Tall Stories, One Man's Window on the World

By Tom Barquinero

Paul Gasper can tell you stories.

Stories from the '40s, '50s and one or two from the '60s. That was quite a "high time," he recalls with a chuckle.

One story, from the '40s, takes place on Pine Street. It was a young morning workday and the chilly fog was whipping through the financial district like a hungry river through a mountain canyon. People on the sidewalks clutched their belongings with extra authority, their gaits more vigorous as they made their way to their offices.

However, to Gasper, this scene was all too familiar. He was dressed appropriately for the weather and the damp fog and he said it suited him because it made his job easier to do. From his vantage point, Gasper could see this was a morning to be savored.

On San Francisco days like this, others viewed him with wide-eyed awe, including Alice, a women he saw occasionally.

Alice approached Gasper with a cup of coffee and passed it to him through a window opening in her office on the 43rd floor. They enjoyed a few laughs and shared some banter as they always did when they met. Then they both returned to work, Alice never failing to comment that she was amazed at what Gasper did for a living - dangling on a rope outside her office building.

Gasper was a high rise window cleaner. Literally and figuratively, he was a professional sky scraper who squeegeed clean the outside windows of our city's tallest buildings. He spent his 31 year career working out-of-doors and way-up-high.

Now happily retired, with looks Robert Redford would envy, Gasper's stories provide a metro perspective that most terra firmas among us find fascinating.

Gasper's views of Baghdad by the Bay are only shared by an elite few, his fellow crew members of Local 44 S.E.I.U. - AFL, the Professional Window Cleaners of the Service Employees International Union, a powerful organization that has helped shape many a political outcome in San Francisco. No mere tall tales, the telling of the Gasper story is one that should help all of us see San Francisco with heightened appreciation.

Every story has a beginning and Gasper's begins in 1964, at the age of 27. He just arrived in San Francisco after working in the oil fields near Houston. Gasper quickly set up home for $11.50 a week at the old Irwin Hotel on Fourth Street and went out looking for work. A friend told him the union was always looking for good high-rise window cleaners, so he headed down to the union hall on Valencia Street. He remembers the experience to this day.

"A big guy behind the desk asked me if I could rig. I said yes. Then he asked me if I could run a Bolson chair. I said yes again. Then he told me to go 'sit on the bench.' So I went to sit on the bench and I sat there for a month. Everyday, just sitting on that bench from noon to 4 p.m., waiting to learn if I was going to get work the next day," Gasper said.

"You see, I was Portuguese/Irish and all the jobs were going to the Italians back then. But I had to let them know I was serious, so I just kept showing up. One day I got the call and that was it. A 34-year career before I retired, and I still have a hankering to go back up just about everyday."

Gasper loved his job. He talks enthusiastically about the process of the high-rise window cleaner's craft, about the respect he has for fellow colleagues and the pride the true pros in his field put in their work.

But the job was also tough at times.

"You always were getting laid off or fired. That's how it worked," he said. "Even when you quit a job to take a better one, the union would label it as a firing. But it was never a problem because you would just go down to the hall and get another assignment as fast as you wanted it. I moved around a lot because I wanted to clean windows on a new building or there were crews being assigned that I was friendly with. You had a lot of freedom in that respect."

Gasper has an old computer printout of his union activities. It lists hundreds of dates, building maintenance companies and discharge commentaries, including these entries from 1972:

1-04 Commercial

5-01 Fired

5-02 California

5-10 Quit

5-11 Whiteside

6-30 Fired

7-06 Garbarino

7-07 Laid off

7-10 Atlas

7-29 Laid off

Looking at the list, which goes on and on in a similar pattern through 1994, Gasper reminisces on the details of his various work assignments from years gone by. Particularly remarkable is his vivid recall of the locations of each job, facts that are not identified on the printout.

"See this Allied job, that was the Wells Fargo Building at 44 Montgomery," he said. "This one here, Clean Windows, Inc., was