What Uncle Chick Said

You never know when nuggets of gold are going to fall into your lap.

     No, not real gold, that never happens (unless you slap some guy so hard on the back of the head, his crowns come out), but I’m speaking of things people do or say that add to your life, change it, and hopefully, make you wiser.

     For me, that happened while working as a laborer one summer when I was 18, for my uncle, “Chick” Morley.

     Uncle Chick was a mason in the ‘burg, as was his father. He was a wild teenager chasing both beers and women with similar zeal in his youth, but he was also a hell of a hard worker. Masonry is a tough job; out in the weather, lifting heavy cinder blocks with one hand, laying down mortar with the other (he had forearms like Popeye). You didn’t get the day off because it was too hot, or it was raining a little.

     You’d often see him on the job, drinking McDonald’s coffee on sweltering days (coffee so hot, he could barely sip it), smoking his True Blues, wearing his pork pie hat, and giving my brother (who was also conscripted at times) and me instructions on how to properly break our backs. I remember more than once, him stopping by to pick me up for our job, and me, not being up at 7 in the morning, coming into my room to gently wake me and inquiring when I might be ready. I think his words were along the lines of “Get your ass up, we gotta go.” Then off we’d go in his milk truck, purchased from the former Brown’s Dairy, repainted a Kelly green, repurposed now from delivering milk to mortar. Tools would pop up and plop down as we hit bumps and potholes, sounding like a silverware drawer being dropped. If we had ever got into an accident, we’d probably die from sharp masonry implements hurled at our sunburnt bodies at ballistic speed (“I’m sorry Mrs. Ashley, your son was killed by a trowel to the jugular”)

  The work was hard; it was hot, sweaty, grimy, and physically demanding, much like doing your taxes on April 15th. He had another laborer, Walt Bushey, an older man who was very fidgety, but funny as all get out, often causing me to stop work, being bent over in laughter (“After work I have to stop at the store and get a henweigh” he once said. “What’s a henweigh?” I asked. “About 4 pounds!” he quipped) On breaks, he wouldn’t sit down, and I asked him why, and he said, “Because I won’t want to get back up”. Fair enough. Or, in the moments between work, as my uncle would lay down block, a truck would be backing in - whatever - Walt would be taking little shovels full of dirt and just throwing it next to the pile he was taking it from. When asked why, he said, “Always look like you’re busy”. Construction workers were ridden roughshod back in their early days, and slouching off wasn’t tolerated. Uncle Chick told me a story of once working on a job, laying brick after brick, and stopping for a moment just to straighten up his back, and the foreman barking at him, what did he need, why are you stopping?!

     At the end of the workday, I had been in so much dust and grime, that I literally couldn’t get my fingers through my hair; my clothes were just totally dirty from sweat, dirt and the occasional swatted mosquito body. The pay was good - $200 a week under the table, and for an eighteen-year-old, that was very nice; that would be about $800 today. I’d blow a lot of it on “Exotic” dancers and beer at the Manitonna Lounge in Prescott on Friday nights; hey don’t judge, I was eighteen and was really into artistic dance expression.

     One time we were working on a new addition to Hepburn Hospital; they were bringing in a mobile CAT scan unit - a tractor-trailer that would travel the rural hospitals of the north - and our task was to build the foundation for it, which meant building a footer - a concrete base with cinder blocks. It had to be dug four feet down (past the frost line) and about a foot wide (hence the word “footer”) and, it had to be dug by shovel…not sure why some 40 years later; maybe he couldn’t get a backhoe, it wouldn’t fit in there, whatever the case. At some point, the shoveling stopped - I had run into clay. You can’t dig through clay with a shovel - it’s just too hard. I alerted my uncle, and he threw down another tool - a pick axe.

 He said, “Peck away at it.”

     I thought nothing of that instruction at the time; it wasn’t anything profound, yet for some reason, I did remember it through the years. While it took a while to complete my shoveling task, complete it I did.

     And it did serve me, not just on that hot, humid day, slaving away in a trench fighting against clay - but many years later.

  It was a euphemism, a quaint way of saying “Don’t give up” when faced with a daunting task; take it in small bites, that’s the way to get it done and use the right tool.

     That was some 40 years ago now; I’ve dug ditches, worked in offices, I’ve used dangerous machines and harmless computers. While I didn’t exactly love the work with my uncle all those years ago (what teenager would), I’m grateful I learned the meaning of a hard day’s work, and how to work smarter.