Northbrook Lumber Company

by

A. Rod Paolini

2012
 “Tell Gene to go to the hill and I’ll put it on him!” I stood for a second feeling like an idiot, for I had
no idea what Jim was telling me. “Tell him to meet me on the hill.” I slowly walked away and headed for
the warehouse where Gene, one of the drivers, was putting gas in the tank of his truck. I tried to repeat the
phrase exactly as Jim had stated it, but it came out as incoherent as it seemed to me. He looked at me for a
second, and then said, “Okay, I’ll be up in a few minutes.” I walked away, still in a daze, not understanding
what I had said.

My mother worked as a bookkeeper for the Northbrook Lumber Company, and thanks to her, she
had secured a summer job for me. I was assigned to the outside, yard crew which received and stacked the
lumber and sheet rock (also called wall board), assembled orders for building contractors.

I was seventeen years old, and I had just graduated from high school; and now I was working with
men–not men who lived in my neighborhood and wore suits, white shirts and ties and carried leather
briefcases, but guys who wore work-clothes, leather boots, smoked or chewed tobacco, and carried a lunch
pail. Their hands were like paws–large, rough, and gnarled, their faces sunburnt while their forehands
were pale as they always wore a cap. Rather than a silk handkerchief in a suit pocket, they pulled a large
cotton handkerchief from their back pocket to wipe their brow or to blow their nose. Their idea of fund was
to make a joke at someone else’s expense.

Al was the foreman. He was probably no taller than 5' 5" but he had a large presence. His eyes
would fix on you so that it felt he was burrowing right into you. You knew that he was in charge, and that
he didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He had been a tugboat captain before the war. I may not have always
understood him, but I never had any difficulty hearing him as his voice was as powerful as a foghorn. In
contrast to his image, he wore a Scottish, red and green plaid golf cap though I’m quite sure that he never
swung a golf club in his life.

Jim was Mutt to Al’s Jeff, that is to say, Jim was tall–probably 6' 5"– and he stood ram-rood
straight. I suspect that he couldn’t bend–at least not easily. His movements were slow and deliberate. He
talked a slight stutter–actually, more of a hesitation. I noticed that he wore dentures, and that his jaw was
slightly deformed, and that his speech was slurred. I still cringe when I think of why. Jim was a truck driver
before he became the forklift operator who assembled the loads of lumber and sheet rock and placed
them on the trucks. So when he said, “Tell Gene to meet him on the hill and I’ll put it on him,” he meant for
Gene to drive his truck to the hill along the train track, and he would place a load of lumber on Gene’s truck.

To return to Jim’s story! There were two ways to dump a load at

a building site. If the truck had a hydraulic bed-lift, the driver
simply raised the bed to a high angle, and the load would slide
back and then fall to the ground, but still leaning at an angle
against the truck bed; the driver would then pull the truck away
and the other end of the load would fall flat to the ground.

Raised Bed Truck

 Other, older trucks had rollers in the bed that
were linked by a chain, so that turning one roller would
turn them all. At the roller at the back end of the bed,
one attached a ratchet crank. Turning it moved the load
backward, causing it to eventually tip and slide to the
ground. The ratchet crank was set so as to apply force in
one direction to turn the roller, but simply slip when
turned in the opposite direction, or, more importantly,
not turn at all when the load tipped and spun the end
Roller bed truck
roller. Only in Jim’s case, it didn’t slip. The crank spun up,
striking him in the jaw with such force that it knocked his
teeth up to his eye sockets. It was a story such as Jim’s that made me aware that this was a dangerous
place, especially if one was careless.

I came to realize that I was to do the jobs that were not routine–the ones that weren’t part of the
production but had been put off until some menial such as myself could be tasked. My first job was refiling
the drums of water that were to be used in the event of a fire. The yard had no water lines, and so these
steel water drums were placed around the yard. [It would have to be a small fire to put one out with those
buckets.] I started hauling the water by hand, but quickly realized that it would take forever, not to
mention that I would die of exhaustion. “Use the small forklift,” said Al. I was given thirty-seconds of
instruction, then left to my own devices. I was giddy to have the opportunity of driving the small forklift,
even though I thought they were foolhardy to trust me with it. I could have done some real damage. I only
had one accident, and that was six months later when I came home from college at Spring vacation. I was
to pickup scraps and pile them for disposal. After creating a pile on the forklift, I drove to the disposal site
next to a shed. I wasn’t going very fast, but when I pressed the brake petal, it sunk right to the floor with a
clank. Bang! I hit the shed. I didn’t do any damage and I wasn’t hurt–just startled. “The brakes are out,”
said Al nonchalantly as he walked by. “Well thanks for letting me know,” I said, sarcastically, sotto voce.

