|
A Series About Childhood Memories |
 |
|
SAGA OF THE SANDPAPER KID |
 Illustration by Jim Hummel |
Hard work in childhood?
Hey, it builds character!
By JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
GROWING UP, for me, wasn't always easy. Because a large part of my youth consisted of hard work.
I'm not griping about it, I just want to tell you the story. It's a story with a moral, and you might learn something. Like I learned something.
I can still remember the day it started, in the fall of 1950. I was all of 10 years old and I was planning that morning to read the latest issue of PLANET STORIES, a monthly pulp magazine that featured interplanetary warfare, bug-eyed monsters, scantily clad space heroines and heroes brandishing disintegrator ray-guns.
Hey, reading pulp science-fiction magazines and war and horror comics was often how I filled my free time as a kid. Either that or solving crossword puzzles in the Napa Register, the daily newspaper that was thrown into the dirt driveway of our home on a small lane off Soda Canyon Road, in the heart of Napa Valley.
But all that free time to read and to solve puzzles suddenly ended when my father came to me that morning and told me to get ready to go. Wear old clothes. Old shoes. We jumped into his '49 Ford half-ton pick-up and took off up the dusty trail that led to Soda Canyon Road which then fed into a main artery through the Valley, Silverado Trail.
Halfway to where we were going, Dad handed me a thin piece of metal. "Here, stick this into your pocket." It was called a nail set. I didn't know it at that moment but that nail set was my introduction to a decade-long odyssey that would establish my work ethics forever and a day. I ended up carrying a nail set in my pocket no matter where I went because I was going to work after school, on weekends and during the summer breaks from school.
|
|
 |
Dad, or "Pop" as I would start calling him in a few years, was an experienced hardwood floor layer and finisher. He was especially good at sanding hardwood floors with a heavy machine with a 12-inch drum onto which I would be forever applying a new piece of sandpaper.
For 10 years he had been learning the floorman's craft, first by laying floors in military barracks that were hastily erected in the early years of World War II, then by working for a Napa floor-laying company while he simultaneously recovered from severe machine-gun bullet wounds he had received in the Pacific Campaign as a dogface G.I.
Dad had just started up his own business in the late summer of '50, the Silverado Hardwood Floor Company, and now he was going to show me the business. My baptism came that morning when we arrived at a new home under construction. Dad had already spread the lumber across the front room and he handed me a hammer and told me to take out the centerpunch he had already given me in the pick-up. My job was to sink all the flooring brads he had used to tack down the floor.
I was frightened out of my wits. I knew I was going to smash my thumb with the first swing and so I didn't swing. I froze up like an iceberg. Dad looked at me, perhaps wondering if he had made a mistake in bringing me, and showed me again how to do it. He made it seem so easy. A swift swing of the hammer, a tap on the top of the centerpunch, and the nailhead sank out of sight. Smooth and easy. At least that's how Dad made it seem.
I swung as lightly as I could, silently praying for the safety of all my fingers, and managed to tap the centerpunch-barely. The second attempt found the hammer ricocheting off the nail set. The head of the nail failed to budge. It just sat there on the surface of the hardwood, obstinate as hell, defying me to sink it. I kept tapping away at it, feeling pretty good when the nail finally began to sink inward. I must have spent five minutes getting my first nail buried deep enough.
Yeah, I hit a couple of knuckles that day, but it wasn't as terrible as I had imagined. In fact, I liked the feel of a hammer in my hand. As it turned out, the hammer was an object that would fill my hand for the next decade as much as a pencil or pen would fill it during my school days. Wielding a hammer would become second nature to me.
From the beginning of my life, apparently, I have maintained some strange affinity with a hammer. And so I must pause for a moment to tell a legendary story about myself and the tool that is known as the hammer.
 |
|
When I was only a couple of years old, maybe three, I was given a rubber hammer for Christmas. I was visiting with my mother's parents in Orcutt, Ca., a small town that had been built by Standard Oil in the 1920s to accommodate its work force and families. As soon as I had that hammer out of the Christmas paper, I went outside onto the back porch and began driving nails into the wood. There was always plenty of nails around because my grandfather, Johnny Hartman, who had been the head electrician for Standard before he retired, was a tinkerer and home-bound carpenter, always fixing things.
They say that I drove countless nails with that rubber hammer into my grandfather's back porch. They also tell the story of the day that a stray feral cat changed along and decided to perch itself on my grandfather's deck. Big mistake. I chased the cat away by pounding the hammer against its tail.
Some tellers of this tale tell it differently. I have an aunt who insists that I killed the cat with the hammer. But I have no memory of any such homicidal act. I prefer to think I was still as innocent as a newborn lamb in those youthful days at Johnny Hartman's home. On the other hand, I think it was John Ford, the great movie director, who once said: "Tell the truth only if the legend isn't as interesting. Otherwise, tell the legend." So believe either story you like.
