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My name is Dick McCabe Jr. I was a Union Ironworker for 27 years and have been a member of Local 378 in Oakland, California since 1978. I retired in July 2005 and moved to Prosper, Tx. I am from one ot those families where the son follows the father into the family trade. My dad followed his dad into the trade as did three of his 4 brothers. My 3 brothers - Mike, Jimmy and David were all ironworkers out of Local 378 and are all now retired. My sister Peggy was in the trade and became the first Ironworker in Local 378 to get pregnant. (That ended her career on the iron.) My sister Susie's husband, Billy Slankard, who retired from the US Navy, is a member of Local 378 as are Jimmy's son-in-law, James Sturgeon and David's son-in-law, Marc Massie. I have never worked around Marc, but have heard good things about him. I have worked quite a bit with James and he is going to be a real asset to the trade.I have 3 cousins in this local too: John (retired), Paul and Owen Dougherty and my late cousin Kathy's husband, Chuck Preset, is also retired out of local 378. My dad, Dick Sr, and Chuck were on the Executive Board of the Local and my dad was President of the local in the '70s.
My dad and I were both apprentice instructors for about 9 years each. (at different times, of course)Teaching apprentices was one of the most enriching experiences of my life. It sounds cliche, but when you see the eyes light up when someone finally understands what you are trying to convey, you get more out of it than they do.
Now for my personal stuff. I have been married to my lovely wife Vickie since 1979 and we have 2 wonderful daughters. Lacy is working full time in Sacramento and going to school to further her career. Ashleigh moved to Texas with us, but is planning to return to California to go to school when her boyfriend, Chris Padilla, graduates from college. It must be Vickie's fault they turned out so good. She stayed home and raised them while I worked iron locally and out of town. We also have a pet zoo at home with 2 cats and 2 dogs. GG is the Lord and Master 20 pound black cat. Bonnie Bell is the Little Princess Siamese. And Sadie is the dorky dashsund. Lacy has a cute little dustmop dog named Coco who moved with us to Texas. Lacy was moving to an apartment and the dog was used to having Sadie for company so Coco came with us. Lacy was not very happy about it, but knew it was best for Coco.
I've been messing around with computers since 1990. Well, actually my first computer was a Commodore VIC 20 in about 1983. I paid about $350 and bought it at Toy-R-Us. It had 5K of memory and couldn't do anything but play a game, so I lost interest in computing while I raised my kids. Then in 1990 I went down to Radio Shack and bought a complete SL1200 system with a 9 pin dot matrix printer for $1500. It was an 8088 4 bit machine that ran at 4 mhz with 512K of RAM and did not even have a hard drive. This of course means anytime you wanted to run a program you had to put a 3 1/2" diskette in. I had the box open, exploring the workings within a week and my wife was quite upset. "We spend $1500 dollars for a computer and you think its a steel building that you know something about". I didn't of course, but I learned. I eventually added 128k of memory and a 5 1/2" floppy drive. Seems very Fred and Barney by todays standards. Since then I have had too many computers to list here. The last 3 computers I have built myself,sometimes with the help of my brother David - he is the hardware guy amoung us. Now that David is retired and unable to get disability because he is too young, he is being rehabilitated by workermans comp to be a network engineer. All I did was take an online course for A+ Certification in 2001 but I never took the test to become certified.
On December 16th 2002 we experienced our first flood. At 4:00am my wife, Vickie, woke me up and said the street was getting pretty deep. I got up to find the water up to the doors of the 94 Taurus I had only bought a month and a half before. Might not sound like much, but it only had 66,000 miles and was definitly a grandma car. My daughter's cars were also parked on the street and had similar water. The water came up amazingly fast and we lost all those cars and my old Mercury Topaz too. By 7:00 the water had receded and it seemed like a bad dream. Here is a picture of my neighbors in a rubber boat at my garage door. I have a picture of my Taurus too. Lacy's car didn't look any better. Ashleigh's didn't show up in the pictures because it is dark green. Life slaps you in the face once in a while.
In 1998 I worked on a house in the Oakland hills. Ironworkers don't work on houses too often, for obvious reasons. But this one was special. The roof for the 17 car garage was made of 24" high beams because the lawn was on top of the beams!! Here is an artist's rendering of the house. 17000 sq ft and it's a 4 bedroom house!
Here are more pictures of the animals that rule our household:
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