my partner during a game. I tell him how this might be a distinct possibility—what he needed to do, who he should first call to get up and going.

Birthdays

July 20th But I didn’t see Jerry Ellis or any of the ironworkers around these last couple days. I remember how tired I was getting because I had had my class the night before and was starting to, as they say, “run out of gas.”
But I was drinking my water in gallops. I finally have been able to determine that the johns are on the 3r, 5th, 7th Floors; the carpenter’s locked work area where they have some materials is on the 4th. Which means when I have to go back up to the 4th floor for some reason or another, I can get a drink of water. The water comes out of a regular water fountain and it’s ever so cold.
It was Thursday and Jack had to split at noon to do something about his license. He’s divorced, been married twice.
“This is a special day for me,” he said. It turns out it is his daughter’s 28th birthday.
I think a little earlier he’d asked me how old I was. “47” is what I said. That, of course, is what I always say. I wonder how much longer I can get away with it. Or if they believed me. Or, better yet, if they really cared. Basically, just idle conversation. This came in our discussion as to how I said I’d never be able to learn how to put up walls. I said I’d prob’ly run out of time. I’d never be able to do it.
And so the age old age question.
But Thursday I got a chance to finish out the afternoon with Greg. He only works ‘til 4:15, instead of 4:30 and he will not walk back the five or so blocks to Sol’s, but will demand to be given a ride. He makes various pronouncements, articulating his world concerns while we frame the columns. No, I haven’t gotten any faster but have a general sense of what next to get ready to do.
After work, Greg’ll also accost passersby; standing outside with the rest of the carpenters in front of the library waiting for a ride back to Sol’s, he makes cutting remarks. He launches into a tirade against the city’s homeless that seem to penetrate and permeate. This warm July afternoon, they find residence on the library steps, or the nearby Eugene Lehy park. One time, a man walking the street took exception; he took exception to being called “a bum” and advanced towards us. Greg just waved him at him as the truck pulled away, all of us gripping the pickup box tight as we took a one lane road back to Sol’s. Our group must’ve been a curious site, the back seat of a pickup filled with tired looking carpenters leaning forward, their lunch pails in front of them, tired smiles that their day was done.
For the most part, I’m like Sergio, I cut studs, I cut track. They’re usually 12-foot studs that have to be cut down to 11’6 inches. There’s something like 12 studs needed between the columns that the ironworkers had put up and then which was now coated with a hard white foam.
“What is that stuff?” I asked. All the red that was the iron was covered with this white foam and therefore the men of steel hangin’ red iron took on a day-glow soft effect.
“That’s fire proofing,” I’m told. It seems in the wake of the 9/11, tall buildings now had to have that protection. I didn’t find out, like I should have, if the white foam is now standard procedure. And, while this is well and good, it necessitated the knocking out a four-inch groove through the foam so that track could be laid. This task, of course, often fell to me: I was finally able to devise a large putty knife. With a hammer, I was able to chisel clearance so that track could be laid; screws then shot through the iron with the Hilti gun. Of course, it wasn’t the cleanest job; the residue quickly got in my hair and down my neck.
Sometimes, quick elevation is needed. I like to think I know where a moving scaffold is handy or rarely, when a JLG is not in use. So the moving blue scaffold, that Jack and I came in possession of our first day on the job and to which we took apart and carried upstairs to the 4th floor, is called a “baker.” I don’t know why it’s called that but it is. This means we don’t have a JLG upon which to climb and spirit ourselves about. To get it down the stairway, we had to take the baker apart: this seemed to be almost a needless time-wasting inconvenience but there was nothing else we could use.
And that’s part of the problem. There are so many men moving in and around the building that it’s hard to keep track of where anything is at; JLG that was hear just a minute ago that I was going to use with Jack to rock the upper edges is gone. So now I’ve got to go hunting for the baker. Where did I last see that? Which, floor, after all, am I on?
It was sometimes hard for a guy to get his bearings.



Ironworker Existential

July 25 Well, I wanted to say how Wednesday was existential.
Like most things, I think of this term later. Like on the idea that “I had an existential moment with the ironworkers.”
Stu Ellenberger: “I was from here to that wall away from him,” Rod said. He looked out in through the huge scaffold set up, supposedly the 2nd biggest in the country, staring. “It was pretty ugly. His partner wouldn’t let anyone near him.”
Rod is an ex-marine with a positive disposition. This might be belied by the fact that, At any rate, according to truculent brother Greg, Rod’s wife had left him. She took the five young kids to Ogallala.
I guess this means that one minute the whole family was in North Bend, living as pretty as you please, the next minute it was split city.
Monday is when I worked with younger brother Greg. He’s a few inches taller than his older brother with a slightly wider frame. Greg is one instantly-get-in-your-face kind of guy. For some reason, although I can tell he knows more than a good deal about carpentry, nevertheless seems to be on a permanent adrenalin rush. Of course, because I worked with construction types for more than a few years, his brash manner, his ever-present “Ode to Billy Joe” death wish makes him, of course, stand out in a crowd. I remember how the young apprentice carpenter Anthony, one of the few black apprentices on the job, said he hated him.
And, I didn’t know what happened to Jack or Rod. It was ‘sposed to be the day that I was going to work on the atrium with Rod. And take it down. This was the “mock wall” that would come down so the Real McCoy, copper, in 3 x 7 sheets, could go up.
So it was Greg and I who had to team up.