I can only assume, the
cat being either dead or alive, that some invisible force, even
then, was shaping my teen-age destiny.
Back to 1950: That day was the beginning of how I would spend
all of my teen years. Laying, nailing, puttying and then sanding
hardwood floors. I would also learn how to varnish and finish
hardwood floors, and even wax them. By the time I was 13 I could
do it all.
A few years ago I told this story to a friend, who remarked that it sounded like child abuse to him. I shook my head and laughed.
Maybe in today's politically-correct world, but not then. Back then everyone had to help earn his way. That was how Dad had been brought up on Stanley Mountain, a rugged piece of terrain outside Santa Maria, CA. His father, William Stanley, had a ranch there and also did some farming.
At 10, Dad was going out with his .22 rifle and bringing back game. It got a little more serious during the Depression years of the early 1930s when Dad went out with a hunting rifle to get some game--in those days it was so his younger brothers and sisters could have some food on the table. He made sure he never missed. This after William had gone flat broke as a rancher and farmer and didn't have a dime in his pocket. I never got to know him because he died of a heart attack when I was around three. A lot of Stanleys would die of heart attacks at a young age, but more about that later.
I gotta get back to the hardwood floors.
My most vivid memories of those youthful days were of the nailing machine. It was a hand-driven metal monster with an upper compartment into which I would deposit a handful of the small flooring brads. The nails would fall through a small slot to form a row, their pointed ends hanging downward as the bodies moved along a descending channel that led toward the entrance to the Plunger Chamber.
My weapon was a wooden mallet with a paraffin head on it. Each time I hit the top of the mechanism, a plunger would drive one nail into the wood. I would have to hit it with just the right amount of pressure to drive the nail slightly beneath the surface of the board. As the plunger rod rose upward, another nail would enter the Plunger Chamber and take its position, ready for my next blow with the paraffin head.
And so it went for minutes, for hours, for days, for weeks, for months, for years. I would eventually run the nailing machine in my sleep. I would dream about it night after night. I still dream about it occasionally. I'm always the same age in my dream. Around 14 or 15.
Of course, a machine like that was destined to jam on more than rare occasions. Sometimes two nails instead of one would drop and I was forever clearing the pathway. I'm sure this was where I learned how to curse. I still do it very well. And sometimes the plunger would slide off the nail and punch a worthless hole in the floor.
Then there was the gooping. Or puttying, as some call it. Dad had designed his own mixture--a batch of fine-textured sawdust from the edging machine (more about that equally monstrous hunk of metal in a little while), some lacquer thinner and some coloring mixture, usually raw sienna. I would mix these ingredients until I had a soft brownish gooey substance-it couldn't be too thin or it would sink into the holes, not completely filling them. Too thick and it wouldn't spread as easily across the floor. Once I had the texture just right I would take a putty knife and roll the "goop" into the holes, covering as much territory as I could in one swooping motion.
(Years later I would find out that "goop" was something Dad had invented, and which had been picked up on by all the other hardfloor men of his time. At least that's the way the story was told to me by more than one hardwood man.)
Up and down the rows of nails, back and forth, stopping to set any nails that hadn't been countersunk. I sat on a four-wheeled scooter that had a soft pad for my butt. That pad was the only soft thing about the job, hardwood being hard on the knees. Pushing the putty into the nail holes and cracks until it was completely spread across the wood, then getting another glomp onto the putty knife and repeating the process ad nauseum. Glomps and gloops were eternally before my eyes.
I can still see those rows. Thousands of those nail holes to fill. We were using a form of oak hardwood called "strip"--5/8ths-inch thick, two inches wide. The rows of nails were about seven inches apart, so it took literally hundreds of thousands of the little buggers to keep a strip floor nailed down. Where two boards butted also required an additional six nails--two at the end of each board, and one into each board butting against the side of the joint.
Occasionally we would lay tongue-and-groove flooring, a much thicker form of hardwood requiring heavy-duty nails that had to be driven diagonally into the sides of the boards. This was never as easy as it sounds, at least for me, because invariably the bloody nail would bend against the resistant wood. And then it was always a bitch to pry the nail out. However, tongue-and-groove was rare in Napa Valley, where contractors and home-owners preferred the less expensive "strip" flooring. That I was glad about.
All of this hardwood floor stuff was the stuff of my childhood nightmares. Night after night I would dream of the repetition and the tediousness of it all.
