And away we go...

I'm going to leave out the high drama of our moving saga and move directly into the world of working...

After moving to Janesville, I did nothing for 2 or 3 months, living off of the profits of our home sale in Southern California. I really felt burned out, and the time off was therapeutic. Finally, it was time to go back to work. But where? The closest large city was Reno NV. There wasn’t much work in Lassen County, or certainly not my kind of work. So I drove to Reno and looked around. What I didn’t know, before I left that morning, was that the MGM Grand Hotel was being built. Of course I saw it as soon as I came over the hill on US 395, up by Sun Valley. It was just a steel structure, maybe 16 stories high at the time, but it already dominated the valley floor.

I went to the Carpenters Union and talked to the Business agent. I had been given his name and a letter of recommendation from the Union that I had left in Los Angeles. I was quickly hired and went to work on the project. Surprisingly, within a few hours I saw a familiar face, Bill Fritchell, formerly a foreman for Solari & Sons Drywall. I had met him 5 or 6 years ago when I was involved with building the Weinstocks stores in Reno and Sacramento. He was now the Superintendent for Oahu Interiors, the company that had just hired me. Right away, he wanted me to become a foreman for him. I told him that I really wasn’t ready for that. I kind of liked my vacation from stress. He insisted, and I finally agreed to run the layout crew. It turned out that the layout was being done by one of the Hawaiians, “Frenchie” and he was supposed to be leaving soon. Someone was needed to replace him. Me.

A little something about Oahu Interiors. Sometime in the 60’s, a drywaller, Ernie Jackson, from the central valley of California, had decided to move to Hawai’i and become a rich contractor. Which he did. And after awhile he decided to branch out and do some work back on the mainland. He had bid on the MGM tower project and was easily the lowest bid. The company I was going to work for eventually, Solari & Sons, had bid on the hotel tower project and couldn’t even come close to the Oahu bid. (Solari was already doing the lower levels, convention center and casino levels. So they had plenty to do without the hotel tower)

Since Ernie Jackson wasn’t sure about the qualifications of the local labor force and he had found that Solari already had most of the good talent employed, he decided to bring a lot of his labor from the islands. That included Frenchie and a dozen others. In fact, the entire layout crew of 6 men was all Hawaiians and I was the only haole.