I thought how ole Greg, among other things, could be cut throat. He dissed me Friday last. Leaning over to Lipincott saying, in exasperation “It took us an hour and a half to put up one column.”
“Well, Jon said, with a degree of equanimity, “you gotta learn sometime.”
It was me they were talking about. I was just sitting on my lunch cooler, given to us by the neighbors because Kath gave them some curtains and which has proved to be a quite satiable place for me to carry my lunch but something to sit down on. It was better than the actual factory-type lunch pail that I’d used for a couple of days at the HyVee job, then maybe at the Union Pacific Railroad Headquarters’ job.
One day I just dumped my contents from my lunch pail and put ‘em in the lunch cooler and Kath stocked it with ice. So what I had was an actual cooler, big such that I can put ice in there and food and keep my drinks cold and fill it full of fruit. And it’s fairly good size so, not only can I carry my lunch in it, I can sit on it.
It was just one morning we did that, I think it was last week when we started at 6 a.m. And you have to get there frightfully early because Bob, who drives the Chevy pickup that has a lone box and burns a little oil, leaves promptly at 6 a.m.
This was an early morning I didn’t quite make the shuttle.
Working nights the BUSINESS COLLEGE tires me out and I have to grab some shuteye. I was glad Dena was able to put me back to work for a five week stint but it just about plum tuckers me out.


