I was a Human Hi-Lo at the Stroh’s Brewery

There I was on the 9th floor of the Stroh’s Brewery in downtown Detroit, with no outside wall, looking straight down at the crane on the ground below . . . but I’m getting just a little bit ahead of myself.

When I was in my early 20’s I worked for Phoenix Metals, a small startup company that was going to recycle scrap metal into powdered metal.  They built a small pilot plant in a warehouse with some used furnaces, crushing machines and conveyors.

One source for their used machinery was the closed Stroh’s Brewery on Gratiot in downtown Detroit.  The Stroh’s Brewery was a 10 storey building with no electricity, so there were no lights, no elevators, and no heat during a cold November.  And it was also scheduled for demolition, so we only had a few intense weeks to get what we needed & get out of there.

Sometimes we worked in the underground sub-basements, where the cold walls seemed to suck the heat right out of your body.  Large holes had been broken in the concrete floors so large equipment could be lifted with a chain fall hoist to the main floor above.  It was really backbreaking work, and we sarcastically called ourselves “human hi-lo’s” (human forklifts).  All we did every day was muscle around heavy machines and equipment.

Mostly we worked on the upper floors, and it was really not fun to carry the heavy tools up all those flights of stairs in the mornings, & then carry them all back down in the evenings.  One outside wall had been knocked out on each floor, so you could walk right up to the edge of the floor and look straight down to the ground below.  It let in lots of light, but we really didn’t appreciate the natural air-conditioning during a cold and windy November.

Our favorite pastime was to go up to the 5th floor for lunch, where one wall was broken out so that we could look down onto the Stroh’s bottling building next door.  There was a very large overturned vent cap filled with rain water sitting on the roof next door, & we would try to throw flat broken cement wall tiles into it.  It was kind of like skipping flat rocks on the lake, except the tiles would sail through the air in a wide sweeping trajectory.  It was very difficult to make them land in the water in the vent cap, but when they did hit the target, there was a very satisfying “sploooosh” and a shooting geyser of water.  It was great fun!

The last job we did at the Stroh’s Brewery was to remove some very large and heavy machinery from the 9th floor, which could only be done by crane.  The foreman volunteered me to be the guy to wear the safety line, and stand at the edge of the floor where the wall had been knocked out.  My job was to give visual hand signals to the crane operator on the ground, 9 stories below.  By the way, did I mention that I’m afraid of heights?

The foreman told me that he left just enough slack in the safety line so that if I went over the edge, I’d be left hanging in the middle of the 8th floor below, where they could pull me inside.  “Oh, that’s just great,” I thought sarcastically.

I had never done anything like this before, but I got out there by the edge, and I directed the crane operator via hand signals where to move his boom, up or down, left of right, extend or retract.  We managed to get all of the machinery out of there without any of it crashing to the ground below, or without the crane boom smashing into the building, and most importantly, without me falling over the edge.

I’d like to think that we were successful because he did exactly what I told him to do, but it’s more likely that he was just a really good crane operator.  He was probably ignoring all my hand signals the whole time.

It’s funny how you look back at things you did when you were young and dumb, but at the time it all seemed like a big adventure.

Labels: Personal Development, Thoughts