Life of an Ironworker: The Collected Works of Joseph "Red" Irving

By Joe Irving

Joe Irving, the oldest living ironworker, returns after his first book to tell us stories of not just his construction days, but from his entire life. Life of an Ironworker is a collection of stories, memories, opinions and events told from the hand of a 99-year-old man, now retired and living in the Kootenays of British Columbia, Canada. Born in 1911, Joe grew up in the pioneer days in rural B.C. and then joined the Local #97, International Union of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers, Machinery Movers, Derickmen and Riggers with whom he had a wonderfully successful career. He later retired and purchased the Rainbow Pines Ranch, in the Slocan Valley, with his wife Sylvia where they lived the better part of forty years farming, ranching, and milling. Joe has travelled the world, graduated high-school at 93 years old, lent a helping hand whenever he could and read and researched his way through thousands of books. His collected works span a lifetime of 99 years and truly show the amazing character that has allowed Joe to survive in the world for the past one hundred years, and still to be alive, healthy and strong, telling those stories today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Sep 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426993817

Joe Irving

Joe Irving, a former child psychiatrist, discovered that his psychiatric training gave a unique perspective to gundog training. He used this method to great success as a professional trainer, winning the prestigious McNeil Professional Handlers' Cup. He was the author of a number of classic gundog training books.

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© Copyright 2011 JOE IRVING.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4269-9380-0 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4269-9381-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011915803

Trafford rev. 03/08/2012

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www.trafford.com

North America & international

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CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

BOOK THREE

WORK HISTORY OF JOE IRVING

SOME OF MY HISTORY OF IRONWORK

BOOK FOUR

RETIREMENT AND RAINBOW PINES

BOOK FIVE

THE SECOND NARROWS BRIDGE

HURRY UP AND DO IT WRONG

OTMER C. CARPENTER (aka High)

THE CHARACTER OF THE MEN

THE MEN THAT BUILD THE BRIDGES

BRIDGES—WHY THEY FAILED

ACCIDENTS

BETHLEHEM STEEL COMPANY

Bethlehem Pennsylvania

BOOK SIX

EPILOGUE—by Joe Irving

THE OLD PINE TREE

BOOK ONE

INTRODUCING JOE

FOREWORD

This comes as the biggest honour of my life, for my words to precede my grandfather’s in what will be his second book, published just shy of his hundredth birthday. Even though Joe and I do not actually share the same blood line, I have inherited so many great qualities from him; qualities that have shaped me as a person and influenced my beliefs in history, religion, politics, and literature. He is solely the greatest influence I have in life when it comes to health, happiness and achievements, and as I aspire to publish a book of my own one day, I truly hope that these words I have to introduce Joe’s second book are only the beginning of something great; something I learned from him.

Joe’s first book, a detailed account of his early years in the pioneer days of British Columbia followed by his ironworking years all over North America, was a true insight into the person that he currently is today. Being twenty-nine myself, I never knew Joe as ‘Red Irving’; I’ve only ever known him as Grandpa Joe (whom I’ve always compared to the character Curly, the crazy old cowboy from the movie City Slickers). Instead, I know an eighty-five-year-old man who would hay his crops in the Kooteanys in 100 deg heat, and not with a tractor, but with horses. I know a man who took the community for sleigh rides every Christmas through the rolling hills of my grandparent’s ranch; Rainbow Pines. I know a man who graduated high-school at ninety-three years of age, and with honours none-the-less. I know a man who believes in working the land, being outside, using animals and nature to survive, and who has always cared about the environment, even before we were all ‘told’ to care about the environment. I know a man who can read a book in one sitting and who can then discuss it for hours. I know a man that sets an amazing example on how to live life, and I can only hope that in the end, my life will be as complete and as successful as his.

I was given the hundreds of hand-written pages of this book, during the winter of 2010 after several years of hearing that a second book was in the works. I couldn’t convince Joe to Fed-Ex me the package (as I’m sure my ‘everything is backed up 3 times’ generation cannot fathom sending the hard copy of your life’s work via the hands of some unknown courier boy) so we waited until my parents made their holiday season trip to the Kootenays and delivered it safely back to me by hand. I then spent the rest of the winter sorting through several three-ring note books, reading ninety-nine-year-old hand writing, deciphering acronyms for companies that existed in the early 1900’s and trying to piece together the latter part of my grandfather’s life. After a couple months of typing, minor editing, some mild frustration and even more laughing out loud, I was finally ready to send the package back to Nelson. Joe spent a few weeks reviewing everything I had typed, and then we set a date for Easter 2011, where I went back to the Kootenays to review his changes and make the very serious decision with him and Granny Syl; to publish the book or not?

When I had arrived that weekend, I wasn’t sure what the outcome would be. I knew Joe was going to be somewhat disappointed with how the writing had translated to typed text. In other words, as I was typing I knew that at times he had wanted his stories to take a different turn, but he sometimes ended up repeating stories from his first book, or not being as descriptive as I knew he would have liked. I was a little worried about his reaction and didn’t want him to have put all that work into the book and be left unsatisfied.

As Easter weekend progressed, and as I spent more and more time with my grandparents and their friends living together in their assisted-living facility, I became more and more convinced that yes, this second book should be published. On Saturday night, we attended a Community Social, and as I looked around the music hall I noticed the elderly men came dressed in ties and hats and the ladies in their finest dresses and their pearls, with the men pulling out the chairs for the women and pouring their wine, and I realized that this is a generation that is slowly slipping away. And along with the amazing people, we are losing history, tradition, and old-fashioned romance. It was a room of people that had survived not only one world war, but two. People who were all grandparents, and most likely great-grandparents, people who had lost wives and husbands along the way, but who’s second marriages were celebrating fortieth anniversaries. As the evening transpired, I realized without a doubt that this is a generation that needs to be remembered.

