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“There’s a certain amount of pride — I don’t care how little you did. You drive down the road and you say, ‘I worked on this road.’ If there’s a bridge, you say, ‘I worked on this bridge’ … . Maybe it don’t mean anything to anybody else, but there’s a certain pride knowing you did your bit.”
– Hub Dillard, construction worker, from “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” by Studs Terkel
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That summer, my entry-level task at Kol Manufacturing in St. Paul was, no surprise, sweeping the metal pressing floor. Sweeping metal shavings all day mixed with sticky, pungent oil, grease and sawdust is harder than you think. What I really aspired to was manning a hydraulic brake press bending metal.
After two or three weeks of admirable sweeping, Fred the foreman promoted me to tube-bending on what the heavy brake presser operators called “the dinky.” That was OK with me. It meant I could talk shop with the machine operators at break time.
At first, I’d chime in about my “^*#@ sticky hand lever” or some other made-up complaint, but my wannabe talk fell flat and I was ignored.