Stretching A Buck

Me Grandpa Joe had his welder rental business, but he also owned a couple of rooming houses with single rooms as well as apartments for rent. With eight kids plus he and me Grandma Cosgriff, 10 mouths to feed and house and clothe required a decent income stream.

Joe's money rule was simple. He used the earnings from the welders to pay for the business. Me Grandma Cosgriff got all the income from the rooms and apartments to pay for the food and clothes and such for her and me Pops and his seven siblings. You know, the various household expenses. 

Now, me Grams was good with a buck. I'll likely go into more detail on that in another blog, but suffice it to say her reputation for handling money was well established. Me Grandpa Joe garnered no such accolades.

One day Joe was lamenting to his older brother, me Great Uncle Bill who me Pops was named for, "Boy, a dollar from the room rents sure goes farther than a dollar from the welders."

Uncle Bill replied simply, "Look who's spending the welding money and look who spends the rent income."

Joe couldn't challenge that judgement. He knew it was true.

Woodbridge Wagon Train

Yesterday I mentioned, in so many words, towing welding machines around the old neighborhood. It was one machine at a time, typically. Yet I remember one day having to move many smaller welders in a more unusual manner.

Gas drives were larger welders powered by gasoline engines. Hence, gas drives, as the welder part was driven by the engine. The smaller ones were electric drives, powered by either 220 or 440 three phase current. 

A gas drive (all of our welders were on wheels) could be hitched to a car or pickup or some such and moved around. Electric drives normally had to be raised by a hoist into the back of a pickup or larger truck for transport. That was fine at the shop where we had modern workhouse amenities. Well, relatively modern. We are, God love him, talking about Joe Cosgriff after all. 

That aside, we needed to move a couple dozen electric drives from a satellite garage (one we rented for storage but away from the main Shop) back to the old barn. Yet there was no way to load the units, which weighed around 1100 pounds, onto the bed of a truck. 

Yet me Grandpa Joe, inventive gent that he was, and I don't mean that so bad as you may think, found a way to work around that. We lined up 6 or 7 electric drives at a time, strung them together with chain and tow ropes and heavy regular ropes and, yeehaw, pulled them the several blocks to the old barn. I'd hazard to guess the lines were better than a half block long.

There would naturally be a bit of clanking and crashing among the welders, so we'd go slow, content to let them bang into one another but not tip or run into anything else. Too, we pulled them through alleys so as not to affect regular vehicular traffic. But we got 'em moved, no real harm, and no foul at all. They were Joe's welders, and if he didn't care about cosmetic damage to them, why should we?

Joe's Small World

For years my part of Detroit was vexed with one way streets. This caused certain minor and admittedly first world problems. We might, say, have to circle a four or six block area to come into the Shop or one of our satellite garages (at a given time we would have rented anywhere from 6 to 10 places smaller than the old barn to store welders and equipment) from a certain angle. Me Grandpa Joe called that going around the world.

"You gotta go around the world for that one," he'd instruct one of us once a welder was hitched up to a vehicle. True, it was a small world. But it was a nuisance, especially with a load, to drive five or six extra blocks when the trip might have been only one without dealing with the street directions which were working against you.

It gave Joe a chance to smoke a cigarette waiting for us. And I can honestly say that I've been around the world in record time several times. Even if you have to put an asterisk by it.