Glaziers: Stories From People Who've Done It: With information on working conditions, expected earnings and more. (Careers 101 Kindle Book Series) by Gigi Little

Author:Gigi Little [Little, Gigi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 101 Publishinig
Published: 2012-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5: The Career Apprentice

Name: Matt Harwood

Location: Glazier, Savoy Studios, Portland, Ore.

* * *

My family’s been in glass for well over 100 years. On my mother’s side, every single generation has been a glazier. My grandfather started glazing back probably in the 1920s. He was working in his uncle’s shop, Hoffer Glass, in Fairbanks, Alaska. They had shops in different places and carried the name on — big family, brothers and sisters — and even now my uncle and aunt have stuck with it and are still running it.

I grew up around the family glass shop in Alaska. Nine, 10 years old, sweeping floors, cleaning glass. Living around glass felt pretty normal when I was a kid. There wasn’t anything alluring about it. It was a job and it paid well. But then I got good at it.

If there’s glass that needs to be moved around or cut or anything involved with glass, I love to get my hands on it. I was always good at handling big sheets of glass by myself. When I came to the shop where I work now, they would have three or four guys on one piece of glass. To me, that’s dangerous, because they’re all moving different ways. I’d say, “Hey, watch this,” and I’d pick it up and take it across the shop and put it on the table by myself. For me, that’s easier.

With my family’s shop, we did both residential and commercial jobs. Never swing-stage work, but I was definitely up high on ledges and hanging off the edges of buildings to figure out how to get some glass in. First off, when you’re putting glass in a house or building, it’s just floors and beams, and you just lean out to do what you need to do. You’re always tied off — you should always have a harness on. Also a lot of the time, there’s scaffolding around you, so there’s no way you could accidentally back up and fall. I don’t really have height issues. I like jumping off high things.

It was in the early ’80s when I started at my family’s shop in Fairbanks. I worked there off and on until the late ’90s. Then I went to Hawaii for a couple of years, did glazing and finished carpentry work, then moved to Anchorage and worked for another glass company. I’d always move around, go skiing, travel. Do different things. But glazing was always something I could fall back on. I’d get tired of it, say I was done, but I kept coming back.

Once in Anchorage I was working on a skylight on the metal roof of a house. This was for a company called Speedy Glass. Snow was packed along the roof. As we walked around, big sheets of snow would break off and go falling down. We’d have to grab on to keep from slipping off with the snow. But then it was kind of neat because it did that so much that at the end of the day, we just jumped off the roof and into the snow.

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