Hot August? Nights

Our first Broadway store adventure in the Phoenix area had us driving to and from there every single weekend. We would gather at Alex’s house on Sunday evenings and then, late at night…drive east to the desert. Friday afternoons we would reverse the process and end up in Encino late that night, to be greeted by our families.

The jobsite, a remote location at the time…was visited regularly by the Arizona Highway Patrol in their efforts to generate a little revenue by making out-of-state-workers buy Arizona license plates. Sure enough, we were caught during our second week there. We sported dual plates for the rest of the time we were in Arizona.

And I do remember a hot night as we headed across the border into Arizona and Alex mentioned that the needle on the temperature gauge seemed to be climbing? Sure enough, it climbed to boiling and beyond and suddenly we were stranded in the desert…with a broken water pump at 2 in the morning. Dark and hot.

But as luck would have it…we had some ice left in our coolers and so we began to put that into the radiator in our attempt to cool things down enough to get us back to civilization in Blythe, maybe an hour back down the highway? (Blythe = civilization? That’s an oxymoron!)

We had to do the cooling process slowly, as we didn’t want to crack the block by adding a lot of cold water all at once. One ice cube at a time was placed in the radiator opening. It would drop; there would be a loud “hiss!” and then a little cloud of steam would emerge and drift off into the desert.

Finally, the temperature was low enough to begin our backwards trip and we made it to Blythe as the sun began to turn the horizon into a silver band. An all-night service station was able to help and called the right people to secure us a new water pump at this early hour.

The sun was up and blazing when we finally pulled into the parking lot at the project site. Luckily, our crew had made themselves busy in our absence and so we didn’t fall too far behind.

Going to the dogs...

I should point out that Alex, Babe and I spent most weeks in Phoenix without the company of our families. It was on our second Arizona project (Scottsdale), a year later, that we were able to enjoy the most time with them.

With lots of free time in the evening, we would explore the Phoenix area for things to do. And one thing we enjoyed was going to the greyhound races north of town. (In these years, Phoenix actually had “city limits” and the race track was north on the Black Canyon road. The Black Canyon freeway was quite short and ended at the edge of town.) At the track, we could sit in air conditioned comfort and watch all of the action through large plate glass windows. We didn’t bet a lot of money, having learned some sort of lessons from our time in Las Vegas. But a $2 dollar bet on each race would just about guarantee that you would pay $20 for the evening’s entertainment.

And when we weren’t betting on the dogs, we might go to the Stockyards restaurant, a premier eating establishment located in the Cattleman’s Association building. Coincidentally, the building was located in the middle of the stockyards. And on a hot summer night…the fragrance was overpowering. But once you walked through the doors, all was elegance. Candles, fine linens and a piano being played softly while you dined. The food was as good as the ambiance and we would try to have enough money to eat there once a week.

One of our favorites? “Calf Fries” or “Rocky Mountain Oysters” I wonder if they are still on the menu?

Arizona

After more than a few mistakes, I realized that estimating was not the job for me. They weren’t terrible mistakes, such as forgetting to add in the price of the materials or something equally disastrous. It was just that I really liked my boss, Marshall. And it bothered me that my mistakes were taking money from his wallet. It became far too personal and so, after some discussion, I returned to working with my “real” tools.

This was where I felt comfortable. I discovered that I had a real talent for reading blueprints and understanding how something could be built. I could actually see the finished product in my mind and knew how to achieve it. I loved it!

I was now the foreman on all sorts of jobs, making decisions and planning daily operations, though when Alex was on the job, I deferred to him every time. We worked well together and the man who was once my nemesis was a best friend.

The Broadway stores continued to be built in far away places and we continued to do the work on them. We went to Phoenix one year and Marshall arranged for our families to join us for a portion of the time we were on the job. He rented apartments for us and we had a great summer, touring Arizona on the weekends. The weekdays were another story…a hot story!

Summer temperatures in Phoenix would climb to 110° and higher, making the windowless jobsite on West Camelback Road into an oven. And we began the work day at 3 in the morning, so as to avoid the worst of the heat in the afternoon. The afternoons were spent in the pool.

