The Story:
Posted on January 10, 2014
A Guest blog by HNE’s Marketing & Communications Manager Joseph Kane:
I would like to share a story from the Springfield Republican by my colleague at Baystate Health, Pat Gagnon:= viewpoint more than four walls define a familys home and the story from my childhood that it inspired:
My parents were both college professors, which meant that my brother and I (my sisters were exempt, for whatever late 70s, early 80s reason) got to spend our summers working on whatever project my father came up with. Our house (white colonial, green shutters J) had a garage behind it, connected by a breeze way. The fact that the garage was behind the house meant that you had to make a right turn at the end of the driveway to park in it, and the only view you had from the kitchen window was the side of the garage. The spring after I turned 12 and my brother turned 15, my father had done some research and found from old pictures that when the house was originally built, the garage was not attached and sat at the end of the driveway, meaning that you could drive straight into it and from the kitchen window you could look out over the backyard. Apparently, sometime during the 50s, a hurricane had come through and leveled the garage, and the owners at the time decided to rebuild it behind the house along with the breeze way. From my Dad’s research, the project of the summer of 81 was born! He, my brother and I, were going to move the garage. Now, the salaries of college professors were modest, and my father was not only meticulous planner, but necessarily frugal, so by the time the last day of school rolled around, we had our work cut out for us. The project would be truly epic!
First, my dad laid out the footprint of the garage. Half of it would be on the current driveway, so the first job for my brother and I was to smash up the asphalt and cart it off to a gully in the backyard. Next, we dug the hole for the foundation – four feet deep by four feet wide around the perimeter of the new garage site. At the part of the ditch that would be the back of the garage, we ran into the foundation of the original garage – massive field stones that we hauled out by hand. When we finished the dig, my Dad hired the first of three paid helpers that the project required, a concrete company to pour the footing for the foundation – all we needed was the concrete, my dad had made and set the forms for the footing himself out of old 2x8s from the basement. Once the footing cured, my dad had found a deal on concrete cinder blocks, so he with my brother and I sharing the front seat of our Volvo station wagon, hauled as many cinder blocks as the car would carry trip after trip until we had all that his calculations indicated we would need for the foundation (we had maybe 20 blocks left when we finished – he was that good). Block by block, he built the foundation with my brother and I tasked with mixing the mortar. Remember – there were no YouTube videos, then, so my father learned everything he needed to know for the project from books (borrowed from the library!), friends, and relatives.
The patience that it must have taken to be the foreman on the job, keeping the attention of two teenage boys, is more than I can imagine to this day. Once the foundation was finally finished, it was time to start on the backfill. It was August at this point in the project, and the nights were refreshingly cool. One of the stories we still tell at family gatherings involved one evening after a rainy spell. As a reward for our hard day’s work, we were all going out to dinner. My brother and I were just about to call it quits as it was about time to go. Remember those massive field stones from earlier in the story? Well, my Mom happened to be walking out the back door, freshly showered and coiffed, just as my brother dropped one of those stones into the hole. The rain had left the hole very boggy, and from twenty feet away, my Mom was showered with fresh mud. We laugh about it now, but oh boy!
The second paid help my Dad brought in was a crane operator. This was the really cool part of the project for my brother and me. My Dad spent a day bracing the inside of the garage with 2x4s. The plan was for my Dad, my uncle (a sometimes recruit and consultant on the project), and the crane operator to wrap the garage in fire hose-like straps, hoist it off the old foundation, pivot it 90 degrees and place it on the new foundation. Well, everything went as planned until the rear corner of the garage where the breezeway had connected collapsed half way through the pivot, and my father’s measurements for the foundation were an inch off. The grown-ups figured out how to make it work and at the end of the day, the garage sat at the end of the driveway!
My brother and I spent the last couple weeks of our summer helping my Dad as he rebuilt the back corner of the garage, then as he cut and placed the forms for the concrete floor that he had hired someone to pour. I learned so much that summer, about construction, about hard work, about determination, about setbacks and triumphs – things that would help guide and shape the course for the rest of my childhood, well into my adult life and even now. And the following summer, I would learn all about landscaping, because my Dad was already planning how we were going to make the footprint of where the garage had been into a brick patio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8pQLtHTPaI