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With Our Hands: The World of the Carpenter

If you try to kneel down in the Riverside Church in New York, you break your nose on the pew in front . . . Who kneels down in that church? I’ll tell you who kneels. The man kneels who’s settin’ the toilets in the restrooms. He’s got to kneel, that’s part of his work. The man who nails the pews on the floor, he had to kneel down. . . . Any work, you kneel down—it’s a kind of worship. It’s part of the holiness of things.

—Nick Lindsay, carpenter in Studs Terkel’s Working

A couple of times a year we always had a get-together. It didn’t cost the union much. Sometimes we’d have a band. Your wife got to meet my wife. We knew we weren’t all a bunch of tramps because we all got dressed up. We didn’t always go around with mud in our shoes and dirt on our clothes.

—Angelo Bruno, Local 402

“I don’t care if I am doing the best finish work or making a concrete form,” says Joseph Petitpas. “I take pride in what I am doing.” Bob Thomas agrees: “You learn every day, you learn every minute.” In today’s mechanized, routinized, and often alienating blue- and white-collar work places, the carpentry trade can be a refreshing alternative. Though the craft may not be as demanding as it once was, carpenters still have to use their wits and solve problems on a daily basis. “Finish work is a challenge,” claims Leo Bernique. “It takes patience, skill, and know-how. There’s a certain time to be rough and a certain time to be very gentle. I wouldn’t have traded jobs with anyone in the world while I was doing that kind of work.”

For many, the work never became monotonous. “You work eight hours and you love it,” explains Ernest Landry. There is satisfaction knowing that the product of a carpenter’s sweat and labor stands long after the job is done. Landry likes to take his children to the Prudential Center to show them where he worked on each of the fifty-two floors, just as John MacKinnon enjoys looking at cabinets he installed in department stores. Tom Rickard appreciates the teamwork it takes to complete a building—“it makes you proud to know that you were a part of it.” Tom Harrington identified with his projects so completely that he nicknamed each of his sixteen kids after the job he was on at the time of their births. That way, he jokes, he knew when “Portsmouth Memorial” was squawking.

Most carpenters were raised with tools in their hands; few came to the craft cold. Harrington’s experience is typical. “We would drop by jobs when I was a kid, watching my father. We used to take his lunch down to him. So we got to know the fellows, the work, the trade right there. We knew the expressions, which is sometimes a language in itself.” When he was eight years old, Leo Coulombe went out shingling with his father. “Dad showed us from A to Z. From the foundation to the painting to the wallpapering. He taught us the whole thing.” Ellis Blomquist started working summers and vacations for his father at the age of twelve. Sometimes the line between work and home was fuzzy in these “family apprenticeships.” Every Sunday, says Harrington, his father would lay out his blueprints in the parlor and explain them to the children.

Joel Leighton of the Massachusetts Associated General Contractors (AGC), an organization of building employers, once commented that only one-quarter of the journeymen carpenters employed by AGC firms went through a formal union apprenticeship. Other observers confirm that estimate.¹ There have always been alternate, or “backdoor,” routes into the craft. For many years, a private organization called the Smith Charities sponsored training programs for young men and women in the Pioneer Valley. Boys interested in becoming carpenters were indentured to an employer and given $300 by the Charities if they finished their training. More often than not, carpenters skipped structured programs altogether. They picked up the trade wherever they could and joined the union as journeymen. Ernest Landry followed this path, passing a test administered by several union members in 1947.

Locals had standing committees to check the craft knowledge of the applicant. “You had to know quite a bit,” remembers Joseph Emanuello. He joined the union in 1946, but not before demonstrating basic knowledge of the trade. “You had to know how to frame. That was the big thing. Could you frame a house? Could you frame stairs? Could you cut stairs? Could you cut rafters?” James Audley had been in a trade union in Galway, Ireland. When he came to the United States, he took a test to enter the Carpenters Union.

There was seven of us young fellows that night. They took each of us into a separate room and asked us questions. They said, “What figures would you take on your framing square to make a wood miter box?” They asked me about the standard height for sawhorses, and how to prove a foundation layout was square. They asked me how to scribe panelling when corners aren’t plumb. Anyhow, I answered all the questions and got my card that night.

Along with whatever admission procedures locals insisted on, new members inevitably faced informal on-the-job tests. Bob Bryant worked for his father, a small contractor, from the age of fourteen. When he joined the union as a journeyman, he still had to prove his abilities to the foremen and his coworkers, always skeptical of a newcomer. “They could pretty much tell if you knew what you were doing if you could build a sawhorse and how long it took you, if you had a pair of overalls, a full toolbox, and if you carried it down to where you were working. If you didn’t have a full toolbox within walking distance, you’d know about it pretty quick.”