Nothing was ever easy when I worked with Dad. Toil, sweat, all that stuff. Today they have electric nailing machines, but not in the early 1950s. Each nail had to be put into that floor with at least one swing of the arm. There was no other way to do it. And then it had to be filled with that damn goopy stuff. Then it had to be sanded. And cleaned, and covered with varnish or shellac. And finally with wax. Nothing nothing nothing was easy in the spring of my youth.
Gooping, on the other hand, had its share of pleasures. The lacquer thinner had an intoxicating affect after I was exposed to the fumes for a while, and I would get giddy and more than a little high. Dad would make me walk outside for a while, and the fresh air always got me back to normal. I can honestly say that I was drunk for the first time when I was all of 11.
Around Soda Canyon Road, the rural route on which we lived, I got to be known as "The Sandpaper Kid" by the guys I went to school with. That's because I was always working with sandpaper around the house. Guys would come over to the house on weekends to play, only to find me forever cutting circular pieces of sandpaper on a template. I found that stockpiling the discs was a way of saving time while on the job sites.
Later, on the job site, I would put three or four discs at a time on the bottom of an infernal device called an "edging machine," a rotary nightmare that whirled the sandpaper discs in a circular fashion, cutting away the dried goop and top portion of the hardwood so we could get down to the bare wood.
Dad, who ran a sander with a 12-inch drum, couldn't get too close to the walls without damaging them so I had to do all the edges with the rotary machine. Plus the small closets in which Dad was not able to maneuver his big sanding machine. The edges stretched from feet into yards and finally into miles. It seems like I could never cut enough edger discs. I was always whacking away with a wooden mallet down onto the template, which would cut the discs from larger sheets of sandpaper. I can still see that old wooden mallet I used year after year. I hope it ended up in the Smithsonian. It deserves to be there.
Although the dust bag caught most of the sawdust, there was always a small cloud of dust that rose up from the (#$%^v) machine. In those days nobody wore masks, so after a while my nostrils would become clogged with sawdust. I would also build up several layers of dust on my glasses, and finally would have to stop and clean everything up.
Then I'd hunch over the
machine and go at it again. Always the sandpaper discs spinning
and cutting. Always another 10 feet to the corner, then another
15 feet to the next corner. And then into a small closet where
the ordeal always intensified a little. Harder to breathe as
the dust accumulated in the cubbyholes. The smell of burnt hardwood
also intensified in these tight places.
And always a layer of that friggin' dust. That was the life of
the edging-machine operator. That was my life as a kid. The Sandpaper
Kid. And smile when you call me that.
The summer of 1955 will always stand out as my Supreme Test. As if my first five years on the job had just been nothing but warm-up training. Dad must have felt I was really ready for the big time because that summer he took on a tract of homes being constructed on the outskirts of Napa.
I don't remember how many homes there were. There had to be at least 25. Maybe 30 or 35. At the time it seemed like hundreds.
When Dad told me my mouth fell open. I had no idea how we were going to do it. And I worked in all of those houses that summer, one after the other, with only a break on Sundays. I went on to work for a living, yes, but there was never a challenge like the one I faced at the age of 15.
Here's an amazing fact for you: There were just three of us who did all of those houses. Dad did most of the lumber spreading and "tacking down"-the placement of a few nails, just enough to hold the boards in position, until I could come along behind him with my infernal nailing machine.
The third crazed party in all this was an old working buddy of Dad's, a man who was considered one of the best sanding-machine operators of his time. His name was Bill Hamilton and he is perhaps the only human legend that I have ever worked alongside.
Even as recently as two years ago, I was talking to a Bay Area hardwood floor man and I asked him if he had ever heard of Bill Hamilton. Heard of him? Hell, he'd known Bill Hamilton. And he went into a long explanation of the man's incredible talents with a sanding machine. I just stood there with my mouth open, amazed that I had known a legend in the profession.
When I worked at his side in the mid-1950s, Bill was an aging, crusty hunk of manhood who always wore khaki workpants and khaki shirts. On his head was a beat-up felt hat that he always wore, even when he was running Dad's big sanding machine. He was married to a woman named Beulah, and whenever he talked about her I couldn't help but think of the shrewish Beulah who was married to the Kingfish on the AMOS 'N ANDY radio and TV shows I had grown up on.
I met the real Beulah only once but it reinforced my opinion that she made life miserable for Bill whenever he was at home, which explained why he agreed to stay with us during that long summer, going home on the weekends but always returning first thing Monday morning. I often asked myself: To work for Dad, or to escape the yammering of Beulah?
I would often ride to work with Bill in the mornings in his old low-slung Hudson Hornet. It was a '49 model and he always drove it like hell. He would step on the gas as he approached a curve in Silverado Trail, then take his foot off the pedal just as he began the turn. As the car slowed and clung to the curving roadway, Bill would suddenly give it the gas again, accelerating the Hornet. He always joked about this afterward, saying, his mighty hands gripping the steering wheel, "That's called powering up, gliding in and powering out." I have no idea what it was all about, but I always felt like I was participating in some unique speeding maneuver when I rode in that Hornet.
