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TOOLS were a part of life when I was a boy in blue-collar Brooklyn after World War II. Men carried their tools to work in the dark mornings, jammed into leather belts, or slung over shoulders, or gripped in gloved hands against the cold. They carried those tools with a certain pride, like prizefighters with gym bags; they were symbols of work and skill.
In the evenings, the subways were salty with the aromas of perspiration and labor and the men planted their backs against the doors, with their tools at their feet. In memory, those working men were all hard and courteous, but grave, even solemn; more likely, they were simply exhausted. But one memory is absolutely clear: no kid ever told them to get out of the way.
Tools helped such men form families, raise kids, put food on kitchen tables. But tools weren't simply a means of earning a living. They were essential to life in the places where working people lived. In those much leaner times, damaged goods could not be thrown away and then replaced by the latest models; they had to be repaired. No agents of landlords or the state would arrive to make minor repairs; tenants did most of that work themselves. And so every flat in blue-collar New York contained a toolbox. Ours was one of them.
"Get me the toolbox," my father would growl on a Saturday morning, his voice already burred by whiskey and cigarettes. "We've got a job to do. . . ."
My brothers and I would rush to the closet and dig out the battered dark-green metal toolbox and lay it upon the kitchen table (no workshop in those cramped tenement rooms). Then, with a metallic unsnapping of locks, the lid would lift -- open sesame! we'd sometimes shout -- and suddenly, magically, there were the tools, lying in almost sacramental order: hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, clamps; a metal file, a spirit level, a plumb bob and a soldering iron; shears for cutting metal and pliers for braiding wire. Tools: the nouns of work.
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