I am glad to have found and read this. My parents never finished high school, and soon after the trade schools were closed down around NYC. Most lower-class, working-class people in my neighborhood in Brooklyn were trades people, but they taught their children to avoid the trades, well some of them. The children eschewed the trades, but if intellect or the family's economics didn't allow them to become doctors, lawyers, or teachers, they became policemen (law enforcement officers), garbage men (sanitation workers), or firemen (firefighters). Juxtaposing the old terms with new to put a sense of generation here!

The parents still had respect for the trades, but they wanted their children to make more money, to climb out of poverty. In the article, he states,

"My dad always had some classic cars. I’d help him in the garage," Hines says. "He actually told me I shouldn’t work on cars professionally. He said keep it as a hobby. I wish he was still around so I could call him and say, guess what I’m doing now. I think he’d be proud."

I really think this is why it is hard to find a good electrician, plumber, you name it, since the trade schools and apprenticeships in the trades have dwindled, or just plain disappeared. I will not speak to the unions; I am speaking of the neighborhood master who plied his trade and then passed it on to an apprentice - plumber, electrician, machinist (I did this), welder (this too), iron worker, carpenter, steam fitter, boat builder, etc...

I grew up working with my hands, landed a job doing computer backups at a NYC law firm at night (learned to code, play Doom when it first came out and started learning expert systems and neural networks). I quit that job and gave my wife at the time anxiety to take a job as a welder making 60% of my cushy night job salary. Best decision ever, since it led me to a lot of different and interesting jobs all around the world, and without a college degree, yet with a dotcom bubble salary before the dotcom bubble.

Now the curse has come to bite me back. I have had mechanics tell my daughter she needs new rotors and pads when I know the rotors were fine, but I didn't have the time to replace the pads. Another mechanic in a different state told her she needed a new $150 O2 sensor when she brought it to him to look at when her engine light came on. A friend hooked it up and it was something totally unrelated, and cost a whopping $25 dollars to fix. My ex-mother-in-law went in for an oil change, and they left the filler cap off, and her engine was sprayed with oil. A different place overtightened the oil drain plug crushing the o-ring on my ex-wife's car, and as a result she leaked a lot of oil out, and fortunately she stopped driving when her engine temperature started soaring. A lot of ill-trained and incompetent people taking care of life-critical machinery. It is the number one reason I am starting to fear flying. If the trend goes towards plane maintenance, it is just a matter of time before accidents increase due to human incompetency or negligence, not just fatigue or cheap parts or manufacture.

The story gave me hope that there are still people who will value such things, and carry the torch to future generations and show the worth in an honest day's work done right.