My father-in-law, may he rest in peace, was a man who kept his own counsel, wise but quiet, never one to impose his views on others even as I was pretty stubborn about resisting the one piece of career advice he consistently offered.
For probably 30 of the 40 years I knew him, Mr. G pushed me toward the sprinkler fitters’ union. We were South Siders, see, and he knew a guy who knew a guy, and an apprenticeship was available when I finished high school.
If he was going to be stuck with me as a future son-in-law, he wanted his eldest daughter taken care of. So the offer stood through college, and through some years of newspapering all over the country.
The nomadic nature of the work I’d chosen took us to increasingly distant points west, depriving Mr. and Mrs. G of seeing two of their grandchildren grow up. And it seemed a crazy way to make a living to members of the post-Depression working-class generation who valued a union card or a civil service job as lifetime security, “something to fall back on,” certainly more stable and promising than this journalism deal.
My people felt the same way. Back when I was covering baseball, a Giants trip to Chicago once coincided with a family wedding. The Cubs and Giants took care of their business Saturday afternoon, leaving the evening free for the reception. To relatives surprised to see me, I explained that I was in town on business.
“I thought you were in the newspaper business.”
“I am. I cover the Giants, and they’re here playing the Cubs.”
“They pay you to go to games?”
They did. And it beat heavy lifting, as Red Smith famously observed.
I thought I had crossed a threshold of sorts in 1985, when Miami played the 49ers in Super Bowl XIX, in our backyard at Stanford Stadium, near San Francisco. The in-laws were out for their annual respite from Chicago’s winter, and as sports editor of the “host” San Francisco Chronicle, I managed to score them tickets to the chi-chi Commissioner’s Party and one for Mr. G to the game itself. This, I hoped, would convince them there was some promise to this journalism thing, that their daughter and the grandkids might be in decent hands after all.
They weren’t back in Chicago a week when a call came alerting me to the patrolman’s exam scheduled later that month, and a sprinkler fitters’ apprentice class convening in the spring.
Something to fall back on.
I probably laughed about it at the time. But now I’m seeing talented, hard-working friends and former colleagues who have had their newspaper careers ripped away from them, and I’m wondering whether Mr. G was right all along.
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So I went to see the sprinkler fitters.
“We can’t turn you down on basis of age,” John Zubricks, business manager of Sprinkler Fitters Local 281, assured me when I asked about apprenticeships on a visit to his Alsip office.
I am the world’s unhandiest man, and even a lifelong aversion to tools doesn’t disqualify me.
“There are people in this union who aren’t good with tools and it didn’t stop them,” Zubricks allowed with a laugh.
Turning serious, he noted that this is hardly an optimal time to seek a career in the trades. Only about 1,000 of Local 281’s nearly 1,400 members are working, and many of those 1,000 are “underemployed,” picking up a shift or two a week when and where they can.
“We haven’t started an apprentice class since November of 2007, and we won’t be starting one this year,” Zubricks said. “There’s just not a lot of construction going on, particularly in the housing industry, and housing drives so much of it. If you’re building houses, you’re building schools and malls and stores and a lot of supporting structures. If you’re not …
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to full employment. It might be years.”
So even Mr. G’s cherished view of security is up in the air in these uncertain times.
But we live with the choices we make, and I’m OK with mine. I think Mr. G and the rest of “my people” would be too. I wish they were around to judge for themselves.
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