When Al didn’t have a job for me, I was to help Frank in the shed. Frank was a quirky little guy. He
always had a pipe in his mouth. He was deaf in one ear so that he had to tilt his head in your direction . If
you approached him from the rear and called his name, he usually looked the wrong way as he couldn’t tell
from where the sound came. He was the only craftsman of the crew: he made window frames. I admired
his workmanship, and I regret that I didn’t try to learn some wood working skills from him. He was a nice
guy. He would make fun of me, but he did it good-naturedly, and I never felt demeaned. One of his gibes
was my difficulty in determining the size of a board. Of course I could recognize a two-by-two and a two-
by-four, but above that, I was always uncertain. Was that a two-by-eight or a two-by-ten? In my own
defense, I should point out that a two-by-eight isn’t eight inches in width but seven and five-eights. And
then there was the length. The piles of lumber were set in order to some degree but not always; and the
location sometimes changed. I never memorize the locations, and I certainly couldn’t recognize the length
by looking at them. So for both the width and the length, I had to us a retractable ruler which, when I
brought out, would cause Frank to burst into laughter.

Every job has a little trick--a clever and effective way of doing something. Frank taught me how to
carry a heavy piece of lumber. I started by just carrying a board by cradling it, which was quite awkward. I
saw some of the guys carrying boards on their shoulder, but when I tried it, it was too painful on my
shoulder bone. “Let me show you,” he said. “Put the board on your shoulder, and then put your arm on
top of the board. This raises your shoulder muscle and keeps the board off your shoulder bone, plus it
enables you to steady the board.” It was that simple, but I never would have figured out myself. I did learn
by myself never to throw a piece of wood, having thrown one and spending the rest of the day pulling the
splinters from my hand.

When I had no assigned task, I was to make stakes. Stakes were used by contractors to mark the
layout of a building for excavation. The stakes were to be made in two lengths: two feet and eighteen
inches. They were to be two inches by two inches square with a wedge-shaped end. The stakes were to be
made from boards that were too warped to sell, and so that
meant I had to rip boards–that is, cut them length-wise–and
then cut them to the appropriate length; then cut the wedge.
And so I was introduced to Mr. DeWalt, or, after got to know
each, I just called him Walt. Walt was a heavy duty, radial arm,
circular saw with a 16" diameter blade and a three-phase, five
horsepower motor. I was duly impressed with Walt, and I
showed him as much respect as I did Al. Al could bite my head
off, but Walt could take my arm off, and I’m not speaking
figuratively.

Frank showed me how to operate the saw, and he

Mr. DeWalt
supervised me quite closely until he was confident that I could
handle it–for which I was, and am, quite grateful. I learned to
swing the saw from cross-cutting to ripping, and even angling, but Frank always made the blade changes,
which wasn’t as simple as one would think. The blades were huge, heavy and sharp. Letting one of them
drop or even slip could cost you a finger. He told me that the blades were actually made from steel wire
which were then heated and pressed so that they were quite strong yet somewhat flexible. I know they
were expensive.

These were the days before OSHA–the Occupational Safety and Health Administration–and so there
were no goggles nor ear protectors. After an hour of cutting, my ears would be still ringing afterwards. I
never caught anything in my eyes, but my nose would become clogged. I was quite repulsed to blow my
nose and expel sawdust.

I thought that my stakes were well made–not that making them was a high skill job and not that
Frank ever complimented me. My downfall was tying them in bundles. I had to use twine and form a knot
that tightened about the bundle but wasn’t supposed to slacken. Frank showed me a couple of times, and
he would proudly show me that the twine was tight, even on bundles that he had done months before.
Then he would lift one of my bundles, and the twine would sag and the stakes would clatter. He would just
smile sardonically and shake his head.

As did the other crew members, I

brought my lunch. Sometimes I ate with the
crew in the lunchroom, but often I would just
find a shady spot on a stack of lumber and
watch the train crew or the unloaders of the
boxcar. The lumber, sheet rock and
insulation boards were brought by train.
Using the side tracks, the engine would
isolate a boxcar containing lumber or a flat
car containing sheet rock, and then leave it
on the siding inside the lumber yard.

