Growing Up O’Shea: Working Weekends
As soon as they were able, the younger O’Shea generations helped the family business. By the 1970s, Bud’s children -- David, Maureen, Linda, and Mike -- started working when each was old enough, usually in high school. They did it every Saturday, year-round, “no matter whether it was snowing, raining or what,” Bud says. “I had them do it because I needed the help, for one thing. And it gave them a break from home, time to be with their dad, and hopefully, they would take an interest in what I was doing.”
“We had sawdust in our blood. Literally,” David says. “I started working for dad as a gopher, delivering materials to job sites, cleaning the shop, and washing the trucks.”
Bud wanted his kids, and sometimes their willing friends, to be there at seven Saturday mornings. “Every Saturday we would wash those trucks, even in the cold winter,” Maureen says. “Dad told me, ‘This is my advertising.’ I would look out the window and see all these dirty cars going by, then I’d see a clean one and it would say ‘Harold O’Shea Builders.’”
Once she filled in for the O’Shea supplies driver. “I drove to the lumber company, like Vredenburgh’s, had the truck loaded with supplies, then took it to work sites. But instead of unloading the truck (like the regular driver did), the carpenters, who were making higher wages, did it because they weren’t going to let Bud’s daughter unload it. I loved driving the truck, but I couldn’t do it because my dad joked, ‘It’s not profitable for me!’ since it took the carpenters away from their work!” she laughs.
“We weren’t forced into helping, we were paid,” says Linda. “They were trying to teach us job responsibility at a young age. We had to sweep the shop. This was way before you had dust collectors. Now, I go to the shop and they have all these machines that collect the dust. When I was a kid, there was sawdust in every nook and cranny, in every saw, on every table, on every surface! I remember doing my best to pull the sawdust together and my dad would come out and look at what I’d done. He never said, ‘You didn’t do a very good job.’ He said, ‘If you use this sweeping compound, and sprinkle it…’ That was his way of saying, ‘That job really didn’t cut it!’” she says, laughing.
Mike says he and his siblings dreaded nail sorting. “My dad was incredibly efficient. He’d buy 50-pound bags of nails. We’d have 30 kinds. Rather than take a 50-pound box of nails out on the job, you’d take a quart or whatever, and it would be charged to the job. Before we went home on Saturdays, after we’d washed the trucks and swept the shop, we had to fill the nail bins. We all hated that!” David agrees: “It could be very painful!” he says, laughing.
“You develop your work ethic from your parents,” Linda says. “Work was always on my mom and dad’s mind, it was discussed at dinner. They didn’t really get away from it on the weekends...I remember one Saturday, Maureen was sick, but she had a date that night so she went in and swept the shop. No way was she going to say, ‘I’m not able to go sweep and wash trucks,’ because then she couldn’t go on her date!”