I didn’t really find a career until I was 43 years old. In spite of all the people telling me in my last year of high school that I had best be looking for what I wanted to do in my adult life, especially so I could choose a college that might prepare me for one, I had no idea of what I wanted to do when I grew up. My friends all seemed to have decided what they would do, including my girlfriend at the time, who was focused on going to Nursing school as soon as she graduated. 

My father thought that I should become a lawyer, like my great grandfather had been. He also told me that since I was a boy, I would have to pay for it myownself. He would pay for my sisters to go to college, but it was up to me to pay for college, if, indeed, I decided that college was what I wanted to do. Lacking any other direction, after I graduated, I enrolled in University of Cincinnati, and chose Pre Law.

At the time, I was just drifting along, hoping that something would come out of college that would give me direction. I went to a branch campus, which, because it was near to my house, and I didn’t have to pay for a dorm and a meal plan, it was only $365 per quarter. I was working at the time, pumping gas at a Sohio gas station from 11pm to 7 am, and going to class during the day. $365 was within my ability to pay, though at the time it was a big chunk of my paycheck. I was making about $100 per week. 

I would go to work, and have my biology or algebra textbook open on the gas station desk, and try to read the uninteresting information, until DING-DING! someone would cross the tube that alerted me that there was a customer waiting for me to fill their tank. I was not getting enough sleep, and sitting there studying, I would pop No Doze, which were caffeine pills, and guzzle coffee, and try to stay awake. By 7am, I was jittery from the caffeine pills and coffee, and I would go home, and eat breakfast, and head out to class. Graveyard shift sucked. 

So, actually, did my classes. They were large classes, and the teachers would drone on, and it was hard not to fall asleep. As a result, my grades were not very good. I was used to poor grades, because back in high school, I was so bored by school, that I barely was able to graduate. After a year and a half of dragging myself through college classes, the dean called me into his office, and laid the truth at my feet. My GPA was 1.2, and the dean told me that I should find something else to do instead of wasting my time in college. The truth was, University of Cincinnati had mostly taught me how to be a pot smoking hippie.

So I went out and found a job running a hydraulic pipe bender, making exhaust pipes for cars and trucks. It too, was pretty boring, but at least it was day shift. I hated my job, and my boss was a total asshole, but I kept my head down, and put as much money as I could each week into my savings account. 

The Vietnam war was going on at the time, and my draft number came up, and instead of moving to Canada to avoid the draft, like some of my friends had done, I decided that maybe I should join the military, and get some training there, and use the GI Bill to go back to college after I got back. I went down to the recruitment office and took the physical, and after shuffling through the process in my shoes and tighty whiteys for several hours, was informed that my eyesight was so poor, that the military didn’t want me, and they were giving me a 4-F classification, so a career in the military was moot. I didn’t realize what a lucky break that was until several years later, after a bunch of my friends had died in the war. Or come home addicted to heroin.

I eventually saved enough money to go back to college, and I enrolled in college again several years later at a private Quaker college. This time college was a different experience, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere there. I studied Economics and Management, brought my grades up, and graduated with a 3.5 GPA. I was still a pot smoking hippie, but an educated one.

I got married in college, and my wife, Jenny, and I embarked on our life together. Through the years after college, I was a bookkeeper for a paint company, a vacuum cleaner salesman, worked at a lumberyard, and eventually worked as an outside salesman for a tool and supply company. It seemed like a waste of my college education, but I was bringing home a paycheck, and being a husband. Life was pretty good.

My wife died of ovarian cancer, and after dealing with the loss, I decided that I wanted to do something that Jenny and I had talked about throughout our 14 years of connubial bliss. I wanted to join the Peace Corps. I applied, and was accepted, and spent 3 years in Africa, teaching Woodworking and Technical Drawing in a high school out in the bush.

When I got back, I was 43 years old, and I knew that I needed to find a new direction for my life. I had absolutely loved teaching in Africa, but I had lots of friends who were teachers here, and I knew from their stories, and from having lived with a teacher for the duration of my marriage, that I was unlikely to be successful teaching in the United States. Too many restrictions, too much political correctness, too many parents who used school in place of parenting their children, it was not going to work for me. Even back then, I did not suffer fools gladly, and I just knew that teaching in the United States was a zero sum game, and that my impatience with people would shoot me down and get me fired from teaching in short order.

During my marriage with Jenny, I had taken on weekend jobs, apart from my regular job, doing simple constructionish jobs like replacing doors in people’s houses, and fixing rotten siding, and installing new faucets in kitchens and bathrooms. We used my side income for traveling and doing things that our combined salaries did not cover. I went back to doing these things after Peace Corps, and though it didn’t pay all that well, it was enough to pay my rent and bills. I was still looking for direction, like I had done since high school. 

