When I was young, my Uncle Pat was my hero. He and my Aunt Janet and my cousins lived on 7 acres in Yamhill, Ore., where they raised horses.
Uncle Pat was fierce and bossy with the young horses when he was teaching them to wear a halter or a saddle. He also raced flat-track motorcycles. But the coolest thing was that he was an iron worker connector.
When steel bridges and buildings are going up, the connectors are the guys on top waiting for the crane to lift the steel beams into place. Then they have to force the holes to line up with sleever bars and spud wrenches, then put a few bolts in and then quickly move to the next piece. It’s physically difficult and requires strength, stamina, fast reflexes and, obviously, no fear of heights.
That sure sounded like a great job to me.
When my cousin Bill and I turned 18, we signed up for ironworker apprenticeships. Once we were signed up, it was a waiting game. We would go to the union hall in Portland day after day and sit, waiting for a dispatch. Eventually they told us it would be a few months, so go home and wait there.
We went back to Yamhill and worked for a local farmer, moving irrigation pipe twice a day, early in the morning then again just before dusk.
We were eating lunch at home one day when Uncle Pat and his working partner pulled into the driveway with a boom truck (a big flatbed truck with its own crane attached) with a long beam loaded onto it. They told us it was time to learn to climb a column.
We went out in the pasture and dug a small hole. They used the crane truck to lift the beam vertically, drop the end in the hole then hold it in place while we were shown how to climb.
When a column or beam is the right size, you can put the sole of your boot against the far flange (the perpendicular ridge of the beam) and lock your calf into the near flange and use your leg strength combined with your arm strength to get up there fairly quickly. Once you reach the top there’s also a way to slide down, almost freefall, then use your boot soles and legs like disc brakes.
We were both pretty excited to get the hang of it right away. We practiced until we were worn out, then down came the beam. Off went Pat and his partner.
Some months later I was dispatched to my first structural steel job, putting up a new pot line at the aluminum plant in Goldendale. When you are brand new on the job, you generally start out in the bolt shack, getting nuts and bolts put together for the journeymen.
But the foreman I was sent out with that morning instructed me to climb to the very top of the structure, drop a rope, pull up angle braces and bolt them in place. I thought, how cool, I don’t have to go to the bolt shack! So I got to climb a column right off the bat and get to work. I couldn’t have been happier.
I had been working away all morning when a pickup truck came roaring down the hill and halted in a cloud of dust. I was looking down wondering what was going on. The superintendent came out of the truck and yelled at the foreman, pointing up at me. He yelled some more and motioned for me to get down there. So I got to slide down a column and then apply the brakes and step off.
The superintendent was hollering at me and asking me what in the heck I was doing up there. I explained that I was bolting in the angle braces.
“I mean that you are brand new and not supposed to be up there and why didn’t you tell this foreman that you were brand new?” he demanded.
“Well, he didn’t ask me,” I said.
By then the super was calming down and he asked me, “Does it bother you up there?”
“No, I like it,” I said.
“OK,” he said, “then go back to it but be careful.”
I ended up being in the trade for 13 fantastic years. I will never forget any of it, but eventually I decided to trade in my work clothes for a suit and a white collar job. That was 32 years ago and I just recently retired, but I still have a whole lot of ironworker pride. It’s not just a job, it’s an identity.
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