Waterboys Have Their Troubles, Too
(Other uses for water buckets)
Screen 1 of 4While I was still in elementary school, I frequently worked as a waterboy on construction jobs during the summer and occasionally on weekends and holidays.
In the early 1920's, waterboys in Kentucky were usually paid about fifteen cents an hour and were expected, as were the common laborers and skilled workmen, to work ten hours each day, five days a week. When construction would continue on Saturdays, we would work until noon on that sixth day. This fifty or fifty-five hour workweek was long and not easy for anyone. Even waterboys had their troubles.
My job consisted of filling the large water bucket from a nearby hydrant, adding the ice, and then carrying the cold water to all the workmen on the job. When the construction involved a building with several stories, the waterboy, as well as the laborers, used steps, sloping ramps, or ladders to get to the upper floors. In those days, elevators were rarely available.
The ice used for this purpose by the waterboy was generally kept in a large, wooden ice box, usually above five or six feet long, three feet wide, and two or three feet deep. The walls and tops of these boxes were thick and very heavy, and they were always kept in some protected place away from the sun, under outside stairs or makeshift sheds, in order to prevent the ice from melting too rapidly. The top was usually hinged at one end and because of its extremely heavy weight had to be counterbalanced with a cement block or a large piece of metal attached to the end of a large hemp rope which was in turn run through a strong overhead pulley and then tied to the metal handle of the top. With this workable arrangement, even small boys like me could open and close the box without too much trouble. When not supported, this heavy top would quickly close to a snug and tight fit, just by the pull of gravity. When waterboys needed to keep the box open for a few minutes in order to get more ice, they could attach the handle to a hook close to the pulley above or prop the top up with a stick.
It should be obvious to the reader that such ice boxes and our method of using them at that time could not meet safety standards developed and enforced in later years, but still laborers and waterboys of the 1920's worked and somehow survived under these conditions, dangerous as they were.
The ice boxes on construction sites were filled from ice trucks once or twice each week, depending on the season and the number of workers to be served. The ice thus delivered was in large blocks weighing three hundred pounds each. Most of the boxes I knew about would each hold two of these blocks.
On one particular job--the major renovation of a large classroom building on the campus of a college in my home town--I was the eleven-year-old waterboy, serving about forty or fifty workmen. I took my job seriously, since our family livelihood depended in part on what I earned; and I tried to do my best, recalling from time to time what my mother had often said about working for someone else, "If you never do any more than what you are paid to do, you'll never be paid for more than you do." She had also said to my older brother and me many times that anything worth doing at all is worth doing well. So in- stead of taking water to each workman just three times during the morning and the same number of times in the afternoon, as required by the boss, I made sure that every man on the job had the chance to drink cold water out of my bucket once each hour. This meant nine or ten complete trips a day for me, including filling the bucket and getting ice for it. Keeping this schedule required that I be constantly on the move, with no time for loitering or sitting down.
To keep me company on these many rounds each day, my pet dog, Goofus, followed closely at my heels, but I was always very careful to see that he did not drink out of the water bucket--for two reasons: common sense told me he shouldn't; and occasionally the boss firmly reminded me not to let this happen.
[Vol. 2 Contents]
[Back to David's Home Page]
- 30 -