Some odd things about Phoenix in those days…swimming pools were equipped with spray nozzles set into the edge of the pool. In the evenings, a pump sprayed the pool water out into the air to cool the water off. And Phoenix homeowners built dikes around their lawns. Neighborhoods were assigned a day to flood irrigate their lawns, turning the neighborhood into a vast lake. You didn’t have to look; you could tell by the increased humidity that your neighbors had begun to flood their lawns.

Bid Day

Estimating was time consuming and very stressful. Yet I did like it. I enjoyed the “reading” of the plans and specifications and I once compared it to being a personal challenge from the architect…my job was to find all of the “work” contained in the plans and the architects job was to make the job appear to be simplicity itself. And when I missed something…the architect won. At the same time, if I were to find all of the work, then my price would be too high and our competitors would win. You had to find everything you could and then price the work to be as competitive as possible. That was where the stress was.

And bid day was terrifying. That was where all of your talents were going to be on display when you finally revealed your price to the general contractors. Worst scenario: Your price is $100,000 lower than anyone else’s price. 2nd worst scenario: Your price is $100,000 higher than anyone else’s price.

It wasn’t very ethical, but our job was also to find out, if possible, what our competitors bid amount was going to be. You did this by cultivating friends among the general contractors and they just might let you know what numbers they had heard through the grapevine.

Here is how it worked; bid time would be at 2 PM. No bids accepted after that time. Sometimes you have to give sealed bids in person, which was a logistical nightmare. But most times you were doing this all by phone and you would start by calling a “friendly contractor” about 12:30 or 1 PM, with your bid price and ask if, just perhaps, some other numbers had been heard? Usually the answer was negative but you got a promise to hear back from them. About 1:30 you would start calling all of the friendly contractors and try to determine where your $ number was in relation to others. Of course all of your competitors were doing the same thing and so finding that number was difficult. If you were lucky, you might hear that a bid had been received for $100,000. Your price was currently at $110,000. You have to make a decision. Can you do the job for less than the low number? And still make money? If the answer is yes, you have to call all of the other contractors and change your bid number to, let’s say…$95,000. And then hope that the competition doesn’t find out right away. The clock was both your enemy and your friend. You would make that price change at the last possible minute, maybe 1:58 and hope you had time to call everyone.

Excitement? You bet

Estimating

After finishing the Bakersfield Broadway store, we were told that there were going to be a lot more of these stores to build and that we had a good chance of securing the contracts on them. But, one Broadway store was taking just a little over 6 weeks to complete and that left a lot of time in a year for more projects for us…or for time off if we couldn’t get any contracts. So I was called back in to the office to do more estimating. It was assumed that since I was now a journeyman, I was more knowledgeable about production values.

I would begin each day by reading the “Green Sheet”, a trade newspaper that listed every job that was being planned. The statistics for each job included the location, the bid date, the trades that bids were needed for, the estimated value and a list of general contractors that were requesting sub-bids.

We were trying to avoid the small jobs, as the margins were usually just as small as the contract price. We looked for jobs in the mid-range of $250,000 to $1,000,000. And a rule of thumb was that our trade, drywall, would make up about 10% of the estimated contract price…so the numbers above would translate to $25,000 to $100,000 in drywall work for us.

After reading the Green Sheet, I would make up a list of contractors to visit and grab my map book. I would have to go to the contractor’s office to see the plans and spend as much time as necessary in their plan rooms while I estimated our work scope. Often, I would find some competitor had already arrived and was using the only available set of plans. That meant that I had to drive on to the next contractor’s office and hopefully find a set of plans that wasn’t being used.

I might spend a whole day driving around the Los Angeles area and see just one set of plans. Very frustrating!

And after I finished my estimate, I had to come up with a bid price, or prices. A high price, a low price, a “field” price and a “walk away” low price. That would be the lowest price we could use and only used when we were desperate for work. If someone (our competition) beat that price…we walked away.

