Overview

This is a unique work for several reasons. There are very few books ever written about the life of carpenters, and even fewer about the dangerous world of heavy construction. Another singular thread in the book is that it describes what it's like to become an apprentice in a trade union right in the middle of the turbulent Bay Area Sixties. On that level it's a coming-of-age narrative...a buildings-roman if you will. The book moves from job to job touching particularly on very significant projects in San Francisco: the Palace of Fine Arts, St. Mary's Cathedral, Moscone Center and the Unitarian Church. There's a motif of stories, both narrative - and as in a high-rise; but also interchapters of reflection on the nature of the trade; for example, on the way that tools and words fuse for a young poet absorbing the lexicon of building. On some jobs the salient memories have to do with the technical wonders...like a complex roof structure on a cathedral. On others, it's the particular dynamic of a crew finding its voice as union brothers. Some chapters describe a near-death experience, or a racially-charged confrontation. And every story reveals the kinds of people who did this work half a century ago, how they coped with the outer world of the war in Vietnam, and the cultural rebellion...while living a life of anonymous hard labor. Journeyman's Dues does not include much architectural or historical background about these projects. There are plenty of books about civic monuments but not many about what it felt like to ply the trades that built it all. Hence the title, the recognition of dues paid. May the carpenters who read this enjoy my yarns while remembering twenty of their own; and for those who are tasting our life for the first time...I hope it furthers understanding.

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9780977384334

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Eric Johnson likes to point out that he is a War Baby, not a boomer. Born in 1943 and raised in a progressive family in the SF Bay Area, he attended Reed College and San Francisco State as a literature student before dropping out permanently in 1964. He took part in the radical movements of the Sixties, deciding in 1965 to follow his dad's footsteps and become a union carpenter. Although maintaining a life of study and writing, he married, had children, and worked on the big civic projects of that time. After retiring with a union pension in 2003, he began to see the literary possibilities in his experiences as a carpenter. The freedom of retirement allowed him to devote himself to his deferred practice of poetry and graphic art...which led to the discovery of letterpress printing as a medium he could take on wholeheartedly. For the next twenty years he developed a public printshop where he produced many experimental works and chapbooks of graphic poems. Now in his 80s, Johnson has retired from the printshop and is devoting himself to publishing his memoirs and playing with ink.

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