When I was discharged from the army in 1946, I returned to work at the shipyard where I had been when I was drafted. It was very apparent that this was not going to be a permanent situation. I was laid off.

I was working putting new steps on the back porch of the duplex in which we lived. It belonged to my dad. The man who lived in the house behind us said I should go to work as a carpenter. I told him I had tried to get into the Carpenter Union as an apprentice, but I was too old for them. He said he would help me get in as a journeyman carpenter. He and a friend of mine perjured themselves by saying I was an experienced carpenter. Voila, I was a carpenter.

I had a number of very short term jobs, like a couple of days each. I wasn’t the greatest journeyman.

I did manage to stay on a few. I remember that one time I was cutting rafters for a hip roof and they fit. I was pretty proud of the fact that I was the only one on the job who could do this fairly complicated job. There were quite a few rafters lying on the ground that someone else had tried to cut. This was long before the advent of ready-made roof members.

When I had worked for about six months as a carpenter, I decided to build our own home. I had bought about six acres of land before I was drafted into the army. I decided to build on a corner lot. The land was a bowl shape that was open to the south. Being a bowl shape it was lower than the adjacent road.

My brother-in-law and I started to lay the footings for the foundation. An obviously English gentleman saw us and called down, “I say, what are you doing down there”? I replied that we were building a home. He next said, “You mean a dwelling”? To him we were building in a hole.

We proceeded to build a six room home with a full basement with a second bath in the basement. To the best of my knowledge that foundation has never leaked a drop. The only mishap we had in the building was when we were pouring the concrete one small section of the form broke loose. We had a small section of concrete next to the basement fireplace that was bulged out. A bookcase became a magazine rack.

The upstairs bathroom had a large panel of glass blocks for a window. Glass blocks were quite new and I thought they were good for privacy. Our neighbor told me that it wasn’t really so. He and his wife came down to see us while my wife was taking a bath. It wasn’t a very clear picture, but it was very evident that it was a naked pink body in there. I had to remove the glass blocks and have them sandblasted. This solved our problem of the peep show.

We lived in that house for about seven years. We then moved into the second house that I built. By this time I had decided that building was not my dish of tea. The next year I started our restaurant furniture business with which I stayed until I retired. That was a lot of other stories, many of which you have already heard.