More Crew

July 25 Friday was our day for new members and we had Tim Russell—black hair, late 30’s, glasses, affable manner—joining our crew of Rod and I on The Wall. I did finally get to work on the Atrium yesterday, also called a curtain. I know for sure now it’s called a curtain that you cantilever. The cantilever will be the track and studs we’ll put up.
And Rod was happy that, saying, “Right, teacher” when I said, “that means there’s 86 degrees left.” I subtracted 4 degrees from the mitered corner that we have to have so it joins. We were setting the track on the hard floor. Because the edge of the curtain swung out on each end, the track had to be cut and then joined in an almost L, top to bottom.
For the first time, I got to use the gun today. That is, the Hilti gun. The class I’d taken months before. And now I had the certification. I could use it. Even though I never owned a gun, it was fairly simple. You just cock it and fire. And the Hilti hammers the nail right through the track, right through the concrete. It makes a muted thump and there’s a slight recoil.
And now I think how I get to go out and work out on the Atrium, away from the noise and clatter of saws and shouts and drywall and ironworkers beating a bolt in with a beater, “moving molecules” is what Ironworker Jim Barnpole always said. But really, I don’t know how I get so special treatment. The job is interesting, the view spectacular; as we climb past the flat rooftops of the neighboring building look down at nearby windows. I like looking over at the Federal Building. There’s always a single light on with a desk and a ton of old file cabinets. Usually there’s a man sitting there, his legs crossed, reading intently. Is he looking at counter intelligence? Is he reviewing most recent reports? It almost looks like a scene out of the old TV show “Dragnet.” And surely, this guy will be the one that breaks the case.
But Thursday, Greg, standing there with Jack, who has been my partner from the get-go at HyVee and now at UP, are going to team up. But today we all four start working at the Atrium section, that’s going to be the much heralded and much talked about Copper Wall. But this was after we finished up on 19th floor putting up what they call a “mock wall.” We’d leave it up and company officials survey it. Changes, adjustments, input. And then we’d take it down.
And that’s when we had our existential moment with the ironworkers. I’m getting ready to head out for the day and there’re the ironworkers ready to call it a day. And then I look a little closer and I realize it’s Chuck from years past, before the big green box of the buckhoist to ascend to eye level.
The ironworkers do descend. Because they are the ones that finish out at the very top, that’s where they are. I’m fairly sure they topped it off, had the topping off ceremony, a small Christmas tree is put on the top beam—the building’s been “topped off.” Something that was picked up from the Norwegians a century ago, I think.
“Are you still runnin?” he asked. He’d turned and looked at me. Suddenly, my mental synapses kicked in. How do I know this ironworker? Were we on a job together?
I remember his name was Chuck. For some strange reason. Just like my old ironworker buddy Jerry Ellis. Who I mentioned above. But for some strange reason, Chuck’s name came faster than did Ellis. Well, I knew Jerry’s last name, not his first. I know Chuck’s first name but not his last. I’d worked with Chuck at the Lucent Technologies building. A few years before that at the ethanol plant in Blair, my return to the ironwork trade. Chuck bears a striking resemblance to a slightly younger Clint Eastwood.
So I had swept out the area that is to be the “Mock Room.” I guess I have to thank the stint I had at Ameristar, the cleaning stint, pick-up-that-broom-and-sweep mindset. That means, like Pineapple, who’s brother Stu we will talk about a little later, who is a fairly big gun at Davis Erection, was pushing the ole water out of the upper deck one morning while everyone else milled around, waiting for work to commence.
Now don’t get me wrong, even though I’m terribly clumsy and pretty awkward when it comes to nuance with some of the wherewithal of walking around with the iron, bright sun glinting off the dull red, stumbling as I do (and today as I traversed the stairs, going up and down from 3 where the break room is to 6 where we started at today, to 7 where Rod had started and then back down to 3 for various odds and ends and walking the hallway I thought of how Kath says I’ve got to pick up my feet, that I shuffle. And, sure enough, on the polished dull concrete, I can hear myself walk and know that I’m shuffling) I did pick this up as a cue. When you’re not doing anything, while there’s a journeyman that knows the lay of the land, I will keep myself busy by looking for a broom to sweep up the area.
So maybe that’s the reason I’m put up with, as slow and clumsy as I am. With Will, my first partner at HyVee, he’s laying it out, where to put up the wall in this one section, measuring it out. I find a broom and I start sweeping.
Will never says anything nor, for that matter, does anyone else, but that’s just pretty much what I do. I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t even know how to run some of the tools that they got here in the gang box, or what they’re called.
But it was an existential moment, an existential ironworker moment when I chanced upon Chuck standing and waiting for the elevator to take us down.
Chuck looked just the same as he did five years ago. “They want me to work overtime but I don’t want to” is basically all he said, to know one in particular. I told him about daughter Allison going to Florida next week to round out the running discussion.
“I’ve gotta picture,” I said.
“Oh you do?”
“Yeah, I’ll have to bring it by.”
“Okay” said Chuck beneath his white hardhat turned backwards. The ironworker that had the Harley-Davidson shirt on kind of gave us a little space and was listening into the conversation but I could see a smile creasing his lips because I was in that mysterious place that is the ironworker mystique and so, in this brief passage of time, I had audience and I had a little space.
Actually, Chuck and Jerry Ellis are the only ironworkers I know. I remember when I started in Blair almost 10 years ago, there wasn’t that many ironworkers in the hall and as construction grew and developed, as buildings grew higher, money people in this town suddenly realized that they didn’t have to resort to a slew of metal boxes but a single story high. No, there was a realization bigger projects could be undertaken; with tax incentives from a state that smiled fondly on businesses and investors, buildings could be put up relatively fast, relatively cheap.
I mean elaborate office buildings and high tech factories at Miracle Hills, HDR, the bean plant and, just down the road apiece, a 75 million megawatt addition to the Coal Burning Powerhouse just south of Council Bluffs would soon be under way. There were enough skilled workers around to get the job done right, get the job done on time. A relative handful of ironworkers built some of the more complicated structures around Omaha.
“The 40-story,” as Ironworker Business Agent Bill Beadie called it, was a prime example. And so it became visited by the 40-story. It was the tallest and highest structure built in more than a decade. And I like to take credit because of the letter to the editor I wrote that said, basically, an idea becomes a blue print. Then using skilled craftsmen and women, a building can be realized.
Well, I don’t know how much credit I can take for that, the letter I wrote driving the construction boom but I know I’m the only one in this fair city that wrote anything about it. And, following “the forty story,” big dog projects were undertaken. The Quest Convention Center, Hilton Hotel, Gallup, just to name a few. Buildings way over a single story high, buildings that required skilled labor that gets it done right, gets it done on time.
And now the UP building. Suddenly, an old man like me can throw his hat in the ring of the construction circus and get selected.
I guess there’s a 60-day trial. Or is it 90 days? I heard Foreman Ironworker Joe Lyons, with whom I tied rebar on more than one bridge deck, say, “get past your 90 days, and you’ll be fine.” But nobody ever said much about it either way. I did turn Local 444 Carpenter BA Steve down for a Safeway job—building scaffolds, I didn’t think, would serve me best—but, like I always said, it helps if you go to those picnics and they can put a name to a face.
So I don’t know if that’s anything to do with this ideal situation I’m in: an apprentice working on the atrium. The $3 million Copper Wall. The burnished copper so it looked like it was used, harking back to the era of when railroads first linked the coasts, the pounding of the Golden Spike in Provost, Utah. And now building the headquarters for the world’s largest railroad, the Union Pacific. And I’m working with one of the high caliber guys out of the hall, Rod LeGrand.
Learning a great deal, learning a lot.
So, for Chuck, I did bring the picture the next day. I had no idea where he and the ironworkers were at, just thought maybe I’d see him at the end of the day. But I chance upon Chuck, hanging small sections of iron at the Penthouse, almost by accident. Another existential moment. I’d taken the wrong flight of stairs to get to the 20th Floor. But I saw a porta-potty which I was going to use and there’s Chuck, with another ironworker, standing on a JLG. And they’re doing something with the building; Chuck has his socket with a large extension, sticking out of his bolt bag. I, too, have a bolt bag—except it’s on the wrong side. It’s only when Will, who came on the UP job with the Canadians who came to the lower 50 to slap plywood on the Copper Wall after Rod’s crew rocked it, few weeks later, points out this discrepancy.
“What’re you doin’ wearin’ that bolt bag,” he said with a smile. “That’s for ironworkers.” And sure enough, I looked at it. I kept my screw I there. I thought it would work. No one ever said anything. But really, when you get down to it, it was the wrong thing for the carpenter trade.
And I nod briefly at him and get closer to the bathroom and there again is Jerry Ellis. He’s rigging the small pieces of red iron to get up to Chuck, signaling—another new addition to Omaha landscape that hasn’t been around it quite some time, a tower crane—the load to go up.
“Hartnett, what the hell ya doin’?” He looks up from the beam he’s putting a choker over. “You remember Harris?”
“Yeah, I remember Harris. I remember you put a toad in my bolt bag.”
“Huh,” Jerry Ellis said, smiling, “you remember Harris?”
And we have an audience of what looked like a young ironworker standing there between us. Suddenly, I’m at another existential moment.
Did you read my article in the World-Herald?
No, what was it on.
About that guy that fell off that TV tower.
Mine was about my fall.
How far did you go down?
65 feet.
The young ironworker shook his head.
And then what looked like one of the Holder people came by and I thought I’d better high tail it back to my section, taking down the Mock Wall. So I duck in front of the JLG, with Chuck moving it up and down, in response to a young man running the transit. I manage to trip on it and the stairs and this Hispanic looking guy goes, “Hey, watch what the fuck you’re doin’ that’s a $5,000 machine.”
I bolt up the stairs and a couple of the steamfitters look at me a little on the question side and I’m embarrassed and want to get the fuck out of there, my snafu.

