A summer construction job, 1959

The summer of "'59 I worked construction to get in shape for football. Construction was as cool a job as a high school kid could get. Not only did it smack of sweat and promise muscle, it paid $2.50 an hour. My father, a South Philadelphia ward leader, got me on putting up Hawthorne Square, a housing project at 12th and Fitzwater.

"Laboring's stinking, hard, dirty, work," Kepler, the supervisor, told me when I brought in my application. "You'll be working with niggers. You'll be taking orders from niggers. And don't expect favors. I don't give a crap who sent you."

I was one of a half-dozen high school and college students. The rest were union men. Our foreman, Pup Banks, was a quiet 30-year-old in a cut-off sweatshirt with biceps like hams, whose father, Big Dog Banks, had been a foreman before him. The crew boss, Hard Hat— the only guy to bother with one— ran numbers on the site. He called me "Slim."

I awoke every morning at 7. I put on a T-shirt, khakis, sweat socks, steel-toed boots. I consumed the juice, toast, bacon and egg my mother had waiting, and by 7:30 I was on the 42 bus. I picked up the brass disc that put me on the clock at 8. I shelved my lunch in the foul-smelling laborers' trailer and put on my gloves.

I climbed the ladder of Number One building to the deck for my assignment. Each week meant one more ladder to climb. There were three when I started. There would be 14 when the job was done.

You climbed according to rank, so laborers went last. That became fine with me. By the time I reached the top, a quarter hour could be gone.

A place in the shade

The job went like this. Carpenters laid a rimmed, wood floor across metal scaffolding. They erected wood pillars on the floor. Ironworkers fixed rods across the floor and within the pillars. Concrete was poured around the rods. When the concrete had set, strippers crowbarred the wood from the floor and pillars. Laborers hauled the salvageable plywood sheets and four-by-fours and four-by-sixes, the scaffolding and screw jacks, from where they'd fallen to the lift to be hoisted two flights to the floor in progress, where other laborers disbursed them to the carpenters.

Working below was best. You were out of the sun. If you pushed early, you could back things up on the deck and give yourself time to talk or rest or take long drinks from the metal tanks with blocks of ice melting into water. But not too long. Kepler had a telescope in his trailer, which he swung from building to building when it wasn't pointed at a nurses' dorm.

The pie woman arrives

You worked until noon. The mornings"“ June, July"“ were hot. The work didn't stop or vary. It measured you only by how much you carried on each trip to or from the lift. When you saw the woman with the basket of sweet potato pies arrive, you knew your day was nearly half done. When Pup went down the ladder, you waited a minute; then, even if the whistle hadn't blown, you went down too. You grabbed your lunch and found shade. The sporadic talk of girls and ball games dissolved into your physical beating.

At 12:30, you went four hours more. The afternoons were hotter than the mornings. The grind grew more exhausting. Your arms and legs ached; your back and shoulders, too. You didn't think or reflect upon anything beyond trying not to step on a nail or rip an arm or leg or fall or crumble.

When I was a boy, the erection of the city's structures had seemed immense beyond comprehension; now, inside one's creation, step-by-step and pound-by-pound, they appeared incrementally doable.

"'You can quit any time'

At night I was too tired to do anything. I was too tired to do much on weekends. Some afternoons I was so tired I let my mother pick me up— but made her park two blocks away, so no one would see.

It didn't seem I was gaining in any measurable realm. I certainly wasn't bulking up for football.

"You are so thin, Robert," my mother said. "There isn't a spare ounce on you."

"You can quit any time you want," my father said, mixing worry with approval. "You've proved your point."

But I didn't quit. I increased the number of four-by-sixes I carried. I mastered the handling of plywood sheets, right hand cradling the lower right corner, left hand steadying the upper left, the weight flat across your spine. It felt a giant sail that, with the proper wind, might carry me across the city— or sweep me off the edge of Number One to doom.

A street confrontation

Saturday night, five weeks into the job, I was walking home from a movie. At 50th and Spruce, a black Ford, coming south, almost hit me. "Outta the way, you skinny prick," the passenger yelled.

"Fuck you," I said. The driver slammed the brake.

I could have run. But that wasn't me standing there. That wasn't some ectomorphic 17-year-old. That was a guy who worked construction.

The passenger"“ short, squat, bald "“ came fast. I grabbed/shoved/threw him over a small hedge. It must have made an impression for he didn't rush to get up. It must have impressed the driver too— a taller, thinner fellow in a dark windbreaker— for he approached with caution. He'd feint toward me, and, backing away, I'd flick a jab at him. He continued forward, but not rapidly enough that either of us was in danger of landing a punch on the other.

Relief at last

The next Friday, around 2:30, Hard Hat came onto the deck with pink slips of paper in his hand. Number Four was done, and they were letting people go. "Knock off and get down there, baby," he said. "Can't do nothing you be leaving early now."

I started for the ladder. "Yo, Slim," he called. "You not worth shit when you started. But you turn out damn good."

I was disappointed but relieved. I still had a month of summer left.

I never saw anyone from the job again. I never worked that hard again, either. My football career didn't appreciably benefit, but I didn't forget how to carry plywood, and I retained Hard Hat's compliment and the sight of the squat man floundering in the bush for instantaneous retrieval from my memory bank.

Hawthorne Square stood 40 years before the city cleared room for something more necessary.