Slow motion breakdown

Me Pops had among his friends a big guy, a mountain of a man as he told it. I don't know if that meant the guy was simply huge in the intimidating way or that he was very fat. Whichever it was, that doesn't matter. I'll call the fellow Cloyce just to give him a name.

Cloyce was a roofer. His company was a decent size, so that he had several crews working for him who could of course be occupied on several jobs at once. So Cloyce basically gave estimates, got contracts signed, and went around inspecting progress.

As it were, me Grandpa Joe once contracted him to put a roof on the Old Barn. The Shop is only one floor tall, with a ten foot ceiling. This meant the roof was about 11 feet high. This meant that what was needed to access it was a twelve foot ladder. As I said, Cloyce didn't do much of the work but he did go around checking on his crews. In the course of things, then, he stopped by to see how it was going at the Shop.

He spoke to Pops and Joe for a minute, them climbed the nearby ladder to look over the progress of his men. Bear in mind that at that point in history ladders were wooden, not aluminum or fiberglass as they are today. As Cloyce returned to the ladder to climb down, the third rung from the top broke the instant Cloyce put all his weight on it. Yet instead of the man falling, and as he has grasped the ladder in each hand on each respective side rail, all that happened was Cloyce dropped a foot to the next rung. Which then broke. Dropping another foot, that rung broke with Cloyce's weight. Then the next, and the next , whump whump, whump, snap, snap, snap, until Cloyce was standing on the ground, still holding the side rails up by his gloved hands. He went down the ladder hesitatingly, in slow motion really, as one rung at a time cracked under his weight.

Grandpa Joe laughed so he hard he had to dab his eyes with his handkerchief. Pops just knew he had a good story to tell in the coming years.

Big Jim again

Among the various tools we used when working on the old Hobart welders of me Grandpa Joe's were crowbars. We might use them to inch a heavy part into place or lift one momentarily out of the way to access another part. We might even use them to check gas levels in their tanks as few of our machines had gas gauges. But you get the idea: we used crowbars, at times for genuinely productive purposes.

A couple of days ago I spoke about Big Jim. He was a huge, mountain of a man, but also a helpful and nice guy who liked to joke around a bit.

One day me Pops was out servicing a welder on a job that Big Jim was running. Dad finished the repair and went to let Jim know he was all set. He happened to have used his crowbar last, so he slung it across his shoulder as he made his way to the field office to speak to Jim.

He opened the door of the trailer and as it was winter closed it immediately to keep the heat in. Jim was sitting behind a desk looking over whatever, and he stopped when he saw Dad. Then a look of true terror spread across his face. Jim harshly pushed back from the desk and, holding his hands in front of his face and turning away, cried, "Hey, Bill, can't we just talk about this?"

Me Pops, temporarily forgetting he held a crowbar on his shoulder, puzzled about what Jim meant. Then he remembered the tool, and laughed along with Jim.

The fact is, me Pops would say later, he wouldn't go after Jim no way for no reason. But if he were, it would be with something more substantial than a crowbar.