High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (25 page)

It was Agnes Walsh who delivered Joe Lewis on July 4, 1945, in an upstairs bedroom of a small white saltbox, just down the street from the house where Joe’s mother lives today. At the time of Joe’s birth, his mother, Bride, was a pretty young woman, barely 20. His father, Moses, was a 28-year-old ironworker.

Joe began his education in a one-room schoolhouse on the Pinch. Older boys attended Master Keating’s Academy near the church, while older girls attended the convent school. Discipline was strict and harsh, the slightest infraction met by a sound strapping. Greater infractions were handled by the priest, Father Casey, the voice of patriarchal certitude in a place where adult men were scarce.

For all the punishment and privation, life was hardly dour. On the contrary, people who grew up in Conception Harbour remember it as an idyllic place. Children were free to wander as they pleased, to fish and swim and climb trees in search of robins’ eggs. In August, the annual garden party drew people from all over the head of the bay to the church lawn. Winters were magnificently cold and snowy and brought different excitements. There was skating on Healy’s Pond and sledding down Lewis’s hill or over the other side of the Pinch into Colliers. At Christmas, gifts were rare but fathers came home and pigs were slaughtered, so for once there was meat instead of tiresome fish.

Joe Lewis, like most of the children in town, did not see much of his father. Even when Moses Lewis was home from ironworking he spent most of his time cutting firewood for the long winter. Two
hundred years of human habitation had stripped the shore clean of trees, so Moses and the other men woke before dawn and rode horseback inland for several hours to the forest. By the time they cut the wood and hauled it back home, the December sky was well past dark.

But the moments Joe spent with his father he would not forget, for Moses Lewis—Mose, everybody called him—was one to leave an indelible impression. He was a high-spirited, fun-loving man, “always jolly and laughing, steady-go,” as Joe recalls. “And everybody that knew him, they’d say, ‘Oh, your father, he was something else, he was some fellow to be around.’”

One of Mose’s friends had a car, among the first in town, and Joe remembers how as a small boy he’d squeeze into the rumble seat in back with his father and they’d drive out to Bacon’s Cove, where his father was born, speeding along the church road on the high bluff above the sea, laughing and singing. There was always singing when Mose Lewis was around. He loved to sing, and was much admired for his voice. One ballad Joe recalls his father singing, called “Babe in the Woods,” told the story of a mother searching for her lost children. It was 46 verses long and took over half an hour to complete. His father knew every word.

Both of Joe’s parents were gifted musicians, so it was no surprise that their children proved to be quick studies. Moses taught Joe, the eldest of the ten children, how to play the fiddle. He started him on a simple jig, “Maple Sugar.” Joe picked it up effortlessly and he, in turn, helped the younger ones learn. On Saturday evenings, Mose would chug up the hill to Doyle’s tavern and return home with a dozen friends, men and women, and they would gather in the kitchen around a pot of soup and sing. Much of the singing was a cappella, but when the adults wanted instrumental accompaniment, they turned to Joe and his siblings. The children would take turns playing fiddle or accordion, and afterward one of the men would say, “Come here, little fellow, ’tills I give ya some money,” and hand Joe or one of the others a coin. Joe loved music, and he liked the idea
of making money from music. He thought that instead of becoming an ironworker, like his father, perhaps he’d be a musician when he grew up.

On a summer day in 1958, Joe and two friends walked out to the great blueberry patch at the Cat Hill Gullies, about seven miles inland from the sea. Joe, now 13, had recently become interested in girls, and he and his friends had taken to hanging out in the shadows of the big stone tolt that jutted up along the road between Avondale and Conception Harbour. Teenagers would congregate and stroll along the lane under the tolt, flirting and teasing. Joe and his friends had set their sights on a few pretty Avondale girls they’d met under the tolt. When the boys caught wind of the girls’ plan to go blueberry picking in the Cat Hill Gullies, a cluster of ponds and thickets, they conspired to try a little blueberry picking themselves.

“Oh, jeez, they had big buckets already full with a few gallons by the time we got there,” recalls Joe 43 years later. “We only had little cans, little bean cans, probably not even a pint. We were just going to chase ’em, that’s all. We started chatting and following them around in the berries. Well, I guess they knew what we were about, and told us to go on back home. ‘Go on and get a bucket,’ they said, ‘never mind your bean cans.’ Before we goes, though, I spoke to her. I don’t remember what I said. Probably something foolish.” The girl to whom he uttered his foolish words had auburn hair and freckles, and her name was Beverly Moore.

