Daddy learned to lay brick while helping erect the building of the Beaver Creek Church of the Brethren in Halls. His instruction was on-the-job training under the tutelage of the church's pastor, who was himself a brick mason. He taught him well.
Daddy was rightly proud of his brick work. He highly valued and insisted on quality from both himself and his laborers, especially my brother and me. From the time we were old enough to get into trouble at home, he required that we go to work with him whenever we weren't in school.
Many a time, he would reprimand me for various ways I would fail to measure up to his standard by my own failure to focus on quality. For example, when I was stocking bricks on the boards where he was laying a wall, he insisted that I mix the colors to avoid having a spot on the wall that had a preponderance of one color. I struggled just to get the bricks there faster than he laid them, let alone ensure a color mix.
When I was rodding the joints, he would get after me for doing it too soon, when I was apt to make the joints too deep in the soft mortar, or for doing it too late, after they had dried too hard and left black marks on the joints. After I finished rodding the joints, I had to take a trowel and carefully cut off any mortar that had extended beyond the edges of the joints, ensuring a clean, smooth surface over the entire wall.
Above all, he insisted on keeping the bricks clean. I had to take care when dumping or shoveling mortar onto the mortar boards not to let it splatter the parts of the wall where he was laying or on the bricks below the scaffold. If rain was predicted overnight, we had to tilt the walk boards up before we left for the night so the rain wouldn't splatter dust from the boards against the wall.
Many times after a job was completed, I scrubbed entire walls with a piece of broken brick and a stiff-bristled brush soaked in muriatic acid to ensure that we left a clean wall behind when we departed on our final day.
Daddy demanded a lot of us, but nothing that he didn't also demand of himself. He set the example for us. And in return for his insistence on quality, he got several notes from appreciative homeowners for whom the house was being built thanking him for the quality of his work. (The following photo is of a pool enclosure at a home he bricked on Emory Road near Pelleaux Road in Halls. They wrote one of the thank-you notes referred to.)
His insistence on quality also paid off in future business. Word got around. He never once advertised. Yet, he was always in demand by several contractors, including Clyde Helton, Joe Ridenour, Wayne Hill, Steve McMahan, and seldom do I remember his being without work, unless there was a general downturn in the home-construction industry. His work was his advertising.
One thing about Daddy's work, however, often did not measure up to my satisfaction--his scaffold building practices. His scaffolds often resembled a Rube Goldberg contraption, and I sometimes doubted their safety.
Once, when I was so young that I could carry only three bricks at a time, I refused to ascend to the third tier of the scaffold via a single 2x12 walk board. It was, I thought, just too high to be safe. So Daddy put a handrail on one side. But with both my hands clutching those three bricks, how was I to hold the handrail? The first time I tried, I promptly fell off the opposite side of the walk board and right into the pile of bricks.
Once when Daddy had nailed two overlapping walk boards together about four tiers high in the gable end of a house, I expressed concern that it might not be safe.
"Sure it is!" he insisted, bouncing up and down on it to demonstrate his point. He and I walked across the board many times that day as he lay brick and I spread mortar on the wall ahead of him and rodded joints. I later climbed down for a drink or something and before returning was gazing up at the precarious scaffolding when the boards came loose just as he crossed them. He fell straight down as I stood helplessly. Fortunately, he fell into a wheelbarrow full of freshly mixed mortar that another worker had just positioned under the scaffold. Daddy suffered only a skinned shin and a little bruised pride. But he simply climbed back up and nailed the boards back together with two nails instead of one and resumed his work.
Some of Daddy's jobs were so tall that he didn't have enough scaffolding to reach the top. To remedy the problem, he had several 4x4-inch, 20- to 25-foot metal poles made. (See photo below.) He drilled into them holes spaced every foot or so along their length. He also constructed frames shaped like inverted T's that fitted over the poles and under which he inserted a bolt through the holes to support the T frames. He constructed brackets that fitted over the top of the poles and attached to the roof. Once the poles were lifted into position and nailed to the roof, he laid walk boards, brick boards, and mortar boards across the frames. As he laid the wall, he would raise the entire contraption as high as needed using a come along wench, or hoist, at each pole. Whenever the whole contraption got near the top, it got pretty top heavy and shaky!
When we kids were growing up, our house was of frame construction with clapboard siding. We were similar to the cobbler's children who had no shoes. But in our case it was the brick mason's kids living in a house with no brick. Only after I had left for college did Daddy brick our house. He did so in his spare time, on Saturdays or holidays or after the regular workday. And Mother revealed once again that she wasn't afraid of hard work or heights, as she proved when she scaled the scaffold in one gable to rod the joints.
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