Picnic with the Existential Ironworkers
July 25 But I did see all the ironworkers at a picnic table where they all sit down for coffee break, for lunch. If I’m up in the area I can catch them sitting there, drinking coffee, bsin. In fact, one time, I gave Chuck a floppy disc that had my book on it. “Here’s my book,” I said. He immediately tried to open it. “How do I read this?” Chuck, who I remember can walk any iron at any height, smiled at me. “Yeah, okay, I will.”
THEN JON TALKED ABOUT those miracle survival stories in Omaha: people falling but falling quite far and being able to go back to work a couple months later.
I WAS ABLE TO THEN GET ROD TO START TALKING ABOUT STU ELLENBERGER.
“The paper said he was coming down off the ladder but he really was up in the elevator shafts.” Now this isn’t quite what Rod said. But something along the lines of Stu wasn’t tied off.
“Not like the scream I heard when this guy fell.” This was his reporting yesterday. It wasn’t at the FDR; it was the UNO building where Stu went down.
Some other elements from Rod, who was right there and saw the way Stu looked:
“There was blood all over the place.”
“They had to restrain his partner because they wouldn’t let anyone go near him.
“It was like Hannibal in Silence of the lamb when he tore his face off. That’s the way he was, his face was just a mess.”
So another way of putting it, Stu’s descent was indeed horrific. And he fell on his head.
“That’s why I’m a firm believer in hard hats,” Jon said later. “Because that donkey dick hit him square in the back of his hard hat, it shattered the hard hat. Then he went down to the plywood that we just bought and went through that. We life-flighted him to the hospital, surgeons were right there, they worked on him, and he was out of the hospital in two days.
Which wasn’t the fate of Stu.
Was he dead on the spot?
He’d just gotten married, just gotten back from his honeymoon.
I remember how that same year, It wasn’t too much longer ole ironworker Scrubbie took his own life, letting himself stay in the car in the garage and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. Never to this day, working with them both at the Miracles Hills project, tying rebar for the four-story parking garage, Screamin’ Rodney as the man in charge, the pusher, did I dream that both of them whom I tied rebar with, would be, a couple years later, long gone.
No, what I wanted to say earlier, there’s not that many ironworkers I recognize who I’ve worked with in the past.
But it’s great to see ole Jerry Ellis and Chuck again.
The existential ironworkers.






