One morning I'll never forget: Bill was in a hurry, as usual, and while navigating a sharp turn in Silverado Trail wandered over onto the side of the road, where a stray dog was walking. Bill saw the dog too late to avoid hitting it. I heard and felt the terrible and inevitable thud and sat there in shock for a while. Bill felt terrible afterward, especially because the animal had been walking where he should have been, and Bill had been driving where he shouldn't have been.
|
|
 |
(Beulah died first, in the early 1960s. The last time I saw Bill was in the lobby of a retirement hotel on Market Street in the spring of 1966. He had only a few weeks to live. He was still wearing a khaki shirt and khaki pants, and the same kind of work shoes he had worn while running Dad's powerful sanding machine. There was a rough texture to his skin and I couldn't help but think of a piece of sandpaper.)
So Dad would lay the floors, I would nail and goop them, and Bill would come behind me and sand the hell out of the wood. Then Dad would drop back and varnish the floors, and I would help him between coats, hand-sanding the rough spots and always sweeping everything crystal clean with a giant push broom that seemed to be as ubiquitous in my life as the nailing machine and the edger.
And so it went all summer long. To this day I don't know how we did it without totally exhausting ourselves. It was how Dad and Bill had spent their lives, so I guess it was nothing special to them. But it sure as hell was a laborious, sweat-filled event to me.
There finally came an end to this decade-long work load in 1959. I was getting ready to go off to college when Dad asked me if I wanted to become his partner--we would turn the Silverado Hardwood Floor Company into a father-son business.
I remember my response very vividly:
"Dad, I've had enough sawdust blown into my face. I've driven enough nails. I've wound up enough cables. I've cut enough pieces of sandpaper."
A new time was beginning for me: I wanted to learn something. I wanted to do something that wouldn't require the unending phsyical labor that I saw Dad going through year after year. I wanted to be a writer and a newspaperman, that's what I wanted to be.
At 18 I'd already finished a novel, THE PLAYPEN, a fanciful tale of World War II in which Nazi chief Heinrich Himmler kidnaps a band of American kids and uses them as cannon fodder to train members of the Hitler Youth. I would never sell the sucker, but it sure got my creative juices started.
So off to San Francisco State College I went in the fall of '59. I would return once in a while to help Dad out when he fell behind in his work load, but I would never again have to face the unrelenting demand of the hardwood floor business as intensely as I had during the '50s.
I know it took some years off my father's life. He had his first heart attack at the age of 56. I attribute part of that to the three bullets that struck him in the jungles of Luzon in 1945. But I also think about all that sawdust he ingested, and the strain of lifting that heavy sanding machine job after job. How about the wear and tear on his knees from years of spreading hardwood and cleaning corners with a scraper?
On the other hand, maybe it was just bad genes. Remember, his father had died young. And Dad had two brothers, Roy and Chet, who both died before they reached 65. Of heart problems. So maybe it was just lousy genes.
Dad went to his resting
place in the Santa Maria Cemetery in May 1982, dead at the age
of 65.
The last year had been the worst--12 months spent in a wheelchair,
paralyzed and unable to speak. Remembering all those years of
work, and now unable to move. I used to push him around in the
wheelchair on weekends during that final year, remembering all
the work we had done together, and realizing that now he couldn't
even move. I could only imagine what he was thinking about and
remembering, but I'm sure it was of sanding machines and sandpaper
and sawdust.
At his funeral I wrote an amusing poem about the hardword floor business, with the image of Dad in the middle of a cloud of sawdust, surrounded by all the tools of his trade. Sanding machine, sandpaper, the works.
But the image was a great lie. I had romanticized it more than a little for the sake of the funeral service, and so Mom could keep all her happy memories of Dad. In my heart I knew only too well of the hard work that in his world had been unending. And finally deadly.
Dad, or "Pop," did one thing, though. He sure as hell taught me a profession. Maybe not the one that I eventually practiced. And he sure as hell instilled in me a need to prove myself and to work hard at whatever I would tackle in the years to come. Nails became words and the edging machine became a typewriter and instead of beautiful, shiny floors there were published books and newspaper stories. Thirteen books in all, thousands of journalistic yarns.
But as much as I wanted to be known as a writer, part of me was always trapped back in the 1950s, trapped in the persona of "The Sandpaper Kid."
Smile, pardner.
©2001 by John Stanley. The cartoon is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photos are the property of John Stanley. All rights reserved.
You can comment on this column or contact John Stanley with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |