The A Cappella Handyman: Pieces of Work

Our two family cats are “pieces of work,” Otto, the all-white, indoor Senior Statesman, who enjoys backyard walks with Jan on a leash, and Joey, the Tuxedo Cat, severely bright and “tough guy,” who adopted us and sleeps in the garage rafters in a box marked “Christmas,” and prefers the adventures of trees and outdoor living. More importantly, these are my “pieces of work” from as early as I can remember to the present (probably serialized or at least in two parts):
Dad and Mom Bray were always great gardeners so the four Bray boys (Pete, Jim, Tom, and Mike) learned early the basics of home repair, gardening, carpentry, light plumbing, electrical and painting our redwood-exteriored home in Walnut Creek each summer during the 1950s with nearly clear log oil. “Buck an hour” was Dad’s standard rate of pay and from the perennial chore list taped to the ’fridge door, you could work weekdays after school and Saturdays if not forever. In addition I could cut and hand trim lawns for the neighbors: the Molofskys, Fishers, Palmers, and the Elliotts. Mr. Palmer was willing to pay me $1.25/hr for my well-experienced 16-year old talents and Dad asked me one Saturday when he heard the News, “And whose tools are you using?” Oh, Crap!…then he proposed my paying him the differential 25 cents per hour for gas and tool use, but it was only a lesson in business economics fortunately and soon dismissed. In addition I could make “a dollar a day” Dad said was fair pay for summer maintenance of our neighbors’ homes and yards, lawn-cutting, watering and feeding of pets when they were on vacation. $14 for two weeks! I was rich!
Starting local junior college in the fall of 1960 changed all of this as I had to become a serious student and not just a college-prep, hot rod building kid at Las Lomas High School as well as having taken every shop class they offered there: Mechanical Drawing I & II, Crafts, Wood and Metal Shops I & II. Diablo Valley College was still called East Contra Costa Junior College District and lower Division Engineering had me doing serious homework! Calculus (four semesters) an an equal amount of chemistry! “The integral from here to there as t goes from this to that.” What? I bailed the first semester and had to restart the series in the Fall of 1961. Remedial Math with pleasant Mr. Skeen in the Spring of ’61 prepared me well for the next 4 semesters of Calculus with Mr. Wheeler (4.0 through the series!). Summer full-time employment with Aerojet General Nucleonics of San Ramon, California who wanted Detail Draftsmen to redraw their ML-1 Mobile Nuclear Reactor to Mil-Specs for the Army. $2.12/hour with a raise to $2.14/hour in the summer of ’62! BIG Money!
The summer of ’63 with John Burton Machine Corporation of Concord drawing Cellubander parts, food processing, seal-application equipment, their turn-screw devices accelerated and spaced bottles at uniform rates and positions for application of top seals…Holy-Moly, this was SO FAR from cutting lawns, AND at $2.35/hour!….Meanstwhile I was working semesters at DVC as Student Chemistry and Physics Lab assistant for Instructors Wendell Taylor and Floyd Swensson. The future looked promising and I was soon UCBerkeley bound as a transfer student transferring in as a Junior with an AA degree besides for my extra time at DVC applied to classes in the Humanities, and Communication, Oh where Oh where would these lead? (To be continued)

Peter Bray lives in Benicia with his wife Janice Jaffe-Bray
and Pieces of Work Otto and Joey and has written
this column since 2008.