Touring the city with my dad who built a lot of it! :)

My dad is now (in 2025) turning 87 years old and came to Central Florida in search of iron work when he was 21. He had a wife, a kid (my older sister) and a car with very little else when he showed up. His specialty was high iron and he worked on nearly all of the jobs that happened in the Orlando and at Cape Canaveral (KSC) before 1975.

I too worked in the construction industry with my mother, my sister in law and my brother. We have also made some lasting changes to Orlando and surrounding areas from working on the original Amway Center to my last big job was being one of the (many) construction superintendents on the Orange County Courthouse but touring around with my dad is one of my favorite things to do. He tells stories of "back in the day" and he doesn't glamorize it but just states the facts of how things were done before OSHA came along and made things at least safer for those that are walking a 4" wide beam 200 feet in the air with 20 mile an hour winds and no net! He tells stories of when one of the best crane operators he ever knew knocked my dad off a building with his crane and the poor operator was so shook he had to take the rest of the day off even though my dad had grabbed the cable and was lowered to safety, the operator knew that he had nearly killed his friend and simply wasn't able to function for the rest of the day.

Dad tells stories of iron workers during the hippie revolution and how the iron workers, in general, didn't seem to understand "flower power!" :) He also tells stories of darker times when he was in the process of being "escorted off the side of a building" by 2 men when one of his friends came along and was able to turn the tide and save my dads' life. There's so much history that to my dad is just his life but to this city they were often pivotal moments in the decisions of the direction of the city. Dad influenced the direction of the city because at one point in the early 60's he opened his own business doing rebar and high iron. He literally worked on or had crews working on nearly everything that was built that was taller than 5 stories all the way up to 1975 in Central Florida including Kennedy Space Center.

One of his favorite stories of KSC is that after they "dried in" the Vertical Assembly Building that it actually started to rain inside the building! The VAB is big enough that it can create it's own climate and actually condense and rain inside! He says it took the engineers a few days to figure it out and a few more days to figure out a cure!

Another good one is how when they were putting up one of the first steel framed buildings in Orlando every morning they would come to work and the building would be "out of plumb" aka not perpendicular to the ground. Therefore, every morning the iron workers would have to spend several hours tightening various turnbuckles to "plumb up" the building so things would be good and square. The next morning, sure as you're living, the building would be out of plumb again and the building superintendent would cuss and gripe and order the iron workers to plumb the building again. After about 30 days of this the iron workers needed to move some of their crew to another job so they told the job site superintendent that the building was moving on it's own. In Florida, overnight, things cool down and during the day they heat up. Steel expands and contracts when cooled and heated therefore the building was constantly moving and that's why it was out of plumb every morning. They of course delivered this as if it were completely new news to them but they all ended up working every day until they had to go to the other job! 🤣

I guess the moral of my story here is, spend some time with the older folks. Get em out where things will spark their memories. You never know what you may learn!