Learning from the pros

Hi everyone,

This morning I am remembering a summer long ago, when I was sixteen and hired to work at Glenstone Block Company, a concrete block manufacturing company owned by my dad and his partner, GUY HALL. I was assigned to the warehouse. VERNON MOORE, the man who ran it, was known to be hard to please. If a new hire didn’t work to suit him, he was known to head down to the front office and request a replacement. I wasn’t afraid of him, exactly, but I didn’t want to cross him either. I’d met him a summer before when I worked with CLIFFORD HALE, making things with concrete — tables, benches, bird baths, flower planters, etc.. We worked in the sun, mixing the mud, pouring it into molds, and stripping the finished products the next day. Clifford had a 3rd grade education but he knew all sorts of things I didn’t know. I learned from him during those long hot hours. Some of the things we made still exist here and there.

Vern put me to work cleaning in the warehouse, scooping and sweeping up cement that had spilled out of torn bags, stacking empty pallets, counting inventory, learning to identify the dozens of kinds of blocks manufactured by the company. Harder jobs involved unloading boxcars loaded with bricks that came in every few days. Pallets of them could be unloaded by forklift but loose ones on the floor had to be picked up by hand, several at a time pressed between your hands, and walked off the car to stack on pallets and hauled off to the warehouse. It was hard work. So was unloading cars of cement. A bag of masonry weighed about 70 pounds. A bag of Portland weighed 94. Every man I worked with could pick up two at a time of either kind. RONNIE TRACY, who was shorter than I and slender, could hoist a bag of masonry over his head with one hand. I couldn’t though I tried all summer and put up with a lot of Ronnie’s good-natured teasing.

In those days, each morning JOHN HERN would carry by forklift the racks of blocks made the previous day from the kilns out onto the yard. There they were taken off by hand and stacked onto pallets. Full pallets were then moved to one of the storage yards for further curing. The most common block — 8 inches x 8 inches x 16 inches — weighed 36 pounds when made with concrete, 28 pounds if made with a lighter aggregate called haydite. There were three such blocks on a steel pallet and each rack held 36 pallets. Working outdoors, one man on each side of a rack would strip off half of the blocks (52) and stack them onto the wooden pallets. Very often my working partner on the other side of a rack was a slender man who always wore a long-sleeved shirt no matter how hot the summer day. He seldom looked up or stopped to rest so I did likewise. He just kept working, quietly and efficiently, until the racks were empty. Down in the office, my dad wouldn’t have known how steadily we unloaded those blocks. My partner on the opposite of the rack never knew that he was a mentor whom I would never forget. Only on our rare breaks did we visit much and that’s when I discovered that he not only had a strong work ethic but also an inquisitive mind. Our conversations often roamed to topics that I was studying in school. We became friends. For many years after that summer, he called me now and then to discuss one thing or another that was puzzling him. The last time was when he was old and in failing health and his son arranged the call. It had been more than forty years since we had met on opposite sides of those racks.

Twenty years after that summer I became the owner of Glenstone Block Company and managed it as president for the following thirty-five years. I learned a lot during those thirty-five years. But my real apprenticeship came from working with the men whose pride and hard work made it all happen, the summer I was sixteen.