Our Fathers, in Construction…
-Handwritten for these men of steel, wood, and bruises on this Father’s Day.
California’s Central Valley summer hell, and I’m helping my grandfather remodel my kitchen. He’s in his late seventies, me in my late twenties, he’s doing most of the work and I’m wearing out. Barely noon and a hundred and something degrees. He finally takes a break to snap a grapefruit off the backyard tree.
His name was Ed. He never said much about how he learned to do what he did, and I never thought to ask until later.
Ed came home from World War II and used his GI Bill on a carpentry school near Pittsburgh. He worked at Pittsburgh Plate Glass during the day and studied the trade at night. When he finished he framed custom homes in the hills outside Beaver Falls, but the Pennsylvania winters shut you down for months at a time, so he packed up the family and drove to California.
In Fresno he went union. Harris Construction. Robert G. Fisher. The big commercial outfits. He ran jobs for them – schools, churches, anything they put in front of him – and he ran a cabinet shop on top of it for five years. He never wanted to own his own company. Said the headaches weren’t worth it. But he could build anything you asked for, and he would.
His father before him was a coal miner in Pennsylvania who made his own tools. Block planes, hand-shaped from scrap wood and steel. A scythe for cutting hay. My dad still has the planes. And the scythe too – the one he made, not the store-bought one. They sit in my dad’s garage and he says they still work fine.
My dad quit his cooped up desk job in the middle of summer and framed houses for seven years before he got his contractor’s license. He had worked for whatever outfit would have him – Gamber Homes, Wilson Homes, a few others – and he learned as he went. Nobody trained him. He watched, he did the work, he figured it out. Learned finish carpentry and did that for some home builders, then decided to be in business for himself and became a G.C. He was about twenty-five and it was the 1970’s. Called the company A&J Construction – his and my mom’s initials – and he knew how to build a house. Built quite a few of them. First house for his mother in law. Custom homes in Fowler designed on narrow fifty-foot lots. A triplex on Fifth Street. A senior citizens center across from the park. He designed homes at the kitchen table at night and bid jobs during the day and swung a hammer alongside whoever he had on the crew. His office was his pickup truck and a two-way radio. If he needed to reach a sub he called through an operator at Cook’s Communication. A woman came on the line and dialed the number for him.
“I never went big with the business,” he says, “so it was pretty much feast or famine.”
The house he was proudest of was the one on Jonna street when I was a kid. Nicest house in our small town, builders called it a masterpiece. It was our house. Good size, though not nearly as big as the pride I took in it — my dad built this. With his own hands. For a child that’s about as God-incarnate as it gets: creating something that wasn’t there before, and we live in it. He designed it and drew the plans and pulled the permits himself. It took a year and a half, and it was mostly just him and his dad working on it together. Ed was retired by then and had the time.
The city inspector came out and looked at what my dad was doing with the roof system. “How are you going to make that work?” he said.
“You just watch,” my dad told him.
He put in millwork you could not find anywhere else in the Valley. Not even in the custom homes up in North Fresno. Trim details from the twenties and thirties — the kind of finish work that costs a fortune now and rarely done for most homes back then.
We ended up losing that house. Times got hard, house got sold, and that was that. Feast or famine.
But that masterpiece is still standing.
My wife Maren’s great grandfather, Rasmus, started R. Pedersen & Sons Construction around the 1910’s. He ran it from a room on the second floor of his house. When his son — my wife’s grandfather — took over, the office moved to a spare room on the first floor of his own house. The work was concrete and steel — jails, foundries, public buildings — and the bids came hard. Paul, the grandson — my father in law — grew up watching his father bid ten jobs and land one.
Paul came back from college wanting to be the best estimator in the Valley. He and his father bid twelve jobs that first year. They got nothing. So Paul left. Phoenix first, then Denver. He worked for other people’s companies and studied their costs and learned what school couldn’t teach him — what the work actually cost per square foot when real crews were doing it in real conditions. He came back to Fresno five years later. The first job he bid, he got.
He and his brother-partner Dick took on big projects — university buildings, hospitals, foundries, prisons — concrete-heavy, complex stuff — the jobs other contractors lost money on or wouldn’t touch. Paul masterminded these projects in a converted garage behind his house at Sky Park — and drew form details. Hundreds of pages. Thousands. He’d take a complicated concrete pour and simplify it on paper until the carpenters could build it like it was the easiest job they’d ever seen. He’d do this 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for months on any given project. He intentionally chose the hard jobs over the easy ones — they were less crowded with bids, and he could often complete projects with about half as many men as his competitors because he painstakingly figured out a better way for his men to do them.
It was all family hands on deck. Wife Peggy ran interference with subs, warming them up to trust this outfit. Daughter Maren on job sites documenting project phases with her camera. Son Brant served a stretch as PE, including those pistol-strapped, sleepless nights in his camper on Corcoran Prison grounds, praying ol’ Charlie Manson wouldn’t pay him a late night visit. Brother Dick’s wife Dar tracked the whole organization like human software, his boys handled various parts (Doug now continuing the family tradition owning his own G.C.), while Dick himself ran the sites, going out every morning and directing the drawings into physical reality. And all the rest of us — extended family, friends, neighbors — recruited to join the bid day circus in that small-tent garage.
Competitors from Denver and San Francisco and Sacramento would see the Pedersen name on a bid list and call the local subs to ask about them. They’d say don’t bother. Nobody had beaten them in twenty years.
When I ask Paul what made him persist the way he did for hours every day, month after month, year after year, his answer is brief: “fear.”
What these men left was not a company name or a contract or a set of instructions written down somewhere.
My great- grandfather carved block planes from raw wood because he needed a tool and the nearest store didn’t matter. My grandfather learned carpentry because his hands already knew the shapes. My dad told the inspector to watch how a masterwork outsmarts disbelief. Paul drew a thousand pages of form details in a garage so his crew wouldn’t have to stand in the sun and figure it out alone.
When I interviewed these fathers about their construction lives, I wasn’t digging for mostly hard stuff to dramatize a story. Hard stuff naturally gets exposed in this line of work. And it’s not them complaining either– it’s describing things as honestly and directly as describing what you find when you open up a wall.
It’s written the Creator built the world in six days, and whether we grasp those numbers or not – surely it was on time – we probably haven’t been easy on Him either. But in this whole, grand, active site, we’ve inherited that inclination to build, to make. Though the way we do it is rarely on time and on budget, we’ve got something to aim for, something and someone to look up to.
I think about what it takes to build a thing that wasn’t there before. What it costs the person who built it. What it leaves behind when the man who built it is sitting in a chair on the patio now – seventy, eighty years old – out of the hell of that valley sun, eating a grapefruit in the shade, and the work is still standing.