Ultimately, learning the job came down to, in Richard Croteau’s words, “stealing the trade.” Harold Rickard confirms the necessity for independence. “I just picked it up on my own.” Since most carpenters grew up in mechanically oriented homes, they had some idea of what to look for and whom to rely on. “You’d see what was going on around you and you’d talk with good journeymen,” Leo Bernique says.

“There was no teacher,” agrees Al Valli. “You had to learn yourself.” But what made the difference between a productive or a frustrating apprenticeship was the presence or absence of informal teaching. For all his claims of self-reliance, Valli admits that he learned quickly because a job superintendent took him under his wing. Many carpenters have fond memories of the veterans who shared their craft wisdom. “The old-timers were helpful,” Bob Thomas remembers gratefully. “They’d try to teach you things that they knew, so long as you weren’t a smart aleck.” Thomas Phalen started out with W. J. Hanley of Fitchburg in 1927 and worked steadily with the company until the winter of 1932–33. “I owe a hell of a lot to some of those old fellows, French-Canadians. They couldn’t read or write, but they could read blueprints. They were wonderful mechanics and they taught me a lot.”

For every pleasant encounter, there were the tougher initiations as well. Apprentices, as the saying goes, were to be seen, not heard. Older carpenters often enjoyed the ritual of breaking in the newcomer to see if he could “take it.” Mitchel Mroz describes his first job in 1939.

I was half laboring and half doing carpentry. They’d send me for stuff and I’d go get it and bring it back and wait for something else. They’d see me standing there and send me for something else they didn’t need. So the boss came by and asked me, “What the hell you bringing that for?” I said, “They wanted it. “He said, “Take it back. I know what they’re doing. You’re watching them. They’re scared you’ll take their jobs away since you’re learning the trade. They don’t want you to do that.” That’s the way it was. They wouldn’t even try to help you. They’d give you the biz.

Apprentices have always done the work no one else wanted—the heavy lifting and the repetitive tasks. They paid their dues to join the union and did the same on the job. In a history of New York carpenters, an upstate house builder talked about some of the apprentices’ duties in the 1920s:

When the lumber was brought to the job by horse and wagon and got stuck in the mud, they would dump the load right there and say, “Contract reads—Delivery as far as good roads go.” Then the apprentice had to hump the whole damn load up through the mud to the job site, sometimes 200 or 300 yards away.²

When Bob Weatherbee came into the union in the early 1960s, matters had not improved. “You were treated like dirt. Whatever they could do to put you down, they did. They made a point out of making sure that you knew you were an apprentice.”

Today as in the past, the fortunate novices “partner up” with veteran carpenters who teach them the tricks of the trade. The less fortunate spend four years stuffing walls with insulation, lugging supplies to and fro, and taking the coffee orders. The particular destiny is largely a matter of chance, depending on the needs of the job or the whim of the foreman. Observation and imitation remain the true pillars of a carpenter’s apprenticeship. As Leo Bernique said of his introduction to the trade, “You learned by keeping your eyes open.”

Older carpenters teach their younger coworkers how to be the right “kind” of carpenter as well as how to be a competent craftsman. The passing on of the craft culture and identity is as crucial as the correct grip on a handsaw. For without craft pride, a lifetime in construction can be a difficult and stressful experience. It is a life filled with constant layoffs, injuries, insensitive employers, and chronic economic insecurity, the veterans warn the apprentice, and if that message is ignored, the frigid winters of Massachusetts drive the lesson home.

In 1879, a carpenter called for higher wages because “our New England climate requires a greater variety of clothing than any other part of the country.”³ The weather has not improved in a hundred years. “You’ve got the wind whistling around your ears and you’re shivering and shaking,” remembers Thomas. “Many times you feel like saying the blazes with this and walking away.” The thermometer may jump or slide, but the outside work—framing, concrete forming, roofing—goes on. Harrington describes pile driving: “They want those piles driven whether there’s snow or rain or sun. They say the machine is driving the pile in there and the machine will keep going regardless of the weather.”

“There is no such thing as steady employment in the building trades,” commented Arthur Huddell in 1921. “There never was and never will be until the skies stop leading snow and rain.”⁴ The weather, the seasons, and the boom-and-bust nature of the building cycle all conspire to force some hard choices. “When you’re loafing,” Rickard says, “you try to scrape up what you can.” Every carpenter has loafed at one time or another, even during the boom years when the problems of seasonal employment are moderated. In 1982, a strong year for building in Massachusetts, the state’s construction workforce worked a total of 24 percent fewer hours from January to March than they did from July to September. The average number of building trades workers that year was 78,879, but the difference between the number employed in March and August was almost 18,000.⁵

Finding a job in a lean period can take a matter of years; sometimes it just means holding out until the spring building season. “Years back,” says Coulombe, “you didn’t find any work after Thanksgiving.” Richard Croteau used to make sure his bills were paid up by November or December. He cut ice or fixed looms in the Lawrence mills in order to earn extra cash. The only thing that kept his family going in the winter, he claims, was credit from the corner grocer and the coal yard. “It was toughest during the wintertime,” recalls Harrington, who was born in March. “A lot of times my birthday presents had to be picked up sometime in June. My family didn’t forget about me; we just accepted the fact.”

