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Saturday, July 6, 2024

Hard Hat Work

Modeling my father's last company hard hat


My father grew up in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1930's and 40's.  

Although he wasn't Jewish, his childhood neighborhood borders one that mostly is.  And Dad's first paying job was dashing about both neighborhoods on winter weekend evenings, lighting fires in fireplaces, and making sure pilot lights in stoves and heating systems were burning.  He did this for practicing Orthodox Jewish neighbors whose religious customs prevented certain tasks on their Sabbaths.

For a kid, it was a decent gig, and he got paid both in cash and food, since Sabbath meals tend to be substantial with plenty to share.  It certainly was an unusual job, but then again, Dad's resume ended up being rather unconventional anyway.

While he attended Pratt Institute, Dad began working for Richmond Screw Anchor, a company founded in 1911 in Brooklyn that made and marketed proprietary components designed for large-scale concrete construction.

Did your eyes glaze over just now?  Well, throughout his career with Richmond, that's how a lot of people would respond when Dad told them what he did for a living!

His certainly never was a common job, or a glamorous one.  Basically, he sold steel contraptions that hold pieces of concrete together, or help reinforce other concrete structures.  For example, whenever you see a concrete wall with little holes spaced evenly across it, chances are, various types of steel anchors are in those holes, and they're helping to hold that wall together.

While it's unclear who actually invented the original screw anchor, Richmond owned its patents, and defended them vigorously in court for decades as other companies tried to copy it.

Dad became something of a walking encyclopedia of concrete construction.  Well, at least a "driving" encyclopedia... Richmond provided him a new company car every couple of years, and he usually had product samples in its trunk.  Those cars were never luxurious.  He started out with Fords, but eventually moved up to base-model Oldsmobiles.  Back in the day, that was one way to climb corporate ladders - by the type of company car they provided!

And hey:  Having a salesperson showing up at a job site driving a Cadillac or a Lincoln would have made customers think twice about the prices they were paying for all those screw anchors they were ordering.

Because, yes, being in the business of selling concrete construction components, Dad regularly visited active, gritty construction sites, first in the Northeast and New England, and then here in Texas and the Southwest.  He usually returned from his days on the road with mud splattered on those company cars.  It was another non-glamorous part of his non-glamorous job.

And on most construction sites, everyone who enters any work zone is required to wear basic protective equipment like a hard hat.

Dad's company provided him with a series of hard hats over the years, and the one I'm sporting in the photo above is the last one he had.  It's been hanging in a closet ever since his retirement, after traveling untold numbers of miles in his cars' trunks, rolling about among steel samples.

He didn't like wearing hard hats.  Or any hats, actually.  You see, Dad was a first-generation American Finn, with both of his parents being immigrants from Finland.  Finns tend to have skulls that are larger than average, and Dad's was no exception.  He never wore hats because most of them didn't fit.  Granted, most hard hats feature a sort of suspended strap system designed to elevate the hat's hard shell.  And those plastic straps - at least in newer models - are adjustable.

The hard hat itself is considered an American invention, although its idea was based on millennia of war helmet designs.  Early hard hats were made of leather covered in cured tar, then steamed canvas, then metal, and eventually various types of plastics.

A true hard hat - instead of just a helmet - features those suspension straps underneath a shell-like cover to increase the chances of protecting a wearer's brain from broad, harsh impacts.  They're not necessarily intended to provide significant protection against high-velocity projectiles like bullets, as modern hard hats are non-metallic so they can be used around electrical wires.  Those suspension straps were the critical invention, because they elevate the hard plastic off of one's skull, thereby partially diffusing, absorbing, and even re-directing a blow.  That's why in the photo above, the hard plastic appears to be floating just above my noggin.  If you see somebody wearing a plastic hat that is fitting snugly on their head, they either don't know how to wear it, or it's not really a hard hat.  It's a helmet.

The sad fact that my Dad would later develop dementia had nothing to do with whether or not he wore his hard hat on construction sites he'd visit.  Dad may have suffered a concussion or two during his life, but those would have been during his rough-and-tumble growing up years on Brooklyn's streets, not while working for Richmond.

Nevertheless, before he retired, worker safety - such as the type represented by hard hat use - did become a real thing for Dad.

One of his lifelong hobbies had been cameras.  As a teen, he and some friends would regularly prowl what had been dubbed "Radio Row" in Lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center now sits.  Radio Row was a collection of legitimate and dubious shops spread over several blocks catering to amateur radio, camera, high-fidelity stereo, and early tech geeks.  One could purchase just about anything electronic there.  And Dad had become fascinated with cameras.

Even long after leaving New York City, Dad splurged on cameras, including a personal video camera, which instantly turned him into something of a videographer.  He even took his video camera with him on his road trips to customers and construction sites.

On one of those trips, no matter how much instruction he gave the on-site crew regarding his products they were using, or printed material he gave them to read, Dad saw they either didn't care, couldn't comprehend it, or didn't want to take the extra time to do things correctly and safely.  Before he left that job site for the day, Dad realized he should - and could! - legally protect himself and his employer, just in case.  He decided to document what the workers insisted on doing despite his instructions and warnings.  So he stood off to the side of the construction site and simply videotaped the workers doing all sorts of wrong things in full view of his camera.

Literally before he got home from that trip, Dad learned there had been a serious accident at the job site, with critical injuries to workers and damage to the site itself.  Executives at Dad's company were apoplectic, fearing a lawsuit, but that was before they learned Dad had taken a video!  Remember, this was back in the early days of such technological availability, and most people hadn't yet become savvy to its array of uses.  He told his employers that with his video camera, he had documented the crew's sloppiness and careless disregard for his training.  He provided the video to Richmond's lawyers, who watched it, told the company they had nothing to worry about, and remarked how clever of Dad to have thought of taking it.

Curiously enough, even though Dad used to love electronics and gadgets and spending entire Saturdays on Radio Row, one tech invention he loathed turned out to be the car phone.  Back when they were becoming a hot item for many early adopters, Richmond insisted on installing them in all of their sales managers' cars (yes, they were on a metal stand which was literally bolted onto a car's floorboard, near the gear-shifter, like a big, black vertical keyboard - complete with a loopy coiled cord).  And while some of his peers welcomed the chance to show off America's latest status symbol - especially with their employer paying for it! - Dad balked.

He thought car phones were an invasion of privacy.  Especially ones installed by one's employer!

"But you won't have to carry the right change, stop at roadside pay phones, buy phone cards, or manage long-distance phone accounts," Richmond told him.  "No more getting out in the pouring rain in a dodgy neighborhood (or the middle of noplace) to try and call from a phone you discover isn't working."

But Dad didn't want Richmond calling him and distracting him while he was driving.  He didn't want them badgering him for not returning their calls more promptly.  He preferred being the person in control of contacting the office, and not having the office expect him to be at their constant beck-and-call (pun intended), which is what he knew would happen with a car phone.  And sure enough, on that score, Dad was entirely correct, wasn't he?  Mobile phones may have "freed" callers to a certain extent, but mobile phones have also forever chained callers to other people elsewhere, whether we like it or not.

Of course, it didn't take long for Richmond to win out, and Dad begrudgingly used his car phones.  He got at least two before retiring, and I remember the first one was the size of an enormous brick, and almost as heavy!

These days, when I get into my car and toss my slim, light smartphone onto the passenger seat, I sometimes remember that behemoth Dad used to bump against with his right leg every time he tried to get into and out of his company car.

Too bad in addition to hard hats, Richmond didn't supply him with shin guards.

_____

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