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| Words and photo by F LoBuono |
When I was a young boy of 11 or 12, I remember watching a movie that had a great impact on me then and continues to do so to this very day. The strange thing about it is that despite its enormous influence, I don’t remember the film’s title or who the main actors were. But I do recall that it was shot in black and white and the plot involved a race against time to rescue minors who were trapped inside a collapsed tunnel.
One scene had a particular impact on me that I have never forgotten. In
an effort to save the tapped men, the owners of the mine bring in an
engineering specialist to devise a plan to get to the men. He considers it too
dangerous to use heavy earth-moving equipment. So, instead, they must dig by
hand. He puts out a call for volunteers to help with the digging, and he makes
it clear that only “men accustomed to jobs of a hard physical nature”, i.e. working
men, need show up. And the foreman intends to verify this by asking each
man who answers the call to show him the palm of their hands. If they were gnarly
and calloused, he knew they were right for the job. Those with “soft hands”
would be immediately rejected.
After clearing a few men to begin digging, another man steps up to show
his palms. When the foreman sees that they lack the signs of having done any heavy
work, he starts to raise his voice to remind the man that he said, “working men
only!” But when the foreman looks up to see whom he is berating, he notices
that the man is a priest. Realizing that the priest only came to help, he
begins to apologize and thanks him for trying but also saying that the priest wouldn’t
last but a few hours under those conditions.
Even at such a young age, that scene moved me deeply. It reached me from several
perspectives that I’ve taken with me my entire life. As represented by the
priest, it showed me that caring for our neighbors is THE key to a healthy
society. Always be willing to help. But perhaps most importantly, it taught me
the real value of working people, i.e., those among us who use their hands in
the most physical sense to earn a living for themselves and their families
while providing essential services to all of us. These include maids, maintenance
workers, miners, steal workers, brick layers, mechanics, day laborers, farmers,
ranchers, and a whole host of others who do the tasks that make ALL our lives
livable.
With that in mind, one summer while I was still in college, I decided to
take a job as a laborer at a large construction site in Tenafly, NJ. Perhaps as
an honor student at Rutgers University, I should have sought out something more
“academic.” One of my challenges was that I have a high IQ. I always did well
in school and with that came certain expectations that weren’t necessarily MINE.
It may have made my career path less circuitous if I had stayed in my lane.
But that is not my way.
Well, I took the job mainly because I wanted to REALY know what it was
like to be a “working man,” i.e. someone who could make a living by taking on a
physical, tough job. On the superficial side, I figured I’d get a great tan by
working outside and, since I was playing college football, I could keep myself
in great shape. I may have been forward-thinking, but I was still just 20
years old!
My task was to help mix the mortar that would be used in lying the
massive number of bricks that would comprise most of this office building. Then
I would have to carry that mortar and those bricks to the masons who would then
lay them in place, brick by brick, floor by floor. Eventually there would be 3
stories of brick and mortar that would be used to create that building. You can
imagine how difficult it could be to carry a rack of 8-10 bricks up three
flights of scaffolding – under a blazing summer sun. But I can proudly say that
I had a hand (literally) in virtually all of it. On the rare occasion my partner
Amanda and I drive past, I point to it and say, “I helped make that!” Besides, I got a great tan, was in fantastic
shape, AND had calloused palms!
I suppose that the point from the beginning was to prove to myself that I
could do this type of work if I had too. And, more importantly, to emphasize
that hard, physical work has value – real value. This is not to denigrate those
who work with their minds. No, not at all. It’s rather to acknowledge that on this
day, the 250th Anniversary of our Nation’s founding, THESE are the
people who have literally built America. And we stand together, hand-in-hand,
rough or smooth and say We are Americans.
