An Obituary...of sorts

Once upon a time, I was down on my luck. I had bailed out of the English PhD program at PennState, due to a serious cash-flow problem. Being addicted to food and shelter as I was, and with a hefty monthly child support payment hanging over my head, I desperately needed gainful employment. Sadly, though, I found myself unable to get work suitable to my educational level. In short, with an MA in English, I was un-employable. At my wits – and moneys – end, I took a job painting houses. I worked for a man named Dale Peters, who owned Precision Painters in Bellefonte, PA. With no idea how well I could work, and with no references, he hired me on the spot and agreed to pay me $10.00 an hour. “If you aren’t any good,” he told me, “I can fire you tomorrow.” Blunt, but honest. That was Dale. And that was how I started perhaps the strangest period of my life with one of the most complex people I ever knew.

When Dale Peters hired me to paint houses with his company, he was actually serving time in the county jail for cocaine possession. He was allowed out of jail every day in order to run his company. His attorney had convinced the judge that Dale was a low flight risk and that there were numerous people who depended on him for their welfare. So every morning at 7:00 AM, Dale checked out of jail and spent the day running his company. Every evening at 5:00 PM, he went back to the jail and checked himself in for the night. He also had to go to drug counselling on a regular basis. All of this I was not to learn until sometime later. At the time, I just knew that I had a job that paid better than any job I had ever had. But it wasn’t an easy job.

We worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year. The only holidays we got were Thanksgiving day, Christmas day, and New Year’s day. I had to be on the job site at 7:00 AM every morning, and I worked until at least 5:00 PM every evening, sometimes later. Except for a 30 minute lunch break, I was on my feet the entire time, plugging nail holes, caulking and painting trim, cutting and rolling walls, or staining and varnishing staircases. And through it all, Dale was there riding me hard, demanding that I work faster, shouting at me if I made a mistake. Oh, he was a hard taskmaster. He moved – and talked – a mile a minute all of the time. You had to run to keep up with him. He would yell, rant, rave, throw tantrums, throw paint brushes. He fired people for arguing with him, for coming in late, for leaving early. This man was an unmitigated ass and the worst boss I had ever had. I hated the man.

And I hated painting houses. It was messy, tiring, monotonous work that left you with aching feet and paint in your beard. And the company wasn’t always the greatest either. Something that most people don’t know about the construction industry is that many of the people who work in the home construction business are either illegal immigrants or ex-convicts. It’s true. And house painting is the bottom rung of the construction ladder hierarchy. During my time in the business in Pennsylvania, absolutely everyone I worked with had either been in jail, was currently in jail, or was about to go to jail. And this included the owners of the businesses. And only a few short months before I had been hobnobbing with the cream of the academic world, with professors and authors and poets. Now, here I was with a master’s degree, painting houses, for crying out loud! Many times, after Dale had stormed away after a major rant, I would stand there looking around myself and think, “What am I doing here? I’m better than this. I can do better than this.” And I would redouble my efforts to find a job more suited to someone with an advanced degree in English. But the jobs never came, so I kept on painting.

And slowly, things began to change. I was becoming a really good painter – fast and accurate – and Dale noticed. He yelled at me less and less. He even began joking with me. Then he started talking to me about himself – something he NEVER did with any of the other guys. That was when I found out that he had been in jail when he hired me. He started putting me on bigger and bigger jobs. Soon I even had my own specialty – staircases. Whenever there was a job with a wood staircase, Dale would send me in ahead of everyone else to stain and varnish it. That way, the wood would be sealed, and dirt and stains wouldn’t seep in and damage the wood. Pretty important when you’re dealing with a $20,000 curved oak staircase. Within six months of hiring me, Dale made me one of his job bosses. It was a major increase in responsibility, with only a minor increase in pay. He handed me the keys to one of the company vans, along with a gas credit card, and placed me over a crew of other guys. Now, not only did I have to make sure that I was getting my job done quickly and professionally, but I had to make sure that the other guys on the crew were doing likewise, and that was often like herding turtles. If I had thought Dale was tough on me before my promotion, he was even harder on me afterwards.