Joe wasn’t sure he was in love—he was just a kid, after all—but he would never regret that walk to the blueberry patch at Cat Hill Gullies. He had his sweetheart, he had his music, and for the next two years, he was as contented as a boy could be.

Joe was visiting his friend Frankie Mahoney’s house on a June afternoon in 1961, sitting on the couch and watching the Mahoneys’ new television, one of the first in town, when the front door opened and
the priest walked in. Not Father Casey, who was on vacation, but his stand-in, young Father Hearn. “Joe, I got bad news for you, son,” blurted out the nervous priest. “Your father has died.” Joe did not hear any more. He got to his feet and ran out through the Mahoneys’ front door onto the street. He ran all the way home, tears streaming from his face, then ran up the stairs into his room—the room he shared with three of his brothers—and cried without pause for two days.

Joe’s father had been working up north in Labrador on a steel-enforced dam near Churchill Falls. A poorly moored derrick toppled and fell onto him, killing him instantly. He was 43 years old. His widow, Bride, was 35. The 10 children ranged from a baby girl of 8 months to Joe, at 15.

“Oh, man, it was something. I think music is what kept us together through that,” Joe recalls. “There’s something about music, when you’re playing it, your mind thinks of nothin’ else. It just goes into the music. We all got together in the kitchen, and we played and played, until my mother begged us to stop.”

There wasn’t much time for grieving. Joe, as eldest, was the man of the family now. Money would come later from the union and from a settlement with the steel company, but even then it would be hard going for a family of 11. So a few months after his father died, Joe boarded a plane and flew to Labrador City to find a job at the iron ore mines. A man who knew Joe’s father hired him to clean the miner’s bunkhouse. Joe did that for a few months, got lonely and went home, then returned to Labrador. The spring he was sixteen he signed on for the seal hunt—still active in the 1960s—but found he had no heart for the brutal work. “I let ’em go,” says Joe. “I didn’t want to kill ’em. They were too cute to kill, like little puppy dogs.”

While Joe was shuttling back and forth to Labrador, Beverly Moore had moved to New York, where her father was an ironworker. There was nothing in Conception Harbour for Joe now. It was time to make a move and earn real money. So he got on a bus
and traveled 1,300 miles west to Toronto. He kicked around at a few jobs there, none of which paid well or gave much satisfaction. All along Joe knew what he wanted to do. It was the last thing on earth he should have wanted to do, but he wanted to do it anyway. One evening he sat down and wrote a letter to his mother telling her that he’d made up his mind: he was going into ironwork. She wrote back at once. You will do no such thing, she instructed him. Your father was an ironworker. Don’t you know he got killed? Don’t you know the danger? You’ll probably end up the same way he did.

Joe read the letter through a few times, and then wrote his response. It was already decided, he told his mother. The money was good, and they needed it. He would be all right. He would take good care of himself.

He neglected to tell her how afraid he was. He knew very well the dangers of the job, and was none too fond of heights, either. Yet there was something about it that drew him, something other than the money. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a rush is what it is. It’s like driving fast. You know there’s danger there, but you push yourself to see if you can do it. People say you’re crazy, and maybe you are in a way.”

He was lonely one evening in Toronto and picked up the phone, but instead of calling home to his family, he dialed a number he’d been holding onto for a while. It was a Brooklyn number. Beverly Moore picked up the phone. Joe hadn’t seen her for a couple of years and he didn’t know what made him call her now, but they spoke for a long while, and by the time they hung up, she’d promised to come up to Toronto to see him. A few months later, in the fall of 1965, they were married in a small church downtown. Joe was 21 years old. Beverly was 20.