On bid day we had to have all of our job knowledge ready at hand when we began to call in our bids. The general contractors would often ask about just what it was that you had included in your price…and your answer was sometimes the key to getting a job. “Yes, we included the drywall in the elevator machine room.” might be the right answer to give, even if you had no idea as to where the machine room was!

Making Money

Just a few more words on piece work…

As I said earlier, piece work was what you did when times were tough and hourly work couldn’t be found. Yet, I always found an excuse to do some piece work all through my career. If I needed some money for something special, I would look for a house or some apartments to work on at night or on the weekends.

But, piece work was a career choice for many drywallers. For those who were fast and strong, “Lids” were the best way to make a lot of money in a hurry. “Lids” were ceilings, and that was all that a “Lid crew” would do. Of course it required a partner and a silent type of teamwork. I did it for awhile with my piece work partner, Lloyd “Babe” Jones. But we had a few things going against us…for one; I was tall and Babe was short. That meant that our “Horses” were of different heights and they always had to be placed correctly in the room before we stepped up on them. The stack of board was usually in one larger room and we would each grab our end, place it against our shoulders and then run to the room where our “Horses” stood; jumping up on to it and rotating the board onto our heads as we stood. The “Horse” had to be at a height where all you had to do was raise up on your toes to put your head (and the board) against the ceiling joists. With your head pressing the board up tightly, you would reach in your nail pouch and grab a handful of nails. Bang. Bang. That was the desired rhythm; one hit to set the nail and one more to drive it home. And don’t stop till the board had at least a dozen nails in it. Then you could relax and get off of your toes before continuing the nailing rhythm. Fast.

OK, now imagine that same scenario when the horses are in the wrong position. I’m standing on Babe’s horse and he is on mine. Painful!  

“Sidewalls” were one of the other choices in piece work. This only required a partner for a few minutes and after that you were free to work by yourself.

Babe and I would often do sidewalls, teaming up just long enough to get the longer sheets of drywall in place. In those days, houses were stocked with the longest sheets available for the longer walls in the house. That meant that sometimes the first half a dozen sheets would be 4’x16’. I could hang 4’x12’ sheets by myself; a 16’ or 14’ sheet was another matter. So we would help each other with the “big” sheets and then the house was all ours to complete – and to be paid for.

Piece work was all about speed; speed in moving the material, cutting it, and nailing it. And although I was never fast enough to make a lot of money, I learned a lot from it. The most important thing I learned was that I shouldn’t make a career of it! But…I did enjoy the solitude of doing sidewalls. No one depended on me to go faster. I knew where every piece of drywall was; when I cut a piece off, I knew exactly what size it was and where it was going to fit later on.

Like my friend and mentor, Alex, I thought that every journeyman should have to do piecework for a time. It taught you good work habits and you learned to move the materials quickly and safely. And you had to do good, clean work. A good lesson. Most contractors would take money out of your paycheck for any board that was damaged by your negligence. In fact, most houses were stocked with exactly the right amount of board to complete them, and if you needed one more sheet…you paid for it.

Rain and Money

The rain we have been seeing for the past few months reminded me that some of the memories of my career should include the fact that weather, especially rain, definitely affected my paycheck…something that “office types” or “suits” didn’t have to worry about. When it rained like it has recently, the contractor couldn’t get decent soil compaction test results and so they couldn’t pour concrete. Without concrete in place, building stopped. High rises or homes, it was all the same.

You quickly learned to value a job that would take you through the late winter and early spring months. And when you were out of work, you joined a large group of construction workers that were also looking for work.

I only used my unemployment benefits one time. And I hated it. I know it doesn’t make sense…the benefits are there for you to use! They belong to you. You had worked for them. But it was a cultural thing. Unemployment was to be avoided. And so I would go searching for piece work in the housing market. And since there were so many out of work, the price being paid dropped to a level where you wondered why you should bother? Some times you could make more money from unemployment and avoid the hassle of deadbeat contractors and long hours.  

