In 1984, I headed to California to work. There was no work to be had in BC and I had knocked on all the doors in town that I could think of. At that time lots of Canadian construction workers and many more from Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona were moving to the San Francisco Bay area where things were booming. The high tech boom was on its way and Silicon Valley was replacing the citrus orchards.
I cleared into the Redwood City local of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America and was put to work right away. The trades in California were all unionized so it didn't matter if you were working on tract housing or high rise buildings you were making the same wage. At that time in BC, a unionized carpenter was making $10.00 per hour while in California the wage was $22.80 and the Canadian buck was at 70 cents US. I was clearing, after taxes, $800.00 per week. It would be another decade before I made that kind of money in Canada.
I was fortunate that when I was in high school, I had gotten a job with Great Northern Railway, an American company. All of us Canadians had to get an American Social Security number. As a result, even though I was neither a resident nor had a "Green Card", I did have a legitimate SS number and when the time came I just paid my taxes like any citizen. Many years later, when I became a pensioner, the two years that I paid taxes in the US resulted in a small American pension as well.
My first job in California was on a large tract housing site right on San Francisco Bay. I was doing finishing work inside. Canadian carpenters do the whole job, from foundations to finishing. In the US, everybody specializes. Foundation guys just work on foundations, framers just frame up, and finishing carpenters just work inside.
That job finished up in a couple of months and I was then sent to work for a company that owned the premises of the world headquarters for Visa. This was a series of four, three storey buildings of approximately 20,000 square feet on a floor, located oddly enough in Cañada, California. There was always a floor empty in these buildings so a floor at a time would be emptied, completely redone and the people from the next floor would be moved in. It would take four or five years to do all the floors and then it would be time to modernize again and Visa has lots of money, right? The property owner had a ten-story office tower nearby which had a completely restored Studebaker carriage in the lobby. My boss was a Swede-Finn and after a short while, I found myself in charge of a crew of three labourers and two carpenters. In California, they only have a morning coffee break that is paid for but nothing in the afternoon when you probably need it the most. So I just held an afternoon coffee break much to the consternation at first of the men. They thought they would be fired. But it all went well. I left that job when I returned home for Christmas.
I had a few jobs on the side since workers were in such short supply and $20 cash was the going rate. I was looking for another place to stay as the next job was building a new Neiman Marcus store in Palo Alto and it was a long commute from Pacifica. An old family friend, Ola Jallinoja, had a business installing hardwood floors and he had just done the floors in a 1920s mansion on University Boulevard in Palo Alto. The Millers were looking for a carpenter to help with the rebuild and the place had a garage that had been turned into an apartment. That was perfect. I exchanged work for rent and moved in. I had traded my BC pickup for a Volvo station wagon so I fit right in.
The crew at the Neiman Marcus site were all from the Tri-Cities area of Washington State. They needed someone who could hang metal door frames and heavy wooden doors. Apparently they were having a hard time finding someone who could hang a door straight in a reasonable amount of time. I made a large square from a sheet of plywood and already had a 4' magnetic level so I was hanging door frames every half hour. I was used to using a cordless drill which these guys hadn't really worked with but it wasn't long before the supervisor went out and bought a bunch when he saw how convenient they were. Another tool they hadn't seen was a two-wheeled door dolly. Reijo put me onto that and I built one as soon as I knew that I was going to hang several hundred doors. After that, I was the door expert and hung all the frames, doors and installed all the door hardware in the building. I was sent by the company for part of a week to the California headquarters of IBM to install combination door lock hardware on some of their more secure offices. It was kind of a kick as all these locks were prominently marked on the underside "Made in Canada".
When the store was nearing completion, the same company transferred me to a site at Moffat Field. This was a US Navy airfield that had housed some dirigibles in a pair of hangars that were each eight acres in size and two hundred feet high. They were in fact so high that during airshows hot-air balloon rides were given inside the hangars. The air field was home to a fleet of Orion submarine detecting aircraft and every fifteen or twenty minutes one would land as another took off. Also based there were the U2 spy aircraft. This was prior to intelligence gathering by satellite and the U2 plane would cruise at an altitude of 60,000 feet to do what it did. It was a treat to watch them take off as they had an immense wing span and they would just get high enough off the runway to turn the nose straight up and power right out of sight.
Our work site was at the adjoining Ames Space Centre. We were building an immense vacuum chamber in which satellites could be tested. This was a top secret facility at the time and only citizens were supposed to be working there. Nobody asked if I was or I wasn't so I just kept on working. The doors to the labs weighed 400 pounds each because they were filled with gravel to discourage eavesdropping. The whole facility had two immense wind tunnels that were initially used to test aircraft aerodynamics but it became a part of NASA and was used for rocket research. I left that job when I went home for a visit.
The last job that I had in California in 1985, before I returned home for good, was building a recreation complex for Hensel-Phelps Corporation, the second largest construction firm in the US. The rec complex was in Mountainview. This was in the very centre of Silicon Valley and high tech businesses were springing up on all sides. The area had all been mixed market farms and citrus orchards until the latest boom. Mountainview was adjacent to Palo Alto and Stanford University; close to Stanford were the headquarters for Hewlett Packard; Intel was in nearby Santa Clara; Apple was in Cupertino. These towns are all adjoining and were the hot bed of high tech activity in the mid 1980s. Definitely an exciting place to live and work at that time.
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