This is how I spent most of my summers when I was a teenager.

Dirty Job


The summer after I turned thirteen Dad decided to put me and my brother to work. Dad made a living as a brick mason. He was self-employed, working for local contractors and individuals on houses and small commercial jobs. Since he could only afford to pay laborers minimum wage, he had trouble finding good and reliable workers. Dad knew he could trust me and my brother. We worked for him each summer through high school and college. We split one minimum wage. That seemed fair enough, since Mom and Dad also provided us with room and board year round.

There’s a TV show called “Dirty Jobs” which highlights people doing difficult, filthy, sometimes frankly disgusting jobs that need to be done. My summer work for Dad could have made a great subject for the show. As the older and more responsible sibling, I had the dirtiest task of all. I had to make the “mud”—the mortar that holds the bricks together.

We got up for work each morning at 5:30 or so. Mom made us breakfast, unless she was in summer school that summer. Then she was too busy and Dad did the cooking instead. This confused our little dog at first. When he learned that Dad intended to follow Mom’s custom of making him his own scrambled egg each morning (the dog went crazy over scrambled eggs), he adjusted to the change quite well.

After breakfast we brushed our teeth and piled into Dad’s pickup. Usually we would stop at a convenience store on the edge of town for a paper, some ice for the water cooler, and any snack items we needed for break time. We then usually had a half-hour’s drive to the county seat, where we had most of our work. Sometimes we worked way out in the boondocks instead. We usually got there before our 7:30 start time.

The mortar mixer I used differed from a cement mixer. Its barrel did not taper, was open on top, and did not spin. A set of paddles inside rotated to provide the mixing.

I began by spraying some water into the mixer. We never measured it out; I just had to eyeball how much was in there. If we had had rain that made the sand pile wet I would make allowance for the sand—the wetter the sand, the less water I needed to start. With the water in place, I started up the mixer’s electric motor. It made a loud whirring and grinding noise that kept me from hearing much of anything else.

I began shoveling in sand. If the sand was damp and clumped together I put in eight shovels full. If it was dry, I needed ten. If bone dry, it might taken a dozen. This turned the water into an ugly brown mess.

Now came time to add the masonry cement. At first I lacked the strength to heave the seventy-pound bags up onto the grill on top of the mixer. I had to use an old trowel to cut the bags in two and dump them in one half at a time. Later I grew strong enough to handle the full bag. Either way, it raised a cloud of choking dust everywhere. Imagine standing right in front of the kid at school who pounded out the chalk erasers for the teacher and you’ll get a good idea of what standing in a cloud of cement dust is like. The feeling and the smell made my skin crawl.

I had to be careful as I added the cement, since it sucked up water voraciously. If I added it too fast, it might clog the mixer and force me to shut it off fast before it burned up the motor. Usually I’d add some water as I poured in the cement.

With the cement safely in I threw in a second batch of sand the size of the first. Occasionally I’d also have to add dark mortar coloring. That stuff was horrible! I’d get it all over your hands and it was all but impossible to scrub off. Then I’d spray down the grill to make sure no sand or cement stuck to it.

Next I opened the grill and scraped the barrel of the mixer with a trowel, to make sure any ingredients clinging to the sides were mixed in. I had to do this while the paddles were turning, in between turns. This took very careful timing! If I got my trowel stuck I’d jam the paddles and have to turn off the motor, work the trowel out, and start over. I think I only had to do this once.

Finally I added any more water that might be needed to get the mortar to just the right consistency. If I got it too soupy I might have to open a new sack of cement and carefully put a couple of shovels of that into the mixer, along with an appropriate amount of sand. I didn’t need to let the proportions of the ingredients vary too much. Fortunately I did not have to do this guess work often.

Once everything was mixed in, I shut off the mixer and let it stand to fully absorb the water. While this happened, I filled two five-gallon buckets with water and carried them to the spot where Dad would be working. Into one bucket I dipped an old coffee can or paint can and used that to wet down the mortar boards. The other bucket would hold a flat-bladed shovel and a garden hoe for handling the mortar. My brother would be busy stocking the material boards with bricks, while Dad carefully set up the angle irons from which he would pull the taut line that would guide his work.

Next I switched on the mixer, hoping that the mud would not have set too much to start back up. If that happened, I’d have to go get Dad so he could use a piece of two-by-four as a lever to help the motor get the paddles started. It only did this once or twice, but I worried about it. I added a bit more water if needed, then wet down a wheelbarrow with a fine mist from the hose and parked it in front of the mixer. Then I carefully dumped the load into the wheelbarrow.

Next I sprayed down the mixer and threw in a couple of shovels of sand to help it scrub itself out. With all my limited might I began trying to work the wheelbarrow, which weighed far more than I did, over to the work site. There I took the flat-bladed shovel from its bucket and threw a couple of shovels of mortar onto each board. Finally I returned to the mixer, shut it off, and sprayed it down. The nasty-looking grey mess in the mixer would serve as the basis of the next batch of mortar.

By now Dad had a line pulled tight between the angle irons. He took his trowel and rolled a neat mound of mortar onto the trowel. With a smooth and easy motion he swept the trowel down along the wall, laying a neat, even trail of mortar. With the point of the trowel he cut a trough in the mortar, forcing it out to the edges of the course where it was needed. Then he took a brick, set it down, tapped it gently into place using the line as a guide, scraped the excess mortar that oozed from the mortar joint with his trowel, and slapped that bit of mortar onto the end of the next brick before setting it into place beside the first.