So, Sunday morning, over a wonderful home-made breakfast, Joe, my grandmother and I agreed, that YES, a second book would be published! Joe and I discussed the potential format and style of the book, though he wanted to leave that up to me.

I took the package back home to Golden, with all of Joe’s hand-written notes and corrections, and took some time to think about how the book should ‘look’. I thought about embellishing his words, connecting the dots, omitting the repeat stories and taking Joe’s original work and turning it into a novel, but I couldn’t. When it came right down to it, I felt proud that at ninety-nine, Joe accomplished this huge feat. With hands that have rigged more steel and iron than any of us could image, with fingers that should frankly have been lost more than once, he held a pen, put it to paper and recounted countless memories and stories about his life. His mind is as sharp as most fifty year olds’, and so-what that all the stories don’t flow perfectly into one another!? The only thing that flows when you’re ninety-nine are the days, one into the next. Words onto paper… well that’s another story. There are only a handful of people in the world who end up publishing books and becoming authors and I felt that Joe compares to every one of them, and that his words are his, that they are important and should be read just as he wrote them. I have therefore arranged his stories and memories into what this book has become; The Collected Works of Joseph ‘Red’ Irving, and sincerely hope that my grandfather is as proud of the end result, as I am.

Jesus H. Christ! Those god-damned sons of bitches horses got out of that bastard fence again! That was my grandfather, from the time I was a baby to two weeks ago when he dropped his book on the floor and had to bend down to pick it up (which I can imagine at ninety-nine is just as much work as rounding up a few horses when he was seventy-five). He is the epitome of fifty years old is the new forty, but with him it goes more like one hundred is the new eighty. He is the oldest surviving Ironworker alive today and continues to be a prominent figure in the British Columbian Kootenays and the Ironworking History. He was a son and a brother; he remains a father, a husband, a grandfather and a great-grandfather. He was an ironworker, a crew member, a foreman and to this very day, a great friend. He is a musician, a teacher, a rancher, a historian and above all, an author. And no matter his age, whether when he was seventy-five or ninety, 100 or older, his memory will live on through his story telling and now his books, so that people may learn from him for generations to come.

-Kristen Ringheim

INTRODUCTION

Joe Irving became known to me during 1935 when he had earned a reputation among the Cominco Mining & Smelter Construction (CM&S) crews as a Steel Gang member of exceptional agility on the high red iron. In 1949 we met personally when we were both employed on the same job by CM&S in Kimberley. Two years later I found myself working for Dominion Bridge Co under Joe’s supervision on the Rock Creek Canyon Bridge, and I continued to work under Joe for most of the following eight years.

Joe is the most safety conscious foreman under whom I have ever worked—safe yet efficient. He possessed that ideal mix of safety, efficiency and common sense, so lacking in many foreman; some being so safe that the job is slowed to a crawl; others being so ‘efficient’ that accidents are prevalent (more haste—less speed). But Joe exercised that natural ideal mix in his instruction to the crew, often interpreted with a bit of humour or the odd joke.

Joe will attain 100 years of age this fall (2011), and he still retains all four limbs and all his fingers and toes; a remarkable attribute for a man who has spent his entire life in an industry notorious for bodily injury and deaths. Uncommonly for a foreman, Joe is basically a kind-hearted sort of person. I have yet to meet anyone who has worked under Joe, who has an unkind word for him. But this is not to say that he does not know how to use his dukes, as anyone who has ever picked a fight with him knows.

As a man of integrity and brilliant common sense, Joseph Irving is not only a man of his word, but also a man so well informed and masterful in his work that he is exceptionally well qualified to compose this—his latest effort to bring to the public eye, not only so many interesting stories of the ironworking trade, but also a wealth of little-known truths pertaining to the sum.

Joe is a man’s man, in a man’s world and will forever remain a true and great friend of mine. I wish him all the best with his second novel; Life of an Ironworker.

-John L. Jack Townsend

Former member of Local #97, International Union of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers, Machinery Movers, Derickmen and Riggers. Born October, 1914.

BOOK TWO

THE EARLY YEARS

CHAPTER ONE

My dad and mother met at the railway station in Spokane, Washington. Dad was on his way to Rossland, B.C. He was very interested in the mining business, especially the work of prospecting. When they met, mother told dad that she was also on her way to Rossland, to see a mining town in the mountains. She had been born and raised on the American Prairie Country, known as the Corn Belt. Her folks had settled in Iowa, but had moved to Omaha, Nebraska, when she was very young. Her father had opened up a blacksmith shop in Omaha that was a very good business in those days. (Note: He also ran a livery business, with teams he hired for different kinds of work.) Well mother wanted to travel and see the west so her father gave her money for travelling, and so she was in Spokane where she met dad. Well, in 1898, they travelled to Rossland together on the Red Mountain Railway. Mother was a very good looking girl, she had long black hair and dark brown eyes. Dad was also a very handsome man and the love bug must have bitten them, because it was not long until they were married. They settled down in Rossland and on May 4th, 1900, they had a beautiful daughter. They named her Violet Margaret. This was a very historic day in the Kootenay Country as it was the day that the town of Sandon burned down. Sandon and Rossland were the two main mining towns in the West Kootenays, but there were quite a few other towns where mining was the main source of employment.

Well time went on and the mines were developing, and some mines were very rich. The miners were working ten hour shifts, but they wanted an eight hour day for the same wages. The mine owners were dead against this so the Miners Union called for a strike (which they eventually won with the help of the B.C. Legislature in Victoria). Dad was not working in the mines so dad and mother went back to Spokane where dad went to work as a