If the pickings are too slim, carpenters leave their families and travel or “tramp” in search of work. Many people drift in and out of the industry altogether. A Department of Labor study of 79,000 construction workers showed that only half were able to support themselves on construction earnings alone. The rest relied on other sources of income—as factory hands, salesmen, or service workers.⁶

Craft pride is stretched thin by corner-cutting contractors eager to save a dollar. European craftsmen are often surprised by the atmosphere on construction sites in the United States. James Audley arrived in this country in 1948 and was immediately struck by the contrast. “In Ireland you couldn’t get any of your work fine enough. Here I noticed as soon as I came that it was just mass production, just speed.” Angelo Bruno worked for a ceiling contractor who offered an incentive plan to company foremen—if a job came in under the bid, the foreman got a percentage of the extra profit. He describes the consequences of policies that reward greed rather than quality: “We had a school in Connecticut that was a tongue-and-groove staple job. They were putting two staples in the tile, instead of six. That’s what the foreman told the guys he wanted. Before the job was even done, the weight and vibrations from the upper floors worked it loose and it all came down.”

As overall building costs have mounted, the pressure for speed has intensified. Petitpas thinks “the pace is a lot quicker, they want a lot more now. Then they just wanted you to keep busy. Today they want you to keep busy plus.” Mitchel Mroz points to the late 1950s and early 1960s as a turning point. “Now it’s the heck with it, it’s good enough, get it up.” Older carpenters mourn the passing of an era when, as they see it, quality mattered, and marvel at the logic of “fast and dirty” construction methods that require constant repair. “How come they have time enough to do it a second time,” wonders Bruno, “but they don’t have time enough to do it right the first time?” Greater speed not only sacrifices quality, it also increases danger. “They didn’t want you to have guardrails,” says Rickard bitterly. “They wanted you to use a lousy two-by-four to walk on.” Some companies, he goes on, “didn’t care. They didn’t give a hoot if you got killed or what. All they wanted was it done.”

Construction can be a deadly force. The industry only employs 5 percent of the total workforce, but is nonetheless responsible for 20 percent of all job-related fatalities. In addition, construction workers have the highest rate of injuries and illnesses of any group of workers. The missing finger, the chronically aching back, the broken bones are all sure signs of the carpenter’s trade. Petitpas lost the tip of his finger handling a piece of plywood on a roof on a windy day. A concrete overhang broke under Harrington’s feet, fracturing his neck and back and forcing him into a twenty-five-month hospitalization. At one time or another, nearly every carpenter has taken a fall or had a brush with serious injury. Harold Humphrey vividly recalls the sparks flying around him when he stood on a steel form that touched a live 440 volt wire. “I should have been cooked right there,” he now laughs. Like most carpenters, Bob Weatherbee has seen fatal accidents on the job. “On one job a cement finisher was finishing off a building where he had a foot to stand on. He stood back and over the building he went, about ten stories.”

Carelessness causes some accidents; the “tough” construction worker too often looks the other way when faced with unsafe practices. Others are an inevitable part of a risky business. But the majority of accidents are entirely unnecessary. Petitpas angrily recalls years of fighting to get the most basic safety equipment. “To get the company to put up guardrails and ladders, that’s where the headache is. You can demand it and they just take their time. When somebody gets hurt they hurry up and put up a ladder so there will be one there when OSHA shows up.” Serious accidents momentarily stun the work crews. Talk drifts uneasily to similar incidents in the past and the likelihood of more in the future. As frightening as they are, the accidents can be accepted—it is the cavalier employer attitudes that burn. Petitpas tells an all-too-common story of the superintendent who complained when a carpenter left the job in order to take another severely injured worker to the hospital. And the worst fear—a fatal accident—is never far away. “I worked a job in the 1950s where two carpenters were killed,” relates Bob Routen. “They were looking out from the side of a building when a cable snapped. It took off both their heads. The Globe had two little paragraphs on it. I quit the next day.”

Carpenters just keep going, muttering under their breath or complaining mildly to each other. They put on another layer of clothing, wait for a job to turn up, or shrug their shoulders and continue working. For those who spend a lifetime in the trade, the benefits—the sense of mastery over the tools, the pride in a job well done—can outweigh the dangers and insecurities. The occasional chance to build something right, to figure out the best approach and carry it out under safe and pleasant working conditions, can make up for weeks and months of slogging in the mud, performing mindless and repetitive work, or fighting a “pusher” foreman.