Each brick took only a few seconds. On a good long wall with no windows or other gaps he could lay a couple hundred bricks in an hour. Dad made it all look just as simple and smooth and easy as could be. That speed and apparent ease took many years of practice. Placing once brick after another with the needed precision is extraordinarily hard to do. Believe me, I’ve tried it! Dad had me lay bricks a few times, but only in places where they would eventually be concealed behind steps. His own work looked so beautiful that other masons who knew him could recognize a wall he had built the moment they saw it. A mason’s work is his signature, like a painter’s distinctive brush strokes. Once or twice local contractors would delay the brick work on an especially elaborate job until he became available to do it.

We laborers did not spend much time standing around idle. We had to keep the boards supplied with mortar and bricks. As the day grew hotter, the mortar on the boards began to set and dry and become too stiff for Dad to work easily. We had to take a trowel or shovel and “shake up” the mortar by stirring in some water. Always we had to take care to add just the right amount and not too much. Soupy mortar was even worse than stiff mortar. Now and then I would take the shovel or hoe from the shovel bucket and shake up the mortar remaining in the wheelbarrow as well.

We spent much of our time preparing the next section of wall for work. This often involved setting up scaffolding. The big adjustable metal scaffold jacks and the solid sixteen-foot scaffold boards (salvaged from a demolished building) took a lot of effort and care for a kid to handle. We had to pick them up right at the balance point in the center and maneuver them very carefully.

Once the scaffolding had been erected, we had to stock it with material. This meant heaving bricks up to chest or head height. As the scaffolding rose higher I sometimes had to throw a shovel full of mortar up onto a board over my head, without having it come back down on top of me.

We had other chores as well. The most common was raking out the mortar joints to produce the neat grooves one usually sees on a brick wall. We did this with a tool that consisted of a curved metal handle, two little wheels, and a nail that could be adjusted to rake out the correct depth. We had to wait until the mortar had dried for a while before we could rake—yet we didn’t dare wait until it got too firm!

Periodically I had to go and start up another batch of mud. We tried to judge our rate of consumption carefully in timing the making of a new batch, so that we neither ran out nor had too much sitting around at one time. If Dad had to work on window sills, or arches, or some other structure that took extra time and care, we might take half a day to use up a batch of mortar. Usually I had to make four or five a day.

Some time around mid-morning we took a break to rest a few minutes, eat some peanut butter and crackers, and drink a soft drink (usually Mountain Dew). Throughout the day we drank as much cold water as needed. Highs in the 90s or higher were not unusual. The relative humidity was usually quite high as well. We never stopped because of the heat. None of us ever suffered a heat injury.

Ideally we finished using up a batch of mortar around lunch, the time of which varied somewhat depending on whether we had reached a good stopping place. If we did have mortar left, we put it all in the wheelbarrow and gave it an extra wet “noontime shakeup.” Then we spent half an hour eating a light lunch and resting in the shade.

Around four in the afternoon we would usually use up the last of the mortar. While Dad and my brother raked out the latest section of wall and put things away, I would turn on the mixer and dump the mess of grey sludge in it into the wheelbarrow. I sprayed down the barrel of the mixer very thoroughly. Then I dumped the mess somewhere out to the side (construction sites are unavoidably messy places) and sprayed down the wheelbarrow. With a worn-out glove and a bit of sand I scoured out the day’s encrustation of dried mud. I did likewise with the shovel, hoe, and shovel bucket.

Dad insisted that we clean everything up completely at day’s end. Once an encrustation was allowed to start, it would simply grow worse until the tool or wheelbarrow became unusable. That didn’t happen with us. We took special care with the mixer, our most expensive piece of equipment. Dad always inspected it himself after I had done cleaning it.

When the inside of the wheelbarrow, the shovel, and the hoe had dried, I took another old glove and a few drops of motor oil and coated them all. This would reduce the problem of mortar sticking to them. Then we would make sure all the sand, cement, and bricks were covered to protect them from rain, carry our tools back to the truck, and call it a day.

I would long since have become covered from head to toe with mud, cement, sweat, and plain dirt. It made my skin, hair, and clothes feel nasty. As we prepared to drive away, Dad would pass around a jar of petroleum jelly. We coated our hands with that to get rid of the film of cement that clung especially tenaciously to them. I could hardly wait to get a bath when we got home!

At home Mom (or perhaps Dad—or later, sometimes, me) would fix some supper. We always had plenty of appetite. On Wednesday evenings we knocked off a bit early so that we could get cleaned up and eat and go to church, where Dad served as pastor. We otherwise tended to spend evenings mostly at home, resting, watching TV, and reading. Next day, unless it was the weekend or raining, we got up and did it all again.

I have to say that during this period of my life I did not anticipate the coming of summer quite as eagerly as most kids at our school. Still, we had a lot of good times working with Dad. We just had to learn to enjoy our work, finding such humor and satisfaction as it offered. I still like to pass by buildings that I helped to build, and point them out when I get the chance. At the time I told myself that some day I would be glad I had had the chance to work with Dad. It turns out I was right.

I appreciate your stories, as my childhood growing up in a different area of the country, was nothing like them.

Thanks, Rob.

So, why don't you tell us a few stories about what your time growing up was like?

Yes, it's a regional thing. They don't have bricks and bricklayers where Rob is from.