Rough Carpenter (Jobs of My Youth #3)
Mike, Jon, me, and Brother Ralph standing in front of the modular home factory we helped build
“It’s not just that you’re an adolescent at the end of your teens, but that adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition; it’s as though we didn’t note that the long shadows at sunrise and the dew of morning are different than the flat, clear light of noon when we call it all daytime. You change, if you’re lucky, strengthen yourself and your purpose over time; at best you are gaining orientation and clarity, in which something that might be ripeness and calm is filling in where the naïveté and urgency of youth are seeping away.” –Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence
When my county road crew gig wrapped up at the end of the summer, I got ready to start my next job, one for which I received no financial compensation. In the last semester of my senior year, I decided to postpone college and commit to doing volunteer work with my classmates Jon and Mike for a Catholic order called Glenmary Home Missioners. Although I attended a college prep high school, I don’t remember anyone from the counselors office asking me about my college plans, and my parents never broached the subject.[1] Maybe this lack of initiative on my part indicated I wasn’t ready to make that step. In any case, when I heard about Jon and Mike’s plan to take what is now called a gap year, I jumped at the chance to join them. By September 1972, we were driving east on the Penn Turnpike toward McConnellsburg, a south-central Pennsylvania borough located in Big Cove Valley, amidst the Ridge and Valley section of the Appalachians. We were on our way to help out with Glenmary’s Project HOPE (Homes On People’s Energy).
More precisely, we were helping Brother Ralph build homes for and with the families that lived on The Ridge, a segregated Black community located a mile outside of town. Brother Ralph became our mentor and friend. Raised on a farm in southern Indiana, he was a man of saintly simplicity, as easy-going and tender-hearted as they come. One of our favorite interchanges went something like this: Ralph would be kidding one of us about something. We’d say, “Brother Ralph, are you making fun of me?” He’d reply with a chuckle, “Shucks, I can’t make fun of you – the fun’s already there.” We never tired of that joke.
Brother Ralph was a skilled master builder. Thanks to his patient guidance, we learned how to lay cinder block, drive a sixteen-penny nail, toenail a rafter beam into place, mud sheetrock, install windows, doors, and electrical outlets. We experienced the exhilaration of nailing together the two-by-fours that became the frame of an exterior wall and then raising it, the four of us together, into place.
I enjoyed the construction work – the pleasures of learning the craft and using what I learned to build something as essential as a home. I also enjoyed building friendships with the tight-knit group of families on The Ridge. That fall we sometimes lent a hand to a local roofing outfit run by Bob Wolford and Harvey Kneese. They were funneling their roofing business profits into a project to build a modular home factory. The agreement was that, in exchange for our donated labor, Bob and Harvey would offer discounted rates to families on The Ridge who wanted to buy one of their homes.
Jon, Mike, and I helped them replace a few lovely old gray slate roofs with asphalt shingles. They didn’t let us up on those high steep-pitched roofs, but we’d serve as the ground crew, tossing the pieces of slate into a dump truck, lugging packets of shingles up the ladder to the crew. We also spent a couple of beautiful autumn days on the low-pitched roof of an auto dealership on Lincoln Way[2] at the east edge of town, preparing the roof for fresh shingles by prying up the old ones with roofing spades. We would occasionally stop, take a deep breath and a long swig of water, stretching our aching backs as we looked east to the wooded slopes of Tuscarora Mountain or west toward town and Sheep Meadow Mountain beyond. Then we’d get back to it.
Our nine-month stint in McConnellsburg was not all work. Brother Al Behm, director of Glenmary’s volunteer program, occasionally visited us. Late that fall, the four of us drove to Glenmary’s retreat house and youth center in Fairfield, Connecticut, for the weekend. He engaged us in some deep discussions about “life’s big questions.”[3] And I got my first taste of Manhattan when we took the train down to the city. We caught the newly released movie Sounder, featuring the great actor Cicely Tyson and a soundtrack by Taj Mahal, and saw our first Broadway play, Joseph Papp’s production of Two Gentleman of Verona.
By late fall, the six of us – Bob, Harvey, Brother Ralph, Jon, Mike, and I – had begun constructing a 50-by-100-foot sheet-metal building in a sheep pasture on a wind-bitten hillside west of town. When the site was being leveled and dirt needed to be moved, I learned how to use a stick shift ... while learning how to drive a dump truck, pretty much killing that transmission.
I gained respect for any construction work done outdoors in the winter. Because of the need for precision when framing a steel building and the unforgiving nature of that material, we did a lot of standing around before we wrestled a steel column into the bolts of a concrete pier or persuaded two roof trusses to meet at the ridge with the help of a log loader. Handling the steel was miserably cold work – I had not yet learned the perfect practicality of Carhartt coveralls.
By March we were helping to construct the first modular home, its two halves efficiently built side-by-side on flatbed platforms that would then be hauled out through the large sliding doors by semi trucks. And not long after that, we were back on The Ridge, putting the finishing touches on a sturdy two-story house for Bebe and her four kids, painting the interior and exterior walls, installing cabinets and sinks and toilets, laying carpet and linoleum flooring, and replacing the temporary cinder block steps with an inviting front porch. When Bebe and her family moved in, we joined the rest of The Ridge in a huge housewarming potluck. Bebe, the tough matriarch who rarely cracked a smile when she worked alongside us on the house, could barely stop beaming.
By the end of May, Jon, Mike, and I[4] were saying goodbye to Brother Ralph, our friends on The Ridge, our second-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Way. We were driving home in the blue 1952 Chevy Impala that Ralph had used to transport us all to work sites and then sold to me for one dollar. The tail fins of that Impala felt like wings slicing through air as we drove west toward Ohio and the next chapter of our lives.
Footnotes:
[1] My father had gone to Marquette University on the GI Bill after World War II, my mother never attended college, and they were probably too busy raising my younger nine siblings to think much about this.
[2] U.S. Route 30, also known as the Lincoln Highway, which follows the route of the 18th-century Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh Turnpike.
[3] The following year, Brother Al included two of my poems in his 12-page booklet titled “I Never Met a Bad One,” which began “...but I have met some of you who have been confused, looking for the thing that will make you happy, and that doesn't always mean what feels good.”
[4] By then, we were known around town as “the church boys.”