One day, as I was contemplating the lack of excitement from doing small joblets, and not seeing much of a future for myself in doing them, my phone rang. The call was from a lady named Pixi, that I had known during the years of Jenny’s teaching career, who had taught with her in the elementary school. She had heard from mutual friends that I was back stateside, and wanted to know if I would come and have dinner with her and her husband Phil, and discuss something that they had in mind. Pixi and Phil had just gotten back from being missionaries in The Congo, and we had that shared experience in Africa, so I was looking forward to hearing their stories, and reconnecting with her.

We had a great dinner, full of our mutual stories, and finally late in the evening, they got to the reason that they had called me. Their daughters were just in college, and wanted some autonomy, and would I be interested in making the two car garage in their backyard into an apartment for the girls? They wanted a complete apartment, with a full kitchen, a full bathroom, a sleeping loft, and air conditioning. We went outside to look at the garage.

It was a big empty box. There was nothing inside, just 4 walls and a roof, and a funky old refrigerator in the corner. I looked it over and tried to envision how I would do the job. In later years, I would come to see something like this as a blank canvas for my art, but back then, I knew almost nothing about large scale remodeling. Pixi and Phil had a vision, and seemed to have the confidence that I would be the guy to accomplish their vision. I wasn’t sure that I could take on such a large project and complete it to their satisfaction. There was so much that I did not know how to do. I told them that I would think about it, and they encouraged me to think hard because they had complete confidence in me.

I drove home trying to come to terms with the idea. I wanted the job, and I knew that they, the Phillips, would be great to work for. But I wasn’t sure that I was up to such a complicated job, their confidence in me notwithstanding. It was pretty far above what I saw as my skill set.

The next morning, as I drove to a clients house to replace their front door, I saw a yard sale on the side of the road that had a ton of stuff spread all over their large yard. Out of curiosity, I pulled over and wandered around looking at a myriad of things. To one side, there was a pile of really nice stairway handrails leaning against the house. They brought me back to thinking about the Phillips job, because I would need handrails for the stairway that went up to the as yet undesigned loft, in the as yet undesigned apartment, a job which I had as yet, not decided to accept. 

I got to chatting with the lady whose yard sale it was, and found that she was a cousin to Willie Nelson, and was liquidating stuff that she had stored for him, to help him pay his taxes. I asked her how much she wanted for the handrails, and she told me that she wanted $140 for the pile. It seemed a lot for some old, though nice handrails. Then she told me that these very handrails had been used in the movie Honeysuckle Rose, in which Willie had starred. I went to my truck, and grabbed a tape measure, and decided that there were enough handrails for the stairway and end of the unbuilt loft. I bought them on the spot, and that was the moment that I decided to accept the Phillips job, and the moment that my career took flight. I loaded the rails in my truck. Serendipity in action.

I called the Phillips and accepted their job. Then, after installing the front door that I was on the way to do when I stopped at the yard sale, I went home and stuck the handrails in my garage, and sat contemplating my decision. It was overwhelming. I drew some crude plans and started listing the things that I would need to do in order to build an apartment. The longer the list grew, the more I was afraid that I had bitten off way more than I could chew.

I went to Home Depot and bought a book on plumbing, and a book on electrical wiring. I had a rudimentary knowledge of plumbing and wiring, but for the apartment, I would need to do high level work, including electric circuits for the air conditioning, a stove, a water heater, and general plugs and lights, as well as bringing supply water, and sending waste water to their septic tank. I went online and read the parts that were relevant in the National Electric code, and National Plumbing code. It was dry reading but not much more complicated than reading about Biology and Algebra back at the University of Cincinnati. 

I found a helper, a friend who was an EMT, and was looking for a side job when he wasn’t at the fire department waiting to go out with the ambulance. 

The first thing we did was run a 70 amp circuit from their breaker box in the main house out to the garage, and install a circuit breaker box for the necessary circuits for the garage apartment, and so we would have electricity for the work. That was kind of scary because I had never done that before.

