Last week I wrote about visiting the "soft opening" of the Halls Crossroads Historical Museum (https://hchmmuseum.org/)and discovering there a couple more relatives who had fought during World War II. I knew then and there that I had to learn more about them and their experiences.
So while going through some boxes looking for something totally unrelated this week, I came across photos of one of those relatives as well as his father. And mixed up among those photos were others of one of the houses my father had bricked, reminding me of some important life lessons he taught me on the job.

The relative was Charles A. Peterson. I learned while visiting the museum that he had been a member of Company I, 86th Mountain Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, and had fought in Italy in the Northern Apennines and the Po River Valley of Italy. I now have some basic information with which to begin my search for his story.
The photos I discovered of him in that box were one showing him standing with a distant mountain in the background, possibly during the war for he is wearing khakis, and the other of him walking down Gay Street in Knoxville. Was that a practice of photographers of the day, taking photos of random strangers and then selling them the developed photo?

Also with those photos was one that included Charles's father, Uncle Bob, or Robert Peterson. (He's second from the left in the group photo.) Charles and Bob lived together on their farm, which sat where Peterson Place now is on McCloud Road. The only thing I remember about Uncle Bob was that whenever we visited him, he would grab me and chew on my ear, and I'd finally escape his clutches and run off, wiping slobbers from my ears. That was almost as bad as Momma Graybeal's hugging on me with snuff running from the corners of her mouth!

Suddenly, another photo that demands research fell from the stack. It was a formal portrait of another uncle, Wallace Farmer who lived only about half a mile from our house. It shows him in an army uniform and a garrison cap and is labeled "Camp Gruber, Okla." I vaguely seem to remember his saying one time that he had served in the Pacific theater during the war (but I might be wrong).
Uncle Wallace was a quiet man, but he teased us kids silently, pretending to "steal our nose" and holding up his fist with his thumb sticking between his index and middle fingers, and it looked ever so much like a nose and made us instinctively reach to our noses to see if they were still there. He sometimes stopped to pick me up as I walked home from track practice, asking, "Need a lift?" And that was all he'd say until he pulled into his driveway on Hill Road, when he'd say, "Well, l'll see you later." That was it, and I walked the remaining half mile home. I have to find his military unit before I can begin researching his war experiences.
But then there were the photos that reminded me of Daddy. He was a brick mason who bricked a good many of the homes in Halls and surrounding communities. Anyone who ever lived in Murphy Hills, Halls Heights, Freeway Subdivision, Gracemont, Temple Acres, or dozens of other subdivisions in the area more than likely lived in one of his homes. His work was seldom slow, unless it was due to inclement weather, because he worked for a number of contractors over the years: Joe Ridenour, Clyde Helton, Wayne Hill, Steve McMahan, Hubert Waller, and several others.
From the time my brother and I were old enough to get into trouble at home, Daddy made us go to work with him anytime we weren't in school. We carried bricks, mixed mortar (by hand in a large mixing box or in a wheelbarrow), rodded joints, built and disassembled scaffolding, and did whatever else we were told. If there was nothing else to do, he'd have me clean out his toolbox on the truck.
At first, I was so young that I could carry only three bricks at a time and so childish that I spent a lot of time calculating how much candy and bubble gum I could buy with what he paid me. As I got older, I learned to apply that income to school clothes and, eventually, college.
On the job, Daddy taught us a lot of important lessons that were applicable not only while working for him but also later in life.
He taught us to do our best and to take pride in our work because the quality of the work we boys did reflected on the quality of his work, too. He taught us not to rod joints too soon after he had laid them because the tool would dig into the wet joint and leave deep gouges that we'd have to fill in. Neither should we wait too long before rodding the joints because then the mortar would be dry and the tool would leave dark, unsightly marks. All bed joints had to be straight, and we should never leave tags below the head joints. And we were not to loaf around but to give a day's work for a day's pay, no matter how little or how much that was.

The accompanying photos of one of Daddy's houses shows the quality of work he did. This particular house was built by Steve McMahan and was featured in the Knoxville Parade of Homes. The intricate brickwork on the gable vent and around the windows in one end of the house, the herring bone design on the chimney, and the retaining wall all took a long time for Daddy to do, and he was paid by piecework rather than by the hour, so it was a sacrifice for such time-consuming work. But he took his time and did his best.
I guess we, too, eventually began to take pride in our work because after Daddy would finish topping off, or capping, a chimney he'd just laid and had moved on to another part of the job, he would leave us boys on the roof to rod the joints and clean off the roof. It was then that we would take a nail and scratch into the soft mortar on the cap Daddy's initials and the date. That memory brings to mind the adage "Do a job that you'd be proud to sign your name to."
I don't think either of us boys really enjoyed working during summer vacations and on school holidays (I know I didn't), but it taught us a lot of good lessons that we've carried with us ever since.
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