Ed Hardy

Ed Hardy grew up in Washington D.C. He first attended Blackburn Junior College and then spent three years at Penn State where he earned his degree in mechanical engineering. After leaving Pennsylvania, Ed encountered many job opportunities including Wright Aeronautical Company, three years enlisted in the Marine Corps working with the Navy Department, and twenty-eight years for Ford Motor Company. He has now been retired for thirty-three years in Boulder, Colorado, after earning a pension from the volunteer fire department of Sugarloaf.

Caroline Wilson with Ed and Alice Hardy (and Corey Lovato, in absentia)

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Dawes Gymnasium Project

It was a crisp October afternoon at my 60th Blackburn class reunion. Blackburn, a small college in Carlinville, Illinois, is sixty miles north of St. Louis. It was at this time when the memories of a hot summer came rushing back to me. I was determined to find a piece of the foundation that I had worked so hard on during that summer of 1937. It was difficult to find this spot because a huge building had been constructed over the foundation that I so vividly remembered. As I walked around the building, I was brought back to the summer after I had graduated from Blackburn Junior College. 

Blackburn was a self-help school, and that summer the administration was looking for volunteers to help construct the new gym foundation. The air was hot when we began the excavation for the foundation. Since we had no mechanical equipment, we were left to dig the entire foundation with a metal drag scoop pulled by a mule and square up the corners with our own shovels. The work was very tedious and paid twenty-five cents an hour. To begin, we dug a large trench for the footing and later poured concrete into this ditch. After the concrete dried, we built forms tied together with wires to make concrete walls to support the gymnasium. After twisting metal wires to hold the sides of the form together, we poured more concrete into the form and let it harden for several days. After this process was completed, we cleaned all of the boards and straightened hundreds of nails. Then we started everything over again for the next section of the wall.

In order to finish our work successfully, we had to take great care to ensure that everything was kept clean. Otherwise, the equipment would quickly become covered with hardened clay and dry concrete. Our boss, Gus, always made sure that the tools were cleaned at the end of the day. He was a slightly overweight civil engineer who had built bridges throughout all of southern Illinois. Because he had this experience, he knew that it was necessary to keep our equipment tidy. Tools covered with hardened concrete would be heavy and difficult to lift. In order to prevent this added burden, we rinsed everything before the concrete hardened. 

Another element of the job required unloading eighty-seven-pound bags of cement from a freight car. At nineteen years old, I was able to carry one of these on each hip. We poured the cement along with sand, gravel, and water into the cement mixer in order to make liquid concrete. This mixture was then poured into our wheelbarrows that we hauled across precariously narrow planks to be poured into the concrete forms. 

Dining Hall Dinner

After this hard work, we were all looking forward to dinner in the dining room. As all twenty of us piled around a long table, Dorothy Grobe, the nineteen-year-old Blackburn student assigned to feed us during that summer, would single-handedly cook us a dinner that we devoured ravenously. I always admired her as she worked harder than we did since cooking and washing dishes for twenty hungry construction workers could not have been an easy task. She placed all of the big dishes in the middle of the table in a family style and it was then every man for himself. You could get your arm broken if you weren’t careful! 

It was unbearably hot that summer. It felt hotter at night than it did during the day. It was so hot after the sun went down that many of the men grew restless and chose to play poker in order to pass the time. However, my roommate Ralph and I were so exhausted at the end of the day that we went straight to bed and later woke up in a puddle of sweat. Ralph, who was about four inches taller than I was and a handsome young man, was not only my work partner but also my college roommate. When we were bored at school, we would at times juggle three tennis balls between each other to kill time. However, there wasn’t much time for juggling that summer while we were working construction.

As I thought of the work that Gus, Dorothy, Ralph, and I endured that summer, I was reminded of why I attended college in the first place. I not only learned the value of manual labor, but also the value of a good education.

Ed Hardy and the 1937 Construction Crew

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   Click image to enlarge