machine shops or cowsheds. Grass grew up in the cracks in the old runways, the old brick chimneys fell to the ground, and what remained of the place was turned into a feedlot for finishing cattle. My father had grown up less than a mile from the old air base and was intimately familiar with every part of it. However, the massive old hangars and the majestic runways and even the utilitarian Quonset huts were not what drew his attention. No, what stoked his desire and got his imagination going was the thought of all those fallen-down barracks chimneys. All that brick just sitting there on the prairie waiting for someone with the desire and initiative to imagine a use for it! All that brick for free!
I remember the Saturday this desire of my father’s was translated into action. Two or three of my brothers and I were loaded into the back of my father’s snub-nosed 1969 Dodge pickup and driven out to the old air base. There we were issued tools and instructed to stand by and watch carefully as my father demonstrated the process we were to use in recycling the bricks for use on our house.
“First you find a cluster of three or four bricks that have already fallen from the chimney,” the old man told us, digging in the weeds until he came up with a representative chunk. “Then you carefully tap at the mortar between the bricks with your hammer and chisel until you get them separated from each other. Finally you chip away at the remaining mortar until . . .” But here, in the final part of his demonstration, the brick he was cleaning broke in half in his hands. “Well, you get the idea,” he said, tossing the broken brick back into the weeds and wiping the mortar dust from his hands. “As you get the bricks cleaned, just stack them in groups of a hundred or so, and we’ll load them in the pickup when I come back to get you.”
And with that, he drove off, leaving us to our work. I can’t recall how much we were to be paid for this job—a couple of cents a brick, I think. I know it was enough that I was vaguely excited by the prospect of making the money to buy whatever toy I had on my wish list in those days. However, this initial enthusiasm soon wore off, as brick after brick broke in half or disintegrated altogether in my chapped, red fingers. That old army cement was just too tough and clingy, the bricks too porous and fragile. In the four or five hours before my father returned to take us home for lunch that Saturday, I think my brother Steve and I managed to clean all of three or four bricks. The rest we had to toss back into the weeds from which we had gathered them, and soon enough the hurling of these bricks because the day’s chief activity, complete with side bets on accuracy, and so on. My brother Joe concentrated much harder on the work but did no better. In any case, the sight of our tiny stack of cleaned bricks must have been all the old man needed to abandon all thought of cleaning enough bricks to cover our house, because we never returned to the air base to clean another brick after that day—indeed, we didn’t even bother to take the bricks we had already cleaned home with us. For all I know, they’re still sitting out there today on the broken tarmac, waiting for sun and rain to pound them back into the ground from which they came.
Despite this initial setback, the idea of bricking the house on Cedar went ahead as planned. I vividly recall the day the pallets of new bricks were off-loaded into our front yard, creating yet another of those No-Looking-Back moments, like the time my father told the seller of the “dream house” what he could do with it, or the time he and my brothers knocked a hole in the side of the house and began to throw cabinets out of it. I guess it’s really going to happen, I thought, bracing myself for what I knew would be a difficult period of transition and toil. Was I myself becoming one of the zombies? I wondered. Yes and no, I decided. For even as I pulled on gloves and began moving the bricks to where the bricklayers could reach them, another part of me was already repeating the familiar words, “And this, too, shall pass. And this, too, shall pass.”
It was around this time of heady activity on the exterior of the house that my brother David brought one of his law school friends home to spend Thanksgiving with us. I believe the guy was from out of state and had no one else to spend the holiday with. He probably imagined the weekend would be a good break from the toil of law school, a time to kick back, stuff himself with turkey, and watch some football on TV. What he got instead is a subject of amusement in my family even to this day. For no sooner had the poor devil been introduced to the family that Wednesday evening than a trenching spade was thrust into his hand and he had to pitch in, along with the rest of us, and help to dig footings for the new brick siding. After all, that’s what evenings and weekends and holidays were for when a remodeling project was under way, and the work went on not just for an hour or two but for the entire weekend, including Thanksgiving Day.
“The poor bastard,” one of us will say, remembering those days. “He didn’t know what he was getting into. He thought we’d surely quit when it got dark. Imagine how shocked he must have been when Dad came out of the house with those floodlights, and we kept right on digging past ten o’clock.”
Similar scenes played themselves out across the next couple of years, as a new roof of shake shingles was put on, the aforementioned patio was added, and, finally, the house’s four-car garage was built. In many ways, this final project was my father’s masterpiece. I was old enough by then to see how he went about it, and like everyone else who witnessed the process, I was both amused and amazed. First the foundations were dug and the footings were poured, followed by the floor of the garage and the driveway. When that was done, we set about building the rafters, stacking each new rafter we built atop the others on the patio.
“What about the walls?” a curious neighbor asked. “Ain’t you gonna have walls on this gigantic thing?”
“Sure,” my father answered. “I already have some ready and waiting.”
“You already have some walls?” the man asked, his eyes bugging a little.
“Sure, at the farm,” my father said. “I’ve got all the walls I need out there.”
I remember standing there in my carpenter’s apron, trying to visualize what my father was talking about. From what I could remember about the place, the old farmstead was little more than an abandoned basement, a rusted-out swing set, and a couple of rows of dying elm trees. Where these “walls” were coming from, I could not imagine.
I found out the very next weekend, when we pulled into the gravel driveway of the old farmstead twenty miles from town, and there at the very back of the property was an old, tin-sided government granary I had all but forgotten about.
“There are those walls I was telling you about,” my father said to our dubious neighbor, who had accompanied us on the errand. “Pull that tin off and lift the roof, and those walls will come apart in sections, just like they were designed to do when the government put them up years ago.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the neighbor said, a weak smile animating his face.
This time, everything came off just the way the old man said it would. Within a couple of hours of arriving, we were hauling our first load of walls to town. As we arrived with each load, a second crew got busy putting them up. It was like one of those Amish barn raisings, the massive garage seeming to grow out of thin air over the course of a single day, the walls rising first, followed by the rafters, followed by precut sheets of plywood we nailed into place before rolling out the tar paper and hammering on the shingles. That evening, we all stood around in the shadow of the thing we had built, drinking iced tea or beer and marveling at all we had witnessed and participated in that day.
When the house on Cedar was finally completed to my parents’ satisfaction, it boasted five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a white-carpeted living room with a stone fireplace separated from the rest of the house by French doors. By then, several of my brothers were skilled carpenters; one of them, Tom, had even gone into business for himself. The work they did on that house was professional grade, and yet, no sooner was it definitively finished, during my first year away at college, than my parents sold it and moved into the three-bedroom farmhouse west of town that my father had