I remember finding a small tract of homes in the Carson area; there weren’t more than about 20 houses and only a few drywallers had found the tract, so it could last for a few weeks. They were paying 1-7/8 cents a foot. That was about 85 cents a sheet for a 4x12 sheet of drywall. More math: I could install about 1700 square feet a day in those particular houses. That adds up to about $32 dollars. And I had to work from 6:30 to 6 to get it done. You had to leave when you couldn’t see to nail. Hourly wages at the time were about $6 an hour; if you could get a job.

(Alex had told me that in the “old days”, when getting a job was tough, he had followed the drywall supply trucks from the supply yard to the jobs, hoping to talk his way into a job. And that had worked for me. I had spotted a truck full of drywall and followed it to the tract in Carson.)

Bakersfield

Our next Broadway store project was also out of town, but not very far…it was in Bakersfield, about 2 hours away from the San Fernando Valley. That made it far enough away that we only stayed overnight one or two nights each week. The rest of the time we would drive back and forth, over the mountain.

And this was a very odd store, not at all like the others we had been building. For one, none of the walls would go all the way to the ceiling. They all stopped short of the ceiling by about a foot. This was a design that some engineer had come up with because of the fact that the building was on a major earthquake fault. The building itself sat on Teflon bearings and could shift up to a foot in any direction.

This unique design prompted a lot of head scratching by Alex and I, as the architect hadn’t really thought through all of the design problems. In fact, we did a lot of the designing in our heads as we drove in early in the morning, each day, hurtling down the “Grapevine” and into the dense fog of the valley. (Note that this was long before Interstate 5 was built…Highway 99 was the only way to get to Bakersfield)

And on the nights when we did stay over, we would usually eat at the Wool Growers restaurant, a local Basque eatery. The food was great and there was lots of it. Steak, lamb, beans, pasta and salad. Plus bottles of red wine, (no labels on the bottles) and water glasses substituted for wine glasses.

Another note on Highway 99; since it was the major north/south artery, truck traffic was hazardous at times, especially where the highway descended into the valley through the “Grapevine”. Early in the morning, the smell of burning brake linings and tires was quite common, as most trucks wanted to cross the mountains while it was cool. Many times we encountered trucks that had lost their brakes and were racing down the last few miles of that twisting downhill road, hoping to reach the flats safely. We just tried to stay out of the way…

A Family

After our return from Las Vegas, we heard rumors that there were going to be a lot more of the Broadway stores to work on very soon and they were scattered all throughout the western United States. But in the meantime, we began working on the more commonplace jobs; apartments, stores and office buildings.

And I had to return to the routine of going to apprenticeship classes on Saturdays. I only had about 4 months left to serve and they would fly by quickly. Finally, an invitation to a graduation dinner was received and we showed up to get that important piece of paper that made me a Journeyman…to my surprise, there were dozens more graduating apprentices at the dinner than there had been in class? It turned out that some apprentices had “connections” and I didn’t.

Now that I was a journeyman, I could take my foreman’s wages without any problem at all. Those who had been upset at my role as an apprentice/foreman now had nothing to complain about. And the extra money was great…we had become a family with the arrival of Denise! And that extra money meant that we could start looking into renting a house and get out of the cramped apartment.  

Las Vegas - 60's Style

As I remember it, our second week in Las Vegas was a financial success. We began the week by putting some dollars aside, stuffing them into a drawer in the dresser. Not to be touched till Friday morning when we packed our dirty clothes for the trip home that afternoon.

The weeks went by and we soon found that we were being recognized in some of the casinos. And attitudes changed. We discovered that once casino employees found out that you were “regulars” and not tourists, they treated you very nicely. Smiles and greetings became commonplace.

Finally, after eight long weeks, we finished up our work. We had made money for the company, a lot of money! And we had a new goal; to do a complete Broadway store in just 6 weeks. We thought we could do it…

And to celebrate our completion, Marshall (our boss) came to Las Vegas and took us all out to dinner. I remember that we seemed to eat forever that night, as Marshall asked the chef to simply give us his “best”. No menu for us! And I saw the bill for that dinner…close to $125!