Working men generally tend to get along by using friendly razzing.  I remember one shop where we had a good variety of ethnic groups.  On boy was of Japanese descent.  Another boy was Italian.  Another one was French and one boy was Irish.  One guy had an easy name to read, “Brown.”  However I think he was just a run of the mill Caucasian with nothing strikingly different about his ethnicity.  Myself, I am Swiss/German, but I was mostly razzed about my farm boy background.

One day the Irish guy made a joke about Italians that would be considered politically incorrect today.  Everyone laughed, including the Italian guy.

The Japanese guy was more or less the foreman.  One time he had written out instructions for a job and sent the Irishman to do it.  The Irishman came back that night and told the foreman he couldn’t read his handwriting.  The Japanese boy took the slip and said; “Well it says…”

He hesitated, walked over to where the light was better and said; “It says….”  He paused and handed the slip back to the Irishman.  He said;”What’s the matter?  Can’t you read Japanese?”

In that shop the Boss had a good sense of humor also.  I remember when he was standing on the top of a five foot ladder trying to reach some light fixtures on a shelf.  His wife, who worked in the office, came back to the warehouse and saw him standing on the top step of the ladder.  Knowing it wasn’t a good idea, she asked if he wanted her to get him a different ladder.  He looked down at the ladder and said; “No thank you.  This one is almost too short as it is.”

I used to get a lot of razzing about being so skinny.  One time a bunch of us were outside eating our lunch on a hot sunny day.  It never took us a full ½ hour to eat our lunch so there were usually a few minutes to relax.

I would usually lay in the shade of a telephone pole.  The trouble with that was that as the sun moved so did the shade.  There was a few times my rolling around trying to stay in the shade of a telephone pole prompted reminders about how skinny I was.

At a different employer we would hire some summer help.  One was a young boy who was in High School in the fall, winter and spring.  Another was a High School shop teacher.  By coincidence they knew each other from school and the two would razz each other constantly over the summer.

One time the Shop Teacher was on a ladder working on something above his head.  The student, looking for a ladder he could use, came over to him and asked: “How long are you going to need that ladder?”

The shop teacher very deliberately looked down at the ladder and counted the rungs; “One, … Two, … Three” out loud.  Then he looked at the student and said; “About 3 feet.”

One time we were remodeling a hotel in Havre, Montana.  One of the electricians was a Coca-Cola addict.  Every day at coffee break he would buy a half dozen bottles of Coke and hand them out to us.  I think he thought he was doing us a favor.  After about a week of it, I started feeling ill, like my insides were rotting away.  I insisted on going back to a coffee break.

The manager of the hotel was a young fellow and he worked with us much of the time.  He explained to us that many times people would leave bottles of hair spray behind when they checked out.  He insisted that hair spray made excellent bug killer.  He used it in his garden, flower beds and shrubs.  He said you couldn’t buy anything that worked better.

There were a couple of painters working on the job with us.  As soon as we finished work in a room, the painters came in and painted them.  They were also putting up wall paper in the hallway.

One day one of the painters was painting the ceiling in the hallway.  (This was an old fashioned building with high ceilings.)  As he cautiously descended the ladder he stepped directly into an open 5-Gallon paint bucket.  His demeanor changed to what might be adequately described as “extremely agitated.”

He kicked the bucket off of his foot.  The bucket went sailing down the hallway, splashing paint everywhere.  He picked up his brushes and left the job, never to return!  He didn’t even stop to get his pay check.

On a different job we found ourselves working with a paint crew again.  The job was a rush job.  Everyone was working overtime.

One painter was painting away with tears running down his face.  We asked what was wrong.  He said his wife had died the day before, but he had to keep working because of the rush.

Many years later I was doing some work for his nephew in Spokane.  His nephew remembered the occasion.

Painters have problems too.

When I first started wiring, it was on farm houses.  Nobody even knew what a hard hat was.  It was not until I got into government jobs that hard hats were required.  The same goes for steel toed boots.

It seemed the hard hats were very heavy to wear, and in the summer time they were excruciatingly hot.  Eventually I found liners you could wear inside of the hard hat in cold weather.

Most of the early hard hats were made of metal, but eventually they were manufactured from hard plastic.  Some featured smooth tops and some of them had ridges.  I was once told the reason for the ridges were so that electricians could hold wire up with their hard hats.  That was one story I didn’t believe.  In all the years that I worked while using a hard hat, I never once had occasion to hold wire up with my head.  Today you can get hard hats and hard caps, and I have even seen hard protected cowboy hats.  I preferred hard hats with a brim that would also somewhat protect your shoulders from falling material.

It was quite popular to write something on your hat – your name or trade, or a slogan – something humorous.  Some of the guys I worked with were quite artistic, if not completely articulate.

On many jobs, when issued a hat, it was a specific color for a specific trade.  It was not uncommon to have a number designation on your hat, which made it possible to identify the wearer from a distance.

One time the big boss of a large construction company was in the hospital next to a construction job his company was doing.  He demanded a room overlooking the job so he could look down on the job from his office … no … his bed.  He had field glasses to observe his men and report what was going on back to his superintendant.

I remember one job where my hat was just plain gray (or grey – either way it’s the same color).  Someone took a strip of wire markers that said; “Power Power Power and applied it to my hard hat to be humorous.  I was allowed to keep the hat after the job was done.  I still have it; along with a collection of other hats I was given.

I do know of one hard hat that didn’t make it.  One of my friends, who was also my next door neighbor, oversaw the installation of high voltage lines.  He liked his hard hat.  He wore it all the time.  One day my friend was out hunting, wearing his hard hat of course.  When they camped at night the group wanted to make coffee but they had no tin can to boil water.

My friend took the interior webbing and support out of his hard hat (it was one of the metal ones) and used it to boil water over a campfire.  The next week he was on a pole and a gust of wind blew his hard hat off of his head.  Upon landing on the ground the hat broke into a hundred pieces.

I have no idea what that coffee tasted like.  And I don’t know if drinking it had any negative impact on their health.

On the other hand, plastic is not the answer to everything.