Chapter 5 Copper Wall
Happy Apprentice

August 1, 2003 Well, it was another week under the belt.
“You’re doing a good job,” Jon said. I just happened to come across him a little bit up and down the stairs in my wayward stud-lugging journeys. It’s gettin’ so I don’t remember what’s on the floors anymore, what ‘sposed to be on them.
Russ and I get a lot of stuff hauled up to the various floors. Which means we had to find and secure 14-foot, 4-inch studs. We had to find 4-inch track. We had to grab a cart, pull out the correct stud length from the huge pile. Because 12-foot and 14-foot, 3 ¾’s inch was mixed with 4 inch in a pile that was chest high, it was a huge disentanglement. A guy had to pretty much measure every bundle. This took a helluva long time. Plus, you swear you saw a useful bundle of 12-footers. You knew where there was a spare JLG.
“Well, if we do labor job, they’re payin’ us pretty good amount if they want us to do that,” Russ observed at one point. And, of course, that was true. There were no laborers on the job. Instead, there were a few haggard-looking men that seemed to be almost milling about, unable to shake street cred. Wearing bright shiny blue hardhats, on occasion you would see them pick up scraps and pieces of general garbage, picking up trash, tossing it in a huge plastic dumpster, filling it, then pushing it to the buckhoist where they’d take it down to the ground floor and unload it in the large dumpster on the street. The men, hailing from downtown temp agencies like Labor Ready or All in a Day, stayed in their own small group of two or three, moving slowly, almost purposeless, about the building, following orders from the General, Holder.
Holder, from the South, didn’t cotton much to unions; so it was really no concern to them what warm body they brought in off the street, unlike the rest of the workers who came through a union hall. According to Russ, drywall lugging and stud hauling from floor to floor fell in the category of what a man from the laborer’s union would do. This meant that carpenters and other crafts had to do pretty much their own pick up and trash carry out, a blending of crafts that is the hallmark of non-union outfits. For instance, I saw how when they were building the addition on to Central High School. A construction worker for Hawkins Construction, for instance, could be seen climbing off a rig as an operator then setting some forms. So first he was an operator, then he was a laborer, and then he was a carpenter. What people watching workers—and they seldom do, nothing too glamorous in the blue-collar world—don’t know is that there’s a fine line between skilled and unskilled labor. Hawkins and like non-union companies, however, can build highways and bridges; save for a few skilled personnel, the lion’s share of work is performed by unskilled labor. When it comes to the higher-grade job, expertise is required. For example, at the 20-story UP Building, skilled craftsmen had to be there. I watched a brother named Dallas from K.C.—through the entire juncture, him and a few workers toiled each and everyday outside the building, putting up the curtain wall, the metal-like material that went from ground to top in various sections of the building. Two or three guys did it fast, did it right. That crew, hailing from K.C., had other buildings to do all around the country and had been together—like the crew that puts up and takes down the Tower Crane, that, in time, will take down the buckhoists—had been together for a long time.
Our crew is new and different. Russ is a navy vet and Rod is an ex-marine. Ron is a Viet Nam protester. The three R’s, unbelievably, are managing to hold it together.
Rod was fairly dispirited Monday, didn’t really talk but just there to tell us what to do. Now this Friday, it just seemed like he couldn’t quit talking, inveigling in lots of what I guess you could call florid conversation, a mixture and picture of a Dad—who was vicious and mean—and is now a job superintendent somewhere in Illinois. I remember Dan saying that’s where he was from and told us about the bridges (Russ and I sit sort of in attendant audience and listen as “mother fuckers, fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that” as they recorded slights from various forces from their working past) and his talk is one of florid fluidity.
But Rod was more communicative today such that we, after lunch, stood and talked for almost an hour. About how you have to ask questions. If you’re not sure what you’re doin’, especially if you’re an apprentice. You have to ask questions. And then they will tell you. That’s how you learn.
I always think about my first construction job, just out of high school, wheeling concrete, tendin’ blocks. How the workers would always say to me, “Buy ‘em books, and buy ‘em books and all they do is eat the covers.” Now, 21st Century, there was more zeal in the workin’ man.
I didn’t ask a question or eating any of the cover of my third edition carpentry book (American Technical Publishers, Inc., 1997) but I remember how I got rapped in the head with a hammer to the hardhat yesterday. I remember at the Miracle Hills job, ole Jerry Bailey would rap Srubs on the hardhat or, with Scrubs bending down and tying, give him a shove. Out of playfulness I think Bailey wrapped me once or twice. At any rate, five years removed, I’m of course doing my usual cutting of the 12-foot studs, making sure I have my safety glasses on, my ear plugs in—Julio’s always walking around the building, bird doggin’ the job. This intensity, of course, is noted by the trades folk and almost everywhere are obscene gestures and strongly worded messages ATT Julio. So I am always ready safety wise. Moreover, the ole yeller DeWitt power saw and I are gettin’ to be buddies, nipping ends and cutting pieces of the metal studs like there’s no tomorrow. I’m getting ready to lean up ‘em up on the scaffold, 12 total, so that Rod1 can grab it, level it and nail it. Russell is in the platform plank above getting the other half, level and nailed. Suddenly, a wrap on my hard hat. Startled, I look up at Rod1 as for explanation. “Anytime Russ says something smart or ’s a smart ass, I’m gonna hit you on the head.”
To what do I owe this honor, I felt like asking but I laughed it off. “Oh, yeah, right.”
But Russell (whose name is Tim Russell but wants to be called by last name only) knows his wood as I found out today that he built log cabins in Montana and Arizona. He drives around in a quite nice vehicle, a huge black Dodge truck with dual wheels in the back. I find out later Russell is pretty fussy about his ride, about his work, about his stuff in general. I remember one time I had to get a lift from the building to the parking lot. Instead of me hopping in the cab, Russell gives me a You’re really dirty and sweaty look but said with a smile, “You don’t mind riding in the back.”
No, of course not.
Russell has fastidiousness down, almost to an exact science. Everything has to be perfect. It was great to work with someone so exact, precise.
But this early August, things are shaping up fine. “Yeah, my mom called and asked me how things were going and I said I really like the crew I was working with.” Rod and Russ and Ron are happy.
Not always so with Greg. He takes a metal 2 x 6. Jon wants us to tear down a temporary entryway. I almost have to get out of the way as Greg goes at it like madman, the 2 x 6 as an effective battering ram—it only took us a half hour to knock almost the entire thing down, just had to get a JLG to finish off the top. It dawned on me that it’s fairly easy to tear things down; takes so much longer to put them up. And really, an excitement takes over. It’s so hard to pull back from the swing, the crash, the watching of demolition at once gleeful and slightly demonic.

