Imagine being not just a good bricklayer, but one of the world's best.
Ken Rutley doesn't have to imagine.
Rutley is a Canadian bricklayer who once placed second at the Spec Mix
Bricklayer 500 national bricklaying championship. It was held in Las Vegas.
"It was absolutely amazing," says Rutley. "The only way I can describe
it is it's like the NASCAR of bricklaying. They pump it up -- loudspeakers,
big screen TV, everything. It's pretty amazing if you're in the trade."
Rutley and the other contestants had to lay as many bricks as possible
on a 26-foot, double-row brick wall in one hour. He managed to lay 818 bricks
with no deductions (the judges took away points if there were imperfections
in the quality of the work).
Rutley's stellar bricklaying earned him $4,000 in cash and assorted prizes,
including a steel chop saw and a bag of masonry tools.
"They give you a set of rules you need to follow and if you go outside
of those rules then they start deducting brick off your final count, and so
I always try to stay within those guidelines," says Rutley. "I stayed within
all of them so I had no deductions, and everybody else seemed to have deductions,
and that's what got me the place that I did."
The following year Rutley returned to the competition, but only as a judge.
"I ended up rupturing a disc in my back, so I wasn't able to compete,"
Rutley explains.
Injuries like that are constant dangers in bricklaying. It's extremely
demanding work. For this reason, bricklayers often move into management roles
when they get older.
"It definitely is hard once you get older," says Rutley. "It's hard on
the body, it wears on your body, but there are quite a few older bricklayers
that are still doing it.
"After a few years obviously the preferred thing is to try and get into
management, that's for sure," Rutley adds. "That's the reason I bought into
the company." He's part owner of a bricklaying company.
"We've actually got a couple of guys working for us now that are 50 and
over," Rutley says. "And they're still able to do it. Obviously, we try and
give them the easier end of the work, and try to leave the harder stuff for
the young guys."
Bob Ahlers got into the masonry field in 1962 and since then he's done
it all. He now has his own masonry company and is president of the Arizona
Masonry Contractors Association. Ahlers started as a laborer for his father-in-law,
then became a bricklayer, then a foreman, then a superintendent, then he got
into estimating, and then he started his own masonry business.
"The masonry business gives a person the opportunity to do just what I
did -- work my way right up to owning my own business," says Ahlers.
Ahlers says there are many qualities that a bricklayer should have.
"I would think someone that enjoys working with their hands, has good hand-eye
coordination skills, and they need to physically be pretty fit," says Ahlers.
"I mean, this isn't for somebody that can't take hard work. This is a hard
job, a physically demanding job. A block can weigh like 31 pounds, and it's
a one-handed unit, and... depending on what type of work you're doing, [you
need] to pick those up and set them to the line anywhere from 150 times a
day to 400 times a day."
The extreme physical demands of bricklaying have traditionally kept women
away from the labor side of the industry. But there is a growing number of
women teaching at colleges and working as engineers in the masonry industry.
One example is Christine Subasic. She's a consulting architectural engineer
in the masonry industry. She's also the editor of Sustainability E-News for
The Masonry Society.
Subasic's consulting work is focused on sustainable design. Her clients
include trade associations and brick and block manufacturers.
Subasic says the masonry industry benefits from environmental concerns
and the move toward sustainable building designs. "Certainly from the standpoint
of durability and longevity, [brick] has got over a hundred-year lifespan,"
says Subasic. "The products themselves are very durable. It has inherent thermal
properties, as far as the massiveness of it, that make it energy efficient.
"Also, some of the products have recycled content in them -- block especially,
but some brick as well," says Subasic. "They can all be recycled at the end
of life... They can be recycled by being ground up and then used in either
new product or other applications. Block can become fill, sometimes you see
brick chips for landscaping -- that's just crushed brick."
Its environmental friendliness is just one more reason to consider a career
in bricklaying. It's an industry that offers the chance to build a solid career
-- one brick at a time.