But time went by as we flew through one house after another, interiors and exteriors, new McMansions to old Victorians. Throughout all of this time, though, I was talking to other contractors, especially the finish carpenters. I watched what they were doing, looked over their work, asked them about techniques they used. One day, when I was talking to Dale, I told him that I thought I could do finish carpentry. I’d had some experience doing wood working and carpentry in the past, and I figured I could do this. Trouble was, I didn’t have any tools. Dale asked me how much money I thought it would take to buy the necessary tools. I told him that I wasn’t sure, but I thought it would be between $3,000 and $4,000. Then he did something that completely shocked me. He pulled out his Lowes credit card and handed it to me. He told me to go buy whatever I needed. When I protested, he insisted and told me I could pay him back later. So off I went to Lowes to outfit myself with carpentry tools: chop saw, table saw, compressor, nail guns, jig saw, skill saw, drills, router, hammers, screwdrivers, door jigs, etc, etc, etc. $3,250 worth of tools. Then Dale went to one of the largest general contractors in the area and recommended that they sub-contract me to trim out houses.

Before I knew it, I was a finish carpenter, pulling down over $50,000 a year. Now, I was no longer working for Dale – I was working alongside him. I was a sub-contractor, just like him, running my own business. This meant that I not only had to nail up baseboards and window casing, but also that I was responsible for not just finishing but installing the $20,000 curved oak staircases. On top of that, I had to keep track of moneys coming in and going out, keep track of time and materiel, print and send out invoices, and so on and so forth. In 18 months, I had gone from being an out-of-work and un-employable ex-doctoral candidate to owning my own business. But I hadn’t done it on my own; it only came about because a recovering addict and ex-con with serious anger management issues was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt when I said I could do something. When Dale decided to start buying rental property, he contracted me to do the renovation work for him. Now not only was I nailing up window casings, but I was removing walls, laying linoleum, replacing bathroom fixtures. I even lived in one of Dale’s rental properties, one that he had paid me to remodel. When he expanded his business yet again and started building houses, Dale hired me to be the job boss. That meant I was responsible for making sure that all of the subcontractors were there when they were supposed to be and got their work done correctly and on time.

But all good things eventually come to an end. After years of trying, when I had all but given up, I was able to land a technical writing job with Bell & Howell in Chicago. So I loaded everything I could fit into a my old GMC Astro van and U-Haul trailer, bid Dale Peters and Pennsylvania a fond farewell, and headed off to Chi-town to start my “real life.” That was fifteen years ago. Since then, I have worked for several Fortune 500 companies in a number of states. In 2006, while living in North Dakota, I bought my first house, a crumbling 1901 bungalow that – thanks to my years spent in the construction business – I renovated into one of the prettiest houses in town. I later sold it at the height of the housing crisis, when most people couldn’t unload a house to save their lives. I only broke even, but at least I didn’t lose anything. In Massachusetts, I remodeled my second home, which I later sold for a tidy profit. Now, I’m in the middle of renovating my third home, and I still hope to be able to build a house from scratch before I get too old to swing a hammer. And for all of this, I have Dale Peters to thank. Only, I never really did.

No, I never thanked Dale for what he’d done for me. Oh, I said thank-you at the time, but I never REALLY thanked him for the transformation he caused in my life. And that began gnawing on me, just a little at first, then more and more as the years rolled on. Finally, I decided that I needed to get ahold of Dale and let him know just how much he had done for me, not just financially, but emotionally, spiritually, and physically as well. But that would never happen. I discovered to my dismay that Dale Peters died on March 25, 2006, right about the same time that I was buying my first house. No cause of death was given – only that he passed away in the hospital. I was too late. I had never properly thanked the man who had not only given me a job when no one else would, but who had trusted me with his money and his business, who had believed in me when I hardly believed in myself, and who had befriended me. Now I never could thank him. I had waited too long, and the time was past, and I was left with the bitter taste of regret.

Dale Peters was not necessarily a good man. He had a lot of faults. He had a bad temper and would fly off the handle at the drop of a hat – any hat. He could be abusive. He was a drug addict. He was an ex-convict. He was a lot of things that would make most respectable folks want to give him a wide berth. But having said that, let me also say that he was a generous man, a man who would take a chance on someone if he thought that they would work hard. I saw him give a lot of down-and-outers a chance during the time that I knew him. He never asked for references; he only asked that you work. He was the kind of man you want to have in your corner when everything goes south, and the chips are down, and you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from or how you’re going to pay the rent, and you just need a job to tie you over until you can get on your feet again. He’d not only give you that job, but if you worked hard enough and showed initiative, he’d loan you the bootstraps to pull yourself up by, and encourage you to do it, and probably pay you for it to boot. He was the embodiment of an old poem I learned as a kid:

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it ill-behooves any of us
To speak any ill of the rest of us

Dale Peters proved that the worst of us might just be the best of us. In many ways, he was a darn site better than I was. That counts for a lot to me. I hope that’s worth something wherever he is now.

Rest in peace, Dale.