May. 09, 2007 - 23:37 MDT

Spectator

Before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 (I was eight years and some months old then) one of the most thrilling things I could find to do was be at the site where a new house was being built.

There was something fascinating about watching purposeful men busily doing work they knew how to do and liking it.

First there would be a man with a team of horses that pulled the scoops of dirt to dig the basement, the the building of forms for the concrete wall. After that there would be much activity.

The grunts of hod carriers schlepping mortar up the ladder to the bricklayers, the sound of hammers whanging nails, the sounds of saws shaping lumber to size and the sight and sound of a wood plane making those delicious curls of thin wood.

Then after behaving well and not being pests we would be allowed to go to the scrap lumber pile and pick up pieces of wood to take home and whittle on.

Watching construction gradually becoming a house and then watching people move in after it was done, hoping that there would be some one my age moving in with them.

Maybe not actually a rite of passage, but learning to love buiding something, making something became ingrained with me. And in learning I was also an avid SPECTATOR . . . . . . . . . . . .

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