Illinois Central freight engine

 I’ve always been fascinated by trains as I had a Lionel train set when I was quite young. I thought
the trainmen had rather cushy jobs. The engineer simply drove forwards and backwards as he sat in the
cab. Another trainman rode on the cars and would unhook the chains and pull the pin to disconnect a car in
order to leave it, and vice versa when picking up an empty one. But the best job was the guy who lay on his
back and looked up at the sky. The engine wasn’t a steam locomotive but electric, receiving its power from
an overhead wire. Because of switching from one track to another, the trolley pole or boom had to be
pulled down slightly and then allowed to spring up to catch a different wire. So one guy simply lay on his
back and pulled the rope that controlled the boom. I thought that I wouldn’t mind having that job for the
summer.

The job I knew I didn’t want was unloading lumber from the boxcars. I couldn’t understand how the
lumber was loaded into the boxcars. Come to think of it, I couldn’t understand why they used boxcars
instead of flatcars. I would have thought the lumber would have been stacked and thus loaded by a forklift
on to a flatcar, but it came in boxcars, and it seemed as though the mill had lifted the top off and simply
dumped the boards in lengthwise. The boxcar contained board sizes that had been ordered–two-by-eights,
two-by-tens, and such–but they were mixed about and filled almost to the ceiling.

Unloading was deemed to be a two-man job. One man would climb into the car to the top of the
heap and maneuver one board at a time out the door and down to a second man who would add it to a
stack of the same width and length. I was undecided as to which job was worse. Imagine moving about on
your haunches and knees on an uneven pile of lumber two feet below a ceiling that is being heated by the
sun so that the temperature in the boxcar is probably one hundred and twenty-five degrees. On the other
hand, imagine being fed a two by ten by twelve feet in length, and swinging it around, and possibly walking
fifteen feet to place it in the proper stack. Imagine doing that for ten hours a day when the temperature is
ninety degrees and there is absolutely no shade.

This job wasn’t done by company workers, but ‘independent contractors,’ though we surly didn’t
use a fancy term like that in those days. I suspect that the yard workers were union–maybe teamsters–and
paid by the hour. The two guys that did the unloading got paid by the boxcar. Whatever they made, they
earned every penny. In those days, we didn’t have Latinos doing the onerous work; we had hillbillies. They
fit the stereotype: rail thin; sallow checks; sandy and disheveled hair. They wore boots, T-shirt and Levi’s.
They stopped only for a cigarette and a swig of water. I don’t think they even stopped for lunch most of the
time. They didn’t socialize nor hardly talked to anyone save a nod or a wave. After they worked a couple of
weeks, they would be gone. I was told that they went back to Tennessee to see their family and/or to ‘go
on a bender.’ They always returned, and they were usually on the job before I arrived at eight in the
morning. I surely didn’t envy them, but I did respect them.

In addition to the spur that ran along the ridge or hill, there was another spur that ran down and
through the yard, terminating at the warehouse. Flatcars that contained the sheet rock were off-loaded in
the yard while the boxcar filled with milled woodwork was offloaded
at the warehouse. One time, a boxcar was left in the middle of the
yard, and it blocked Jim with his forklift and the trucks from getting
their loads; so Al decided to move it.

He had a long, oak wooden pole with a little lever at the end.
He jammed the end with the lever against a wheel and then push
down on the pole, causing the lever to push up against the wheel. A
full boxcar has to be awfully heavy, but the wheel turned a little,
moving the boxcar an inch or so.
Manual car mover
 End of lever

Boxcar with wheel brake near top

Al jammed the lever again, pushed down, and the boxcar

moved again, and so he repeated this quickly so the boxcar began
Spool of strapping band, Crimper, and
to roll...and roll...and then roll a little faster and faster. I’m quite
Tensioner
sure Al hadn’t anticipated this, but he quickly realized he needed
to stop the boxcar lest it crash into the train stopper. He dropped the lever, jumped on the boxcar’s ladder
and scampered to the top to the wheel brake. He spun the wheel furiously and the boxcar came slowly,
slowly to a screeching and then grinding halt. Al came down slowly as well, not looking at anyone. He
knew, and we knew, and he knew we knew, that he screwed up; but no one said anything. Who would
dare? We all just turned and went back to our jobs, but I couldn’t help chuckling to myself and my day
became a lot brighter.

