Don Gay – long days, carpooling and ingenuity

Don Gay speaks about the long hours, arranging carpools and the materials management of the build.

Don is sitting in a chair at the centre of the screen

[JANET – Off Camera] So that meant that you had to travel to go to Hamilton to work during the build?

[DON] Oh yes that that took up a lot of time, a lot of our time because I worked at west, west end, westy, uh west end, Westinghouse, sorry, on my apprenticeship so I’d have to travel all the way out every day. But to augment the cost of running a car I managed to find two others that that worked out there as well so we shared the ride but I was on three shifts, and that presented a problem of getting my hours in because, you know, I worked the first shift it would be seven till three then the next shift I worked, and it changed every week,
would be three to eleven and eleven to seven. So you’d work all night you’d come home and you’d sleep a few hours then you’d build, you’d put in maybe four or five hours on the site and then you’d go to work. Of course it was on the other shifts you reversed that. You worked and then went to the building site.

[JANET – off camera] You mentioned something when we were talking earlier about some of the materials were arriving by train?

[DON]  Yes. When we had the building at a point where we were going to do a lot of drywalling and framing, I guess pricing came into play that “hey we can get a better quantity for our dollar if we bring a train load of drywall in” and they did they brought a box car in and off loaded it there at Grimsby, but we had to we had to empty the car within a certain period of time otherwise you’re going to pay a demurrage. So we’d send a crew over with that with the, we had a three-ton flatbed truck

[JANET – off camera] oh you did ok?

[DON] I’m not sure whether it belonged to us or to Sexsmith but anyhow we’d go over there and unload this car and then bring it over and then put it into one of the houses that was partially framed up to use it as a storage you had to do it