Rod’s Story
August 1 Suddenly, it just seems like there’s a lot of new faces of the job and I don’t hardly see Jack anymore him working with Gregg on the putting walls around the columns; framing the columns, I guess, is a better description, and kind of goin’ at what I guess you could call is at there own leisurely place and pace. However, because each one is skilled enough to know what the other’s doing, they make it look fairly easy, not that much sweat equity.
It’s a match, as they say, made in heaven.
Rod1, I know for sure, has a good understanding of how the Copper Wall ceiling should be put up.
He tells me how The Kinko’s building by Wal Mart, at age 25, is when he put his first building together.
His dad screaming all the time at him.
His last employ, before Allied, Rod talked about how he told Kiewitt architects to get the section cleared off because he had to do a job but they pretty much ignored him so he said he just started throwing things around, he didn’t care what anybody said and then he got the wall up but was going to do a job and Midwest Contractors got rid of him.
“And I though I was goin’ to Ogallala anyway to be with my kids,” Rod said, taking the stud I handed to him and lining it up.
Rod really didn’t say why she left or how long she’s been gone. But he’d driven to Ogallala last weekend, a 5 hour drive or so and then, he said, “they swam like fish.”
“You took ‘em to the swimming pool?”
“Yeah, the one at the hotel.” By the sparkle in his eyes, I could see that he’d had a good time interacting with his kids.
And then some of the tools he’d gotten rid of—drill, level, power saws. He said later, Because that’s where he thought he’d be going, he didn’t think he’d need them.
But, walking out to the cliff that looks down on the wide opening below, that is to be the large opening that remind me of a reduced version of Grand Central Station, yet equally splendid, seeing the mostly men and a few women come in and out of doors, the great expanse before me, I think how I enjoy immensely the opportunity I have to work with them. It was so far away and so much better than building scaffolds. It was a great way to start the apprenticeship.
I told Dena at the college where I teach Comp I two nights a week how this little piece of 2 and ½ inch track I leaned against the bar of the scaffold, five stories in the air. I said how it just skittered off the 2 x 4 a little bit and immediately took off. It didn’t go very far before it the planks below but then I thought how stupid and careless I was to not set it down with more care. I told her how surprised I was that you had to be so alert all the time.
Dena, head of the English Dept. at the college, regarded me and my story with interest. It probably was hard for her to fathom why I was working so hard at so little money. But Dena, who has been at the college for almost 10 years, supervising, has no doubt—because it’s a business college mostly populated by women and men who want to brush up, who maybe have a few kids and might be a single parent—has heard her share of war stories.
And then, leaning over the edge of the scaffold to nail a screw at the outermost edge, the hammer slipped out of my pouch and I watched it take off with a mind of its own went to the floor below me that was actually a scaffold. One good thing, on the Copper Wall section, there is no one working beneath.
Today, which was Friday, I was so worn out, I went numbly through the day.
The usual banter with Russell and Dan from Illinois who like to join us for lunch and is as thin as a rail and has trouble making it, given the fact that he’s only working 40 hours a week. Illinois Dan thought that the job would have OT (overtime) but it was only one day. He said he was applying elsewhere. Said he applied to be the bridge superintendent for Vrana. How he’d built several bridges in his lifetime. He assured us he was ready to build a couple more.
I listened as the conversations took their usual turn. He’s gotta Harley; he’s got an old lady; he rides it to the job site. He said, Six months I’ll be done with this shit then go drink beer, smoke pot, what ever.
A survey of lunch crown. Yeah that must’ve been six pussy walkin’ around that building. I just ain’t makin’ it guys. I gotta go somewhere I can work overtime.



Saturday OT
August 2 Saturday and I note now it was another existential moment with an ironworker.
I’d given my signal for the buckhoist to stop by sticking my hand out the building. The buckhoist stops and there’s a fairly sizeable crowd of workers on board.
I recognized one of the guys that worked on Chuck’s crew. He was kind of a a burley guy.
“Not this time.” Was his firm command when I was seeking ways to traipse the bundles of studs to the 5th or 6th floor. And now because it’s Saturday the only thing I can think of is all the times Russ and I have had to come up and down the stairs, carrying bundles of studs or track.
Yes I know it’s a laborers responsibility, according to Russ, but it gives me something to do. I guess the carpenters do have two young laborers that will move material but one of them, a petite pretty girl with blond hair, will be going back to school at University of Omaha in a short time. I find out that she’s Jim Frank’s daughter. I think her labor mate has the same plans. And really, I mean, because I don’t know what it is exactly I’m supposed to do. We can’t do anything because there’s no material brought up to work with…so I might as well find the 12-foot studs.












