The Rowdy Story Behind the Staid Bank Columns

By Ira Spector

SAN DIEGO — I stopped by Ray the Swede’s workshop. The place was padlocked. A very official- looking notice from the State of California declared he owed back taxes, and the state had seized his business. Ray was a very talented stone maker, and had recently completed years of work on the facades of the new University of San Diego buildings. Because of the style and cost, these masterpieces of Old World detailing were rarely used to adorn buildings in the United States

Over the past couple of years, Ray had taught me techniques to construct plaster molds and pour castings. My wife and I were just getting started in the architectural arts business. Ray readily helped me when I needed him. I phoned him to express my regrets about the loss of his business. During the conversation I asked, “Do you have any jobs pending that perhaps I could take over, and give you some work, which you probably could use?”

“In fact I do,” he replied, and that’s how I got the job making eight columns for a new bank building. Each column was twelve feet high, made of four thousand pounds of concrete, with an exposed face of quartz aggregate.

My shop was a broken down old house I rented in Solana Beach for twenty-five dollars per month. Behind the building at a lower level was a leaky tin roof shed with wood lattice walls and a dirt floor. I set Ray up there to make the plaster molds for the job. He said, it would take two weeks to make four molds for pouring the eight columns. After two weeks, only one mold was completed, and I was going crazy trying to figure out the problem.

A neighbor of mine stopped by to visit the shop one day. He knew Ray, and went down below to say hello. When he returned, he said, “I found out what your production problem is. Ray’s having a party down there. His breath is one hundred proof.” Goodbye Ray! Now what was I going to do? I contacted Jim, a full-blooded Indian who had worked for Ray. and asked if he could help. Jim had another job, but agreed to work for me Saturday, his day off, and made a mold in one day. At the end of the day he made me a proposition. “Let me take the mold down to my back yard, and I’ll complete the job for you in two weeks.” Great! I thought, this would solve my problem.

Lee who was unemployed at the time, helped me haul the 12-foot molds to a chaotic, uneven, dirt back yard behind the six floor walk up apartment where Jim lived, in the run-down Logan Heights section of San Diego. The yard was strewn with every piece of trash known to man. I would have bet this slum was one of the worst in the U.S. A few years later, the place was torn down and became an approach ramp to the new Coronado Bay Bridge. Jim, a muscular, gentle-speaking man, in need of extensive dental work, lived on the fifth floor with his wife, a Black woman from the sugar cane fields of Cuba. Her two surly-faced sons lived there too. They were not Jim’s children.

I reached the conclusion early on that his wife was not to be trifled with. I watched her and Jim position themselves at one end of a concrete column, and lift and reposition it six inches to one side. This was an impressive feat for any two behemoth men, let alone a woman and a man.

I often visited their apartment to check on the job, usually at dinnertime. I never saw anything green on the dinner table-always baked beans, fried potatoes or fatty meat. One evening I passed by the open door to the bathroom and noticed the bathtub, filled with the blackest, foulest-looking water imaginable. Maybe they were making their own paint?

Two weeks passed, and the columns were not finished as promised. The general contractor and architect were pressing me for completion. It was Sunday and I went down to Jim’s yard to help his wife bathe the concrete columns in concentrated muriatic acid to expose the quartz aggregate. This would give the surface a sparkle. We carefully dipped the mops into plastic buckets containing the caustic acid, and swabbed the columns.

At last the columns were ready. Lee drove a stake truck and forklift that I rented to load the columns and deliver them to the job site just a few miles away. I was busy on another job at our shop. Lee, with Jim’s urging and my approval, hired Jim’s stepsons to help load the truck. The older brother, a parolee for terrible crimes and sundry misdemeanors, was maneuvering the truck in the alley, and suddenly disappeared with the truck for about forty-five minutes. When he returned, Lee carefully asked where he had been? His reply, “I never handled one of deze trucks before, I wanted to see how it drove.” Lee, sizing up the delicate situation wisely said, “Oh that’s o.k.” A short time later some small tool was needed. This time, Lee chose the, younger, sixteen -year old brother, who had just been released from prison for beating up a cop. Lee sent him in my pickup truck to the hardware store a few streets away. He retuned after an hour and-a-half. Lee noticed a dent in a fender that was not there when he left on the errand. Again Lee wisely never said a word to him. I told Lee, “I was grateful we got the truck back at all.”

Finally the columns were at the bank site. The general contractor on the job noticed one column had a slight bow. (We had seen it previously and kept our fingers crossed). “Don’t say a word to the architect,” he said. The architect arrived soon thereafter to inspect our work. Fortunately, he was so busy complaining about some insignificant pinholes that needed filling, that he overlooked the bowed specimen. It never showed when installed. Jim arrived with his older stepson, and said to him, “Help these guys fill the pin holes, they’re in trouble.” Then Jim left, and the stepson immediately climbed into the back of his car and fell asleep, much to our relief.

More than 30 years have passed, a new bank occupies the building, and the columns are still there. They now have a thick coat of paint hiding all the glittering exposed aggregate we worked so diligently to achieve. Ray the Swedish stone maker is dead, as is the architect. Lee died tragically a few years later of influenza at the age of 37, leaving a widow and two young children. The name of the general contractor firm, once one of San Diego’s most prominent, has disappeared by way of merger. I never had contact with Jim or his family again, and can only speculate whether any of them are still alive, considering their diet and life style.

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Ira Spector is a freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection, with slight revisions, was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.