In recognition of the growing voice and influence of the organized trades and beginnings of America’s Industrial Revolution, Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day an official public holiday in 1887. By 1894, thirty states were celebrating the holiday. Following the Pullman Rail strike of 1894, Congress passed a bill recognizing the first Monday in September as Labor Day, making it a federal holiday, with the bill signed into law by then President Grover Cleveland.
The law only made Labor Day a holiday for federal workers, and as late as the 1930s, unions were encouraging all their members to strike to make sure they got the day off. Our neighbors in Canada and numerous countries across the globe also celebrate their own version of Labor Day.
As Union membership has declined across the U.S., with the exception of federal, state and local government unions, and Right to Work states have become more powerful economic powerhouses, the holiday has become more viewed by many as a bookend to summer, bracketed with Memorial Day as the official start.
Let’s give pause to remember what we are celebrating
Both of these holidays deserve more attention and respect to their reasons for being, Memorial Day is of course a more solemn remembrance of all men and women in uniform who paid the ultimate price in their service to our nation, and Labor Day celebrates the working men and women who helped build our nation.
Labor unions arguably gave us the 5-day work and 40-hour work week, overtime pay, employer paid health care and other related benefits, and though today existing with decreasing frequency, employer paid pensions.
I have long viewed working men and women as being a much larger sub-sect of our population and society than simply union members. The working trades who build, construct and repair our infrastructure, keep our homes cool and comfortable with working plumbing, electricity and HVAC, in and outside of union membership each deserve our appreciation and respect.
Just for a moment envision your home this particularly hot summer without that HVAC tech crawling through your crawl space, or up inside the sauna of your attic, repairing or replacing an evaporator coil, heat sensor or simply refilling refrigerant to get your home back into working ‘conditioned air.’
A personal connection and reason for celebration
My paternal great-grandfather, Charles Clinton Crane, was a working man. He ran away from home at age 14. His family’s failing farm in upstate New York was not able to sustain a family of 9 children, 7 brothers and 2 sisters. Charlie headed west, leaving school and becaming a real cowboy. He picked up the habit out west of wearing Stetson hats for the rest of his life, as well as a love of western folk art and customs.
When he returned to upstate New York, he met and married his child bride… literally, my great-grandmother Hazel, when she was only 14, and almost immediately after, he was shipped off with the Army to fight World War I. His first born son, William Clinton “Bud” Crane was born while he was overseas.
He later shared some of his hellish tales of war when I was a child. Grampa Charlie spoke of being bombed all through the night while in a muddy foxhole in the midst of battle. As he was talking to one of his closest Army buddies, they heard the all too familiar whistle of high-flying artillery overhead. As he felt the concussive blast, he was knocked out, waking hours later and pre-dawn. The foxhole around him was partially collapsed, and an arm was draped over his shoulder. He looked around for his comrade in arms, only to realize that was his dead arm, buried under tons of soil, as the bomb had either killed or buried him alive.
Post-war highway builder and supervisor
Charlie survived, and returned home, largely none the worse for wear. He joined a company called McDougal-Warren Paving, and worked primarily as a Paving Crew foreman, constructing what you and I now know as U.S. Highways 19 and 41. Highway 41 starts in Copper Harbor, Michigan (north of Detroit) and travels 2000 miles south and east to Miami, Florida (construction begun in 1926). Highway 19 is just under 1450 miles, connecting Lake Erie and Pennsylvania to the Gulf of Mexico. Both highways traverse Georgia north to south, and is how in large measure the Crane flock landed here in the south later. Charlie, his wife Hazel, and crews too numerous to mention toiled daily for years building these critical north/south highways.
Charlie and Hazel lived on the road with the paving crew for the years it took to pave each road. The summer heat in the south was simply too hot for laying pavement, so the company would give the crew the summer off. Charlie and Hazel found a modest heart of pine cabin to their liking in Pine Lake, Georgia and after a second summer spent there as Charlie’s retirement loomed, they decided to make Georgia their new home, near the onset of WWII. An invitation post-war, to join them in this burgeoning land of opportunity would bring Bud Crane and his wife Mary south in 1945, along with my father, Jerry Crane and his baby sister Sheila, in 1945.
Some valuable lessons paid off, decades later
Grampa Charlie had a ton of memorable stories, and many stuck with me for a lifetime, and a few of those tales got me out of some serious scrapes.
I had asked him how his crew cut and built roads through mountains. He went into some detail about blasting and digging tunnels as well as carving highways into the sides of mountains. Both U.S. Highways 19 & 41, were built from the north to the south, with several brutal winters on the road. Hazel ran the cook wagon that fed the crews. As the workers were often of multiple races, hotels and similar accommodation were hard to come by, particularly in the south.
Having only experienced deep snow a few times before I was in my 30s, I was fascinated about driving or making it through a snowstorm. Charlie told me they would cut straight-aways through the shaded and tree covered mountainsides, and curves, as often as possible as well as steeper grades open more to full sunshine. Even in winter, the sun could bring enough heat to the blacktop to melt off most snow and ice, making the roads less treacherous.
As I headed north towards Blairsville, Georgia along Highway 19 during the great Snowmaggedon of 2012, this guidance likely saved my life along 37 miles of very curvy roads through the north Georgia mountains…though I only made it as far north as Helen before the roads was closed, and as I watched several less fortunate drivers in their cars slide off the roadway and down the mountainside.
As I crashed safely instead in bed that night at the Country Inn in Helen, with my Black Jeep Liberty looking a bit like a snow crusted locomotive, I even more fully appreciated the many life lessons I learned from a man who ended his formal education prior to high school…Charles Clinton Crane.
So for Grampa Charlie and the millions of other men and women who toil, build, repair and rebuild for us all the rest of most every day, I hope you each had a restful and blessed Labor Day holiday and weekend.