The insult to self-respect, to craft pride, cuts deeply. Whether the cause be a new labor-saving device, prefabricated material, or a contractor willing to trade speed for quality, every carpenter bemoans the loss of trade skill and is convinced that his generation is the last one to “really” know how to build. In 1829, an artisan grumbled that the trade had been divided into half a dozen subtrades and that “every working tool is simplified.”⁷ Seventy years later, a Worcester carpenter attacked the rise of “wood butchers, men who come from the backwoods with a kit of tools comprising a saw and a hatchet.”⁸

The story has not changed. Chester Sewell believes the difference between younger and older carpenters today is that “less skill is required now.” “When I was an apprentice,” Tom Phalen points out, “you were taught to do everything. Today you don’t put a window frame or door frame together. It comes all ready and you just stick it up.” Mroz echoes this view. “You can’t get these younger carpenters to cut rafters, lay out stairwells. They go on a job and they’re told what to do and they pick up what they can.”

Mroz is partly right. In training programs today, young apprentices frequently question the point of learning how to cut roof rafters or stair stringers. Why bother, they ask, when factory-built roof trusses and stair units have made those skills obsolete? A novice carpenter can spend years in the trade building forms for concrete, framing walls with metal studs, and installing drywall, without ever getting a chance to work with a piece of finished wood. Still, relative to other traditional crafts, building trades workers have retained significant skills. Their industry evolved in fits and spurts but never succumbed to the assembly line. A nineteenth-century carpenter, walking onto a construction site today, might be bewildered by the heavy equipment, power tools, and modern building materials, but he would not be entirely lost. The hammer, the handsaw, the level, and the square—time-tested emblems of an ancient craft—are still indispensable.

Will they continue to be? The construction industry today is in the throes of a dramatic and potentially far-reaching transformation. As a result of a major reshuffling of homebuilding techniques, low- and moderately priced single-family houses are now almost exclusively constructed in factory settings, leaving only the expensive custom house in the hands of conventional on-site builders. Multistory residential, commercial, and heavy construction remain insufficiently standardized for the limited options of the factory system, but more and more individual components—cabinets, door and window assemblies, even finished walls—are preassembled behind plant gates. The carpenter’s work is changing; some new skills are required, but overall the craft will become less complex and more specialized. As this history suggests, such periods of industrial reorganization in construction have happened before. A constant theme of this history is how and to what degree carpenters have been able to adapt to the shifting sands of their work environment.

Through the Eyes of the Howes Brothers

In 1888, Alvah Howes opened a photography studio in Turners Falls, a small town nestled in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. For the next twenty years, Howes and his brothers Walter and George eked out a meager living in the “view business,” as Walter called it.

The Howes brothers were neither self-proclaimed social chroniclers nor courtiers to the wealthy—their aims were more modest. Constrained by the realities of small-town life in the Connecticut Valley, they simply took pictures of anyone who would pay their fees. In 1889, the Turners Falls Reporter ran an announcement for the Howes studio under the headline: HAVE MAMA’S PICTURE TAKEN. The same advertising copy reappeared every week with just one change in the banner—LITTLE SISTER, GRANDMA, PAPA, BABY—until every conceivable family connection had been exhausted. With no more human subjects available, the ads turned to KITTIE and THE DOG for suggested portrait sittings.

Turners Falls and its neighboring towns were too small to support the three photographers and their families. Throughout their careers, the Howes brothers—particularly Walter and George—roamed far afield in search of clients. The precarious nature of their business drove the brothers from town to town, hoping to find new faces willing to pay for a moment in time frozen by their cameras. The life of the itinerant photographer may have strained the resources of these men, but it has left us a remarkable collection of photographs—a visual social history of turn-of-the-century western Massachusetts.

The subjects are astonishing in their diversity—rich and poor, farmer and factory hand, men and women, in group shots and individual portraits. The Howes had an unerring feel for context, particularly in their depiction of people and their work. The tobacco hand is shown in the fields, the logger in the forest, the laundress in her factory, the painter with brush in hand, and, above all for our purposes, the carpenter in his world of work.

Fortunately, the bulk of the Howes brothers’ glass-plate negatives remain intact, protected over the years by the dry air in the attic of the Zachariah Field Tavern in their hometown of Ashfield, Massachusetts. In the early 1960s, the collection was donated to the Ashfield Historical Society. After years of painstaking preservation and cataloging, over 21,000 Howes brothers negatives are now accessible to students of late-nineteenth-century New England. Some of their photographs can be seen in New England Reflections, 1882–1907: Photographs by the Howes Brothers, a 1981 book edited by Alan B. Newman and published by Pantheon Books, New York. The pictures on these pages are published here for the first time, with the permission of the Ashfield Historical Society. © 1979, 1981 ASHFIELD HISTORICAL SOCIETY