Chapter Six Carpenters Have Class
Have Gun, Will Travel

August 11 WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION, WE DON’T NEED NO THOUGHTS CONTROL…hey, teacher, leave those kids alone….
This is a brief review of the carpenter course: Materials Tools. The box at the bottom was entitled Topics Covered in this Class. Math was the first one listed; this was followed by everything from hand tool usage and fasteners to residential portable power tools and pneumatic tools. The box below that said Tools Needed: All of the tools you have at this time. There will be a tool check for all basic tools.
As apprentice carpenter, I hear we have to take a weeklong course every six months. There’s the usual bitch—can’t draw a salary during training.
And did I not say, that, like first run-through at Patent, when I took it upon myself to build scaffolding six stories in the air, I had yet to come across my saw? Yes, I can check everything off the list except my handsaw. So this will be one item I’m short. ‘Course, what’s the use. Are not handsaws like the Model T? I’ve yet to see one on the job.
According to the notice, proper dress was required: “You must wear work clothing and boots to class as there will be hands on in the workshop. Bring your tools, pens, books, calculators, etc.” Well, save for handsaw, I was good to go. A few trips to Sears and I was able to get through the list. And, because I finally asked a carpenter what a keyhole saw looked like; he pulled on out of his pouch. So I then found one at Sears. I fact, Rod even gave me his old one so I wouldn’t have to buy one. But I did anyway. Insofar as the handsaw, maybe one more fumble through the junk in the old garage and it would turn up.
Retired carpenter Danny, who regrets his contretemps with Kiewitt as an early carpenter, ruefully admitting that “now I’d be a millionaire,” was our instructor. He was burly, short and stocky. He was an older man but still looked like he could carry a few sheets of rock. Moreover, he wasn’t going to take any guff egregious in the class from any of the young whippersnappers. ‘”I’ll let cha know that right now,” he said, and stuck a tape into the VCR beneath a small TV in front of the classroom.
So, after a week of video, building a frame and a birdhouse, after taking the final test, we were done with our first class.
In fact, as Danny got ready to dismiss all 17 of us there was good news. “You all passed,” Danny said and I started a round of applause. For me, it was more an applause of relief than any congratulatory.
Ole Paul I think missed more than 30 but Danny, our erstwhile instructor, waved it off, looking like he wanted nothing better to do than hop in his new blue small car and away from the heat and speed away to enjoy the tomatoes that were overrunning my garden and a few of which I gave to him.
“Yeah,” Tommy said, leaving the Carpenters Local Union No. 444 and Millwrongs Local Union No. 1463 Joint Apprenticeship Committee building, “my boss is an asshole. I couldn’t work last Saturday because I have a bad back but he didn’t really care.” The young man was redheaded, medium-height, fairly good build. I remember how he had a few of the other apprentices team up with him, how he had little or no trouble building the picture frame or the birdhouse, sawing straight, sawing at a 45 degree angle, toe nailing at 45 degrees, quick nailing into the wood’s end grain.
Me? I could do none of the above. Usually I had to stop what I was doing and ask a brother to help. Or maybe have Danny show me what the heck I was doing wrong. I couldn’t toenail to save my life. Maybe I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. So I was surprised when the star pupil started talking to me.
Other tales from the crypt: “Yes, I’d go there and fill out an application. But I heard them say they didn’t want any more apprentices and wanted three journeymen. But we might not be able to send ‘em three journeymen because they don’t want to go out.’
The bespectacled young man, who had a weird if disarming laugh and a hachu that shook the upper half of his body and made many of the carpenters nearby almost stop in their creation first of bird cages then of picture frames—a shadow box is what it came to be called—and almost stopped us from working to examine this specimen more closely. He was always involved in some sort of diatribe with other carpenters—put downs in jest and humor. Standing in the middle of the command center were the two secretaries—Barb as command or lead with an assistant, Jim Franks as president of the apprentice training committee—going about their business. They kept track of all the workers and all the jobs and all the latest hiccups that seem to emerge from the trade en large, en masse and on the very human scale of young and old and in between wresting with the 21st Century building of America.
Mr. Sneezer stood there patiently; a laugh and a look of concern simultaneously stole across his face. He was looking at Barb. He wanted, now that the week of coursework was over at the training center a stones throw away from the U.S. Postal Service’s main building, to get to work.
“Well, they laid me off,” he said, almost plaintively, looking at wide-girth Barb behind the partition. “I don’t know what I should do now. Should I go ahead and apply?”
“Well,” Barb said, with her easy Southern accent that places her around about the Texas confines with large girth but not altogether unattractive, “I don’t know when they’re going to start putting the computers in I can’t remember if they’re starting next week or September 5th.”
“Well, should I go and fill out the application then?”
“Yeah, I would. Then when they call, you’ll have that all taken care of.”
So at this point…Shorco. ESS. Those are some of the companies. Allied. “I was puttin’ up the scaffold and made it to the top floor” is what the one carpenter said that came in just for one day and reported that that what he was doing for Allied at the convention center. I didn’t disclose to anyone about my job, that I had the pre-eminent job at the UP building, putting up the atrium, the $3 million Copper Wall.
“Thanks for the tomatoes,” is what Danny said as he walked out the door at noon or so and got in his small new blue car and headed off to his house where he’d put the tomatoes away and listen to his wife playing her TV games.
I could hardly even find the UP building with lane closures and the slug of traffic. Maybe the street is blocked off. I see the Paxton Manner is closed; I think that’s where I dropped off the young casual for the Main Post office, a block diagonal away from the training center a couple years before. Maybe the building got condemned or some sort of moneys quit coming in or something so a couple blocks away the pix of schizophrenia is evident: swans swimming in the lagoon below the arch and the Lehigh Mall—sculpture and landscape giving off a most appealing look while a few blocks south angry weeks poke through broken concrete.


Hurt Russell
August 18 I was in a trance or something today, almost killing Russ twice. There we are, on the ground floor and Russ is takin’ up track and I’m standing there holding this 14-foot stud and kinda twistin’ it, wondering about maybe just having it fall down when WOOSH, plaster and debris and black plastic tape came rumbling down. Russ scrambled out of the way and I just stood there dumbfounded. Was I still holding onto the stud? I can’t remember. But there was suddenly a black sheet on the ground, some plaster and then a piece of plywood suspended almost in mid-Air.
“Wow, what was that?”
There was an elevator installer around and he just looked at out dilemma of trying to get up there and get the plywood down. I think Russell scaled to the top and unscrewed it and then it fell down with a decided thud.
“Thank God for hardhats, “Russ said, a plaintive look stealing across his face.
We were on the ground floor. We’d walked one step too far then had to trace our steps back and then I recognized it as the floor where, it seemed an eon ago, I was able to be shown where all the studs were and where I’d go to walk around and cut studs.
We moved back to the rightful place and I looked at what was the ground floor of the atrium. Scaffolds were huge and monolithic ahead of us.
“We’re doing some demolition.”
“Me ‘n Rod handled it,” Russell said. “We didn’t have anybody else come in.”


Copper Wall Redux

August 13th I was just coming out of the daylong exposure to academia carpenter style. And the night before, there was Russ stepping into the room.
I was surprised to see him. Like at the camp site, he dresses like a dandy. He had a power tools class that everyone must attend, first coming onto the job.
“We’re doing some demolition.”
“Me ‘n Rod handled it,” Russell said. “We didn’t have anybody else come in.”
He continued.
“Yeah, I had a good time at the camp site. Did you guys stay overnight?”
“Yeah, we left about noon.”
“Go scuba diving.”
“Yeah, if we can get into the lake.”
“Course, when you’re down there, you’ll have to get an okay.
I more or less mossy around like in a what-if there was somebody wanted to scuba dive.
“Oh,” Patti said, “The Ralston Fire Dept. comes out here every Sunday and practices.”
The idea of someone wanting to do it for fun was not broached. So that would mean, and I didn’t have a chance to tell this to Russ, that we’d have to do a little subterfuge and get it going that way. Scuba diving that is. And of course, now that I think about it, there’d almost be no way we could get away with it lest we were super subterfuge.


