Al was a good man and always tried to keep me busy even when there was no work. I can remember him giving me busy work just so I wouldn’t miss a paycheck. I was willing to do anything he asked, even to pulling nails out of used lumber and stacking it.
I can remember him inviting both Sandy and me over for a big waffle breakfast Sunday morning and them he would ask me to go out with him to hang a screen door. He had emphysema quite badly so I was needed to actually do the work, while he would stand there and tell me what to do. The best part was that I got paid for four hours when in fact it probably only took two and both Sandy and I got a lovely brunch out of it as well.
Al was old school and very honest in his dealings with his men and the people he worked for. He was very fussy and wanted everything done properly and correctly. As I had never done construction work before Al was quick to notice my incompetence with a hammer. I remember one day when I was doing my best to pound in a nail, he came over and grabbed the hammer from my hand saying, “Gimme that hammer, I’ll show you how to use it, you swing just like a woman.” “Give it to me.” He then took a nail from his pouch and proceeded to demonstrate the correct technique, bending the nail over on his first swing. With that he shouts, “These cheap Japanese nails.” And then he walks away.
The work was varied but consisted mostly of small jobs such as, renovations, and carports.
Besides me, there were only two other guys who worked for Al on a regular basis; both however had difficulty controlling the bottle. Jim was very good at finishing concrete but his home life was mostly a shambles. Jim never let it interfere with his work even though he showed up at work once with his face so scratched that you would have thought he had been attacked by a mountain lion. It seems that even though he was married he had gotten into a fight with some woman in a bar and she had taken exception to whatever was on his mind at the time.
Charles on the other hand had been laid off several times as he was caught drinking on the job, and because of that, I was able to later take over his position as truck driver.
It was Charles job to drive the old Diamond T work truck, which I then inherited. It was a stick shift without synchromesh gears and boy was it a challenge to shift.
I never learned to shift gears without grinding them, as I left before I had mastered the technique for a job bucking trees for a friend of my dads, named George Egolf. George was a salmon fisherman who had a falling contract with GMG Logging in the off-season. So soon it was off to the rain forests of the central BC coast, and would you believe it, living on a floating logging camp in Boswell Inlet.
In a way I was sad to leave as Al Bolin was a positive part of that period of my life and I appreciated his support and kindness to me, a penniless student and to my wife Sandy. I often think of Al who died shortly thereafter of his emphysema, and of his good wife Hattie, who befriended Sandy by having made her wedding dress.
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