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High Steel In The City
I was talking here with a digital friend, Gray Wolf , a gentleman quite, rightfully, proud of his American Indian heritage and it brought back some memories from the early sixties in NYC.
At the time I worked for a time lock company and this story starts with me shooting the bull with a fellow worker named Jim Cavanaugh.
While talking it came up that he originally wanted to be a high steel worker, one of the guys twenty or many many more stories up riveting the sky scrapers together.
He’d spend his days sitting in the Local 580 (If I remember right) union hall, trying to get in the apprenticeship program, trying to get out on a job.
One day a steel worker, who Jim found out later was a Mohawk, noticed how long he’s been sitting, waiting and they got to talking. Jim told him he just couldn’t seen to get off the bench no matter how eager he was. Well the guy took a liking to Jim told him to head over to Brooklyn and talk with a guy he called the chief and tell him that he'd sent him.
Jim, having nothing to lose gave it a try. Turns out the ‘chief’ was in a part of Brooklyn called little Kahnawake, where Mohawk high steel workers lived and congregated. Seems Mohawks genetically lack acrophobia, fear of heights, and subsequently got in on the ground floor, so to speak, and dominated high steel work in NYC including building the Empire State Building.
Well, the ‘chief’ had a real say about who got hired, he called the union hall and Jim was out working high steel the next day.
End of the story; Jim found he wasn’t quite as comfortable as his new friend that got him working, standing on am eight inch girder, catching red hot rivets in a steel cone and setting them for the riveter to hammer home, -which is why we were able to have that conversation in the time lock company.
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