Often I had to band a load of lumber. This job entailed estimating the size of the load–its height
and width–in order to determine the length of the two bands with which to secure the load. If the load
was six feet wide and four feet high, then one needed bands 20 feet in length plus an extra amount as one
couldn’t pull the band tight by hand; so one might add another four feet. One then stepped off the length
asa means of measuring, and then cut the bands. To secure the bands, one fed the ends of a band through
a small metal clip or buckle. With the tensioner tool, one slipped one end of the band that wrapped around
a roller by means of a crank while the other end was held fast by the tensioner. When the band was tight,
one crimped the buckle, thereby preventing the band from slipping. I remember the first time I did this task
by myself while Al was watching. I forgot to put the buckle on first, then I let the band slip to the ground,
and as I was fumbling with the buckle and tensioner, my hands were shaking. “Pretty shaky for a young
guy,” quipped Al.

This seemingly simple job actually entailed a skill that was somewhat competitive. The goal was to
use the least amount of band, the excess being measured by the length of the tail or band that was sticking
out from the tensioner. A long band was viewed as wastage, and as the English say, “poor form.” However,
to be short–to have to discard the two bands and cut new ones–was a total waste, for which the worker
was held up to ridicule as a horse’s butt. I never won any kudos for short tails, but I never was short–and I
did stop shaking.

Occasionally I would be assigned to a truck driver to help carry materials into the house that was
under construction, usually sheet rock as it would be damaged by rain. Of course I enjoyed this assignment
since most of the time I was sitting in the truck and talking to the driver, usually Gene or Buddy. I assume
that the drivers were teamsters being paid by the hour, but you would have thought that they were being
paid by the delivery as they drove like mad men and hustled to dump the load. The bad part of this job for
me was carrying the sheet rock. I’ve never been strong though I did build a little muscle after working those
two summers in the lumber yard; but hardly enough to easily carry in that damn sheet rock. The sheet rock
came in pairs with the finished or good sides facing each other. If the size was a four by ten, an unusual
size, then we could pull the pair apart and carry one in at a time; but if the size was four by eight, the
standard size, then we had to carry them in as a pair. I had to reverse my hand so that my thumb faced
backward to hold the board and lean it against my shoulder and head while I held it with my other hand so
that it would fall away from my body. We carried them together, but the weight still caused me to
sometimes stagger like a drunken sailor, and I thought my arms were going to be pulled from their sockets.
We usually had to walk over boards and bricks strewn about, and weave around the doorframes to where
the boards were to be placed. After each trip, I looked to see if my arms were longer. They weren’t as far
as I could tell, and as we bounced along the road homeward, I felt quite macho to have done a man’s work.

On one occasion, I did have lunch with the crew of Al, Jim, Frank and Sonny, the latter being the
worker in the warehouse. There was a discussion of the current state of affairs between the United States
and the Soviet Union as this was the height of the Cold War, and there was talk of a shooting war. Al, never
one to mince words, spoke his mind: “I ain’t fighting nobody. I done my fighting and I ain’t fighting again.”
I had heard that Al had fought in World War II as a platoon leader. I’m not sure it would have been pleasant
serving under him, but I knew that I’d be in capable hands. I was somewhat surprised by his remark, as
tough as he was. Reflecting over the years on people’s willingness to start a war, I’ve come to notice that
those who have actually fought in battle are more reluctant than those who never have or have little
prospect of doing so.

In my second summer at the lumber company, I committed one of the bravest acts of my life: I
wore Bermuda shorts. Remember, this was the late 50's, and Bermuda shorts were worn only by college
kids at beer parties. By mid-July, it was really hot, and the Levi’s that I wore absorbed the heat and became
damp with sweat. I received some startled looks at first, but I don’t remember anyone saying anything to
me, though I’m sure there were some chuckles behind my back. I was just thirty years ahead of my time.

At the end of each workday, my mother and I waited for my father to pick us up. We would wait in
front of the office building where it was cool due to the shade. I would lie spread out on the green grass,
weary and covered with dirt and sawdust. And yet I felt good–that I had done a day’s work and knowing
that I had pulled my weight, however light that might be. I never have given much thought to my
experience at Northbrook Lumber except that I knew I didn’t want to do manual labor all my life. In one’s
youth, I enjoyed the physical exertion and spending myself, but only because I would throughly revive
within a few hours. As one ages, the body no longer revives quickly–at least mine no longer does.

In terms of learning, there were not too many KSAs, that is, “knowledge,” “skills,” and “abilities”
that seemed to be transferable from the lumber yard to a mid-level management position in a Federal
agency; but dealing with superiors and colleagues in new situations recurred many times in my life, and it’s
quite likely that I benefitted a great deal from my experience at Northbrook Lumber. I must admit, that by
and large, I was treated quite well, and I think that I learned to do the same for my employees and
colleagues in my professional career.