My wife has been combining the brief histories of her pioneer families. They were brief but interesting histories she wanted to share with our children and their families. While doing so she read to me, how her grandfather had moved to Salt Lake prior to the ‘Great Depression’ in the mid 1920’s. He was fortunate to find a job building houses on the outskirts of Salt Lake, in the areas of 7th East and 9th South streets. Today that address is near the heart of the city not on the outskirts. Building houses in that day was unlike building houses today. They didn’t have nail guns, power saws and other tools, nor modern scaffolding. There were no large supply stores nearly a mile apart, throughout the whole city, as there are today. Everything was done using relatively antique hand tools. However, if you had been a worker on one of those early Salt Lake homes you would have thought you were ahead of your time in some respects. An average home that would take a month to build in our day, took a year in those days. If you needed a ditch dug for a water line, or sewer system, it was dug by hand. There were very few machines or equipment, that could dig, in a very short time, as we have today. The ones that they did have, such as steam shovels, were still primitive and would break down on practically every job they were brought onto.
They were hard times for everyone, regardless of your job or assignment in life. Whatever you did, you did it the hard way.
I quit school in 1949 when I turned 15 years old and almost immediately I got my first full-time job working on a hog farm just outside of town. The year before that, this farmer’s pigs had all died of cholera and their bones were scattered all over his rather large barn yard. He had already built either three or four wooden bins about eight feet square and six feet high. Ford motor company had just developed and produced a little Fordson tractor. It had a front end loader and that farmer had probably bought one of the first manufactured. My job was to drive this tractor around that barnyard and scoop up the bones of the dead pigs. There were literally tons of them. I would scoop them up and dump them in the bins. When a bin was full he poured crude oil all over them and set them afire. When I finished with the bone project, I was assigned to clean his huge barn where he had, probably two hundred of his new herd, all penned up on two floors. I would shovel the leavings from each pen into a wheelbarrow and dump them at the end of the barn on each floor. When there was a large pile of pig leavings he would back his truck up to the barn. I would shove and/or push it off into the tuck bed below and he would haul it away. That was without a doubt the dirtiest and slinkiest job I have ever had. A few weeks later I got a job working for the city. We were putting in a water line down a new street where new homes were being built. There were no steam shovels available to assist us, either. There were just five men with shovels. The ditch we were digging was a block long and had to be about seven feet deep, as I recall. When we were near seven feet deep, there was some dirt falling back on us with each shovel we threw up.
During my early working years, most of the jobs were temporary, meaning when the job was done I had to move on and find somewhere else to work. When I hear my young grandkids talk about going to their work, I ask them what their job requires and it is often being a waitress or some desk job. There are not many really ‘hard things‘ anymore, computers, machines and robots do most of the hard things. Eventually, while still a youth, I worked a year or so as a hod carrier, keeping bricklayers supplied with mortar, bricks and scaffolding. Because my foreman recognized that I was a hard worker, he promoted me and I became an apprentice bricklayer. Bricklaying is still a pretty hard job, because it is still done today, just as it was when I was a young man. Slapping a trowel full of mortar on a row of bricks and then laying bricks one at a time, in that mortar in a precise way, is no different than I was doing it 65 years ago. For each trowel of mortar and each brick that is laid in the wall, the bricklayer has to bend over and pick each of them up. I remember how sore my back use to be each night at quitting time. There are still ‘hard things’, but fortunately they have become fewer and fewer as more and more jobs become automated. We live in a good time, automation has made many things better.