Hod Carrier (Jobs of My Youth #4)
Hod Carrier (Handlager), c. 1927, by the German photographer August Sander, from his “People of the Twentieth Century” project.
“Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, [Max] Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed. That would seem an easy sell today, but it wasn’t in 17th-century England, when many commoners still earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the landowners, who wanted them to do steady work for wages. ‘A man [or woman] does not by nature wish to earn more and more money,’ Weber argues, ‘but simply to live as he [or she] is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.’” –Eula Biss, Having and Being Had
After spending nine months building houses with Brother Ralph and Jon and Mike in the Pennsylvania mountains, I returned to Ohio and, by the beginning of June 1973, with my dad’s help, landed a job as a rough carpenter with a small construction outfit. But I was a little over my head; I missed Brother Ralph’s gentle mentorship.
We were transforming an old barn into lawyers’ offices in Peninsula, a quaint village located in the middle of what would later become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.[1] One task involved climbing high into the loft of another old barn to salvage the sturdy oak roof timbers. I was straddling a beam atop the wall of the barn, trying to drive the pegs from the mortise and tenon joints that held the bones of the barn together, admiring the view while being scared shitless. That barn was being torn down to make room for the vast parking lot that would surround the Richfield Coliseum, then being built for the new Cleveland Cavaliers pro basketball team. The coliseum served as the Cavaliers’ home from 1974 to 1994, but (I’m pleased to report) it was demolished by the National Park Service in 1999, and the land was converted to meadow.
My father may have overstated my carpentry skills to my boss, who was clearly less than impressed with me. I tried to make up for my lack of experience with my willingness to work hard, but I lasted less than a month at that job, fired for literally “not having all the necessary tools,” although I took the meaning metaphorically as well. I shrugged off this setback, deciding to travel the rest of the summer – back to McConnellsburg to help Brother Ralph build another home, then to Vanceburg, Kentucky; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Mount Katahdin, Maine.[2]
My month of wage labor paid for one edifying semester at Ohio University in Athens. Then I decided to do another volunteer stint with Glenmary Home Missioners,[3] this time in Butler County, Kentucky, and supported by Glenmary’s $450 monthly stipend. By May 1974, I had completed my commitment to Glenmary but decided to stay on in Kentucky. I had fallen in love with my living situation – I was renting a four-room farmhouse at the end of a dirt road seven miles outside of Morgantown, the county seat. The house was heated by a coal stove and had electricity but no running water. The west door off the kitchen led to the back porch and the well; the kitchen’s east door provided access to the outhouse. I had already planted a garden between the house and the tobacco barn – long rows of corn, tomatoes, and green beans.
I found work on the assembly line of a wood pallet factory on Sawmill Road, but after a week of that, noticing that nearly all my co-workers were missing one or more fingers, I decided to look for something safer. I met a young bricklayer named Oval Clark, who had recently parted ways with a crew to start his own business, and was in need of a helper. Oval was a bit moody and habitually disgruntled, but I needed a job and liked the idea of returning to house construction.
I soon learned Oval had a drinking problem. When it started raining at a job site, we’d retire to the nearest bar to shoot pool, and Oval would start drinking. We’d never make it back to the job site that day. (If nothing else, I became a decent pool player that summer.) Most mornings, I’d hitchhike into town to meet Oval at his house, knocking on his door to wake him up, usually hungover, sometimes still drunk. His sixteen-year-old wife would answer the door, wearing an oversized Butler County High Bears t-shirt, grumpy from lack of sleep and vexed by it all. I could see her coming to the slow realization that this was the life to which she’d said I do.
Since we weren’t finishing any bricklaying jobs, I wasn’t getting a paycheck. For suppers, I was either resorting to a big pot of green beans from my garden or shamefacedly stopping by to visit my good friends Walt and Betty Essex around supper time. One morning, after a couple of weeks of this, I walked from Oval’s apartment to the Farm Boy Restaurant, the meeting spot for Oval’s former brick crew, and asked the boss, Wavy Romans, for a job. Familiar with Oval’s tendencies, Wavy had already let me know his outfit could use another worker.
The rest of the summer, I worked for Wavy and his son Ronnie, becoming their number-one hod carrier. I assembled the scaffolding and carefully leveled it with wood scraps, adding a second level as we worked up a wall. I made the mud (i.e., mortar), mixing the correct proportions of sand, cement, and water in a large tub with a hoe, and then kept the bricklayers supplied with fresh mud and made sure it maintained the right consistency. Using brick tongs, I delivered twenty bricks at a time, ten in each hand, to whoever needed them. As we finished a wall, I’d use a joint raker to clean excess grout from the mortar joints and then wash the bricks. And at the end of the day, I’d carefully clean the trowels, hoes, and mortar tub.
We worked all over Butler County and neighboring Ohio and Muhlenberg counties. Sometimes our job sites were rather rudimentary; on one job, I had to draw water from a well by hand to make the mud. Every day was a workout that included lugging mortar blocks or tongs full of bricks and buckets full of mud, often lifting them above my head to reach the 2 x 10 scaffold planks. My upper body became as ripped as it would ever be in my life. At the end of the day, I’d arrive home exhausted, walk out to the back porch, strip down, pull a pail of bone-chilling cold water up from the well, and pour it over my head. Nothing had ever felt quite so good.
I enjoyed working with the crew, which usually consisted of four bricklayers and two hod carriers. Driving to a site with our equipment, we’d shout, “Brick job!” – our voices charged with pride and delight – whenever we saw a house under construction, as if we could claim it by exclamation. We’d stop for lunch at one of the grocery stores found at many country crossroads. At the small deli counter, sandwiches could be made to our liking and pickles fished from a ceramic crock.[4] Head cheese sandwiches were popular, but I always passed.
By the end of September, Wavy was talking about training me to lay bricks. Although the idea of becoming a bricklayer appealed to me, summer was fading, the wind was changing, and my wanderlust was calling. At the time, I tended to agree with Joni Mitchell that “all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out.”[5]
In retrospect, I can say that hod carrier work was hard labor that didn’t pay well, but it wasn’t a “bullshit job,” a job like telemarketing or fulfilling orders in an Amazon warehouse. It felt meaningful to make homes, especially ones with some durability, ones that could protect a few little pigs from a wolf. After four months working for Wavy and Ronnie, I’d saved enough from my paychecks to buy one of the Volkswagen Beetles my friend Walt had rebuilt, with enough cash left over to roam for the next three months, first driving out to Iowa, where my family now lived, and then hitchhiking to the West Coast. It was as much as I needed, a fair exchange for my labor.
Footnotes:
[1] Located on the land of the Erie and Kaskaskia peoples, the park was designated in 2000. It follows the Ohio and Erie Canal and the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire in 1969, and it includes what was once the most contaminated dump site in the U.S.
[2] For more on that trip, read my blog post entitled Carpe Diem Days.
[3] You can refer to my blog posts An Alternative Education, Part 1 and An Alternative Education, Part 2 for more details.
[4] And if we were particularly hungry, bags of Mikesell’s Bar-B-Q chips.
[5] From her song “Urge for Going” (1966).