Joe still remembers the first time he drove into New York. It was the late 1960s and there was a strike on in Toronto, and Joe and a friend named Patrick Grace boomed south in Patrick Grace’s brand new
bright yellow Plymouth Road Runner. They drove straight into Manhattan. Patrick Grace was afraid for his car, that it would get scratched or dented or stolen in the mayhem of the city. Joe, as he looked up at the buildings, had other concerns on his mind. “Holy shit, man, I hope we don’t get on one of
those
jobs, way up in the sky,” he thought to himself. They drove down to the Local 40 shape hall. Patrick Grace told the business agent he wanted to go connecting. “Well, I ain’t goin’ connecting on
them,”
announced Joe. So Patrick went connecting, and Joe went out on tagline with a gang of Indians. A few weeks later, Patrick Grace got caught in the drift of a column and seriously injured his leg. He returned to Toronto to recuperate, dropped out of ironwork, and Joe never saw him again.

Joe soon got over his initial trepidation. He started connecting and found he loved it. Beverly came down to join him in New York, and they moved into an apartment next to her parents’ home in Park Slope, over an ironworkers’ bar called the High Spot. Newfoundlanders were all over Brooklyn in those days, at Snitty’s and Tyson’s, at the shortlived Newfoundlanders Club on 69th Street in Bay Ridge, at church on Sundays. Most of the Newfoundlanders came from the head of Conception Bay, but ironwork had spread to other pockets on the Avalon Peninsula. The Hartley brothers, for instance, came from Placentia Bay, on the southern shore of the peninsula. They settled in a small Newfie outport in Lindenhurst, Long Island. (The director Hal Hartley, son of a Newfoundlander ironworker, later used this neighborhood as a backdrop in several films.) Newfoundlanders were well represented in the union, too, constituting about a quarter of Local 40’s membership and holding much of its political power. They ran the union as they had been running it since 1937, when Jim Cole, a Colliers man, was voted in as president. Jim Cole was succeeded by Ray Corbett, whose family came from Harbor Main, and Ray Corbett would soon be succeeded by Ray Mullet of Conception Harbour, who would eventually be succeeded, in the 1990s, by Jack Doyle of Avondale.

One afternoon, on a skyscraper job on State Street, Joe saw an ironworker die for the first time. The victim was a fellow Newfoundlander named Bobby Burke. Joe glimpsed him plummeting off the edge of the 44th floor. “It looked to me like a bag of garbage. That’s what I thought it was. I said, ‘Someone’s thrown a bag of garbage off the side of the building, they shouldn’t have done that.’ When we went down, they called out the name of everyone there, ’cause they didn’t know who it was. There was nothing there, just—I don’t know what it was. Just his boots. Some clothes. And a little soap stone that must have fallen out of his pocket, a little white spot.” It was difficult to go back after something like that; you’d feel sick to your stomach for a few days. But then the sickness would pass and work, and life, would resume.

Most of Joe’s memories from back then are good ones. It was wonderful to be young and strong and building skyscrapers in the grandest city on earth. The days were exciting and interesting, and there was always beer or something stronger around to lend a festive atmosphere to the proceedings. All the drinking was foolish, in retrospect, but at the time it made you feel invulnerable, like you could dance over the steel—hell, you were a hot shit Newfoundlander ironworker—and no one, not even a hot-wrench Indian, could touch you.

Ironworkers still had a foot in their antic past in those days. Riding the load was by now strictly forbidden, a firing offense, but men still did it when they thought they could get away with it. Joe remembers going to a bar for lunch one afternoon with a fellow ironworker who was already so drunk the bartender refused to serve him. The ironworker threw a fit, then tossed a glass into the mirror behind the bar, shattering both the glass and the mirror. As the bartender called the police, the ironworker dashed out of the bar and jumped onto a load of steel that happened, at that very moment, to be rising off the back of a truck across the street. He ducked down and rode the steel up to the top floor, where he hid until the police had come and gone.

New York was a town of extraordinary events. There was that morning on the East Side, for instance, when a 7-ton derrick lifting a 10-ton load of steel broke loose from the guy wires holding it atop a building and all 17 tons of steel plunged 18 stories onto the street in the middle of rush hour. The falling steel demolished the flatbed truck below and turnbuckles smashed through a restaurant window across the street, but, miraculously, nobody was seriously injured. And then, moments later, another miracle: a geyser of water burst from a broken water main under the street and shot a 100-foot spout into the sky. As Joe remembers the story—he was not there himself to confirm it—hundreds of tiny fish came raining out of the geyser and landed flopping on the streets of New York. Real live fish.