The Class Was Pretty Boring
August 11 It was Danno again, a short square man that’s a retired carpenter who likes to tell war stories.
ALTHOUGH HE STARTS WITH THE PLEDGE OF ALLIEGIANCE, he says that he’d drive the bus to Canada if any of the young guys were drafted.

Carpenter class
And there were a couple jokes on the somewhat ribald side, a few clips, handouts, a visit by Barb and a few more war stories.
I don’t think he read my tome that was published in the W-H because looking at me he didn’t draw any recognition. That is, the last class I had with him, the orientation section of the first part of the apprenticeship, I gave him a copy of my article. He put it in his pocket and I don’t know if he remembered to read it.
I even mentioned about the guy that fell off the towers in Lincoln and he still didn’t draw a bead.
Which I guess is okay. The fact that either people didn’t read what I wrote or didn’t remember or make the connection. “That was interesting” is what Karen said. She’s my fellow teacher at the business college. I think she gets more and longer stints than me, going into the Comp II realm but now, that I was fully engaged with apprentice carpenter, Joseph the Nazarene, I wouldn’t have an ounce of time for any of that. Yes, I saw her at the workshop at the Bel Air. I’d asked her if she’d read it, me—going a on a little Song of Myself gig—but it in her box.
Now Dena, she ruefully admits, no longer gets to teach English. But she’s been there a number of years; she says its 14 total, and now no longer will teach English but will see to it that the teachers in all sections of the building will be surveyed and helped to one and all become top-notch teachers. The college is teaming up with another learning center from across the river. They are making certain, on a switch from the Nebraska College of Business to Hamilton College, that all teachers have proper credentials.
Moreover, there were more dictums and pronouncements from Heir Hamilton. I quickly threw the letter away. The material handed out is up in the attic somewhere. I should go ahead and find it but that would make me clean out my office because it’s such a potential fire hazard.
No, the luster of teaching is pretty much gone gone. I could give a whit about how to teach, how to do it better, how to do it worse, what I, as a professional educator, can do…to be pedagogically sound, to be goal oriented, to be able to address each and every student’s needs.
And on and on.
But we left the building in a flat out hurry. I was able to get a ride I’m glad we quit early because it seems to get hot as the day progresses.
It was my first time to have lunch outside the building.
It’s not much of a crowd that sits between the fountains at the 40 story building which was the last time I saw Mike Johnson, Dave “Gravy” Johnson’s brother who, I heard, quit the union. I didn’t realize it then but it was an existential ironworker moment. It was well into the early evening, 8 o’clock or so, and there’s a few a few rod busters tying away. And I look over and who do I see: not only Mike but Gary Frauhm. Like Chuck, he was a blast from the past. That same summer after I was run off the job in Blair, BA George Mattice sends me on a bridge deck.
“That outta be good for ya,” he says, and sends me on my way. The only one on the bridge deck, which was a section of I-80 as it swoops east and west across the country like a bullet train, was Gary and another older ironworker. Of course, it was huge job. Of course I didn’t know how to tie. But they needed a warm body to carry rod. Well, the ironworkers call in “punkin’.” So, Gary not only taught me how to punk properly, but also how to tie.
I recalled that evening to him what he said to me. No, wearing the exact same hardhat he had years before, he didn’t remember what he said to me.
I tuned in the blast from the past at a higher level. “You said, ‘You’re gonna learn how to tie rebar, but it’s not gonna be in my lifetime.’” The rod busters, a handful of them, working the night shift, had all stopped to listen. Mike said, “Yeah Gary would say something like that.”
But insofar as Mike, it was revealed to me that there was a large settlement for some insurance claim or something that went up he and his lady friend’s nose and thus made him work iron and have to keep going with the work ethic.
But now the ironworkers, accept for that one point of existential moment, that I saw both Charles and Jerry Ellis. And then came back all the early days of working iron again, the middle days of working iron again, the late days of working iron again.
But now I’m on something of a more gentle craft. Even Russell will have his iced tea next to his work area and then I noticed another carpenter having the same thing.
I’m thinking again of Pusher Gary, near the job’s end, seeing me head for the water yellow Igloo water cooler, to urged me to “Fill both humps” and we took in a brief moment of time to ready ourselves to finish out the bridge deck.
No, it was a very colorful, if singularly unattractive bunch that sat beneath the water fountain and the geese on the far side and you could see that Omaha was doing it’s best to try to define itself but really didn’t’ know what to do with the schizophrenia that sees wider highways and larger parking garages and shopping malls and huge mega stores and they’re looking for that Omaha time when the streets were filled with cars and people walking the streets
Well, at least there are garages into which the vehicles can park.
And then we don’t have to listen to the bleep and cant of pollution from exhaust and horns and people with tinted windows all push pushing to get ahead of one another as they drive their huge fortress of a car hither and thither through the night.
We’ll inveigle ourselves for more class tomorrow and chop away at not a few of the hours that will allow us to increase our respective merit and work and know something finally about what to do when it comes to fixing up part of your house.


******/

Well, it is 3, 4, and 5 and moves a little faster.