I needed water for the kitchen and bathroom. I found where I could tie in to the water supply in the main house. We dug a trench from the house to the garage, and I got busy dry fitting the copper pipes out to the garage. It was winter, and cold work digging and fitting the copper pipes. There were 157 solder joints in the system, and I spent a whole day doing nothing but soldering them together. I was worried because if, after I was done, and I charged the system with water, if there was a leak in the trench, the only way that I could fix the leak would be to cut the pipes in the trench open, let the water drain out, and then resolder the leak. In the cold, working in a trench full of mud. I used what I would later come to call “the Sam method of soldering”, being carefully obsessive with each joint in the preparation. I was so nervous about leaks, and it was getting dark after all the soldering, that I put off charging the system until the following day. I spent a sleepless night at home, worrying about what to do to fix any leaks that might present themselves. 

The next day I opened the valve to let water into the lines, and held my breath. It was a miracle, I had not even one leak. I was so happy to fill in the trench and get on with the inside work.

As I built in the inside of the garage, I invented solutions to whatever presented itself. I needed a beam to support the open end of the loft, and after pouring over the lumber span and weight tables at home one night, I designed a beam that would support the weight of the loft floor, I hoped, and the next day, bolted it together. We built the loft, and I built a stairway to get us up there for the rest of the work topside. I had never built a stairway before, but it didn’t seem that complicated after reading an article in Fine Homebuilding magazine, which I had subscribed to about a year before that. 

It was like that throughout the job. I put a skylight in the roof over the stairway, built the internal walls for the ground floor of the apartment, bought a tile saw and read a book about tiling, and tiled the bathroom and kitchen floors, plumbed in the new fixtures in the bathroom and kitchen, built and set the cabinets, ran the lighting circuits and plugs, set the water heater, and got ready to finish the inside sheetrock. I had never done any of this before.

I read a lot in the evenings about how to do the things that were on the schedule for the next day. The only things that I subcontracted were the air conditioning, and the carpet on the living room floor, stairway, and loft floor. It was coming together nicely. The Phillips and their daughters came out every day to see how things were going, and were a wealth of input on how they wanted it to look. Last thing that I did was install the Willie Nelson handrails on the stairway.

I never said anything about the handrails until the last day when I handed over the keys to the apartment, and packed up my tools to take them home. They laughed when I told them that their handrails were famous. I was so proud of myself for having done the job, invented solutions, and made a nice little apartment. I learned a lot of new skills in doing the job. It was truly a trial by fire. The Phillips never doubted that I could do the job, and that gave me the confidence to keep going. The girls moved right in.

The experience gave me the confidence and ability to take on more sizeable jobs after that, and I never again worried about working above my skill set. I started a real bidness, which I named “Call Sam”, because that is what my satisfied clients said to their friends… that if they needed work done on their house, they should call Sam. That was 28 years ago, and since then I have learned lots of new things and become much more proficient at what was now my chosen career. Looking back with what I know now, I am amazed at me for pulling the Phillip’s job off. I really knew so little about remodeling back then.

About a year or so ago, I again got a call from the Phillips. It was time to upgrade the apartment. They wanted a redo of the bathroom, basically stripping it all out, and reworking it with current materials. One of the daughters had lived there ever since she moved in. They wanted the old carpet stripped out, and wood floors put in downstairs. New exterior doors. And repainting  the walls. I agreed to come and look at it. I was very worried about going out to see what they wanted. Did the beam I built sag? Had I made good decisions on how I built the bathroom? Were there cracks in the walls? Had everything worked ok over 28 years? I was really nervous as I walked into the apartment that I had built so long ago. 

Miraculously, everything was structurally sound. There was one crack in the wall over the stairway, but in general, everything looked to have weathered the intervening years just fine. I was so relieved. It was very interesting to tear out work that I did so long ago, and see how the decisions and invented solutions that I had done back then had held up. I am so much better at tilework now, having done a lot of it since then. The renovation came out beautifully. 

My career has given me a lot of joy. I love my job. I am pretty good at what I do. I have managed to earn enough money to cover my philanthropy in Mexico, where for 20 years I mentored teen age girls, and paid for their school costs up to, and sometimes even through college, and tried to teach them how to take charge of their lives. Just like on the Phillips job, I invented solutions, and learned on the job. 

I work to live instead of live to work. I have about 100 regular clients in whose houses I have worked for years as their children grew up and moved out. As I always say, I am just a lucky boy. A very lucky boy. And it all started with Willie Nelson’s handrails.

The saddest thing is that although I have taught many things to my various helpers over the years, none of them has made it into their career, and when I die, an enormous body of arcane knowledge will die with me. But I ain’t dead yet, so I get to go out every day. and learn new things, have fun, meet new people, and do work that is satisfying. How many 71 year old men can say that?

A career is what you decide that it will be. Thank you Phillips family for helping me to find one.  <3

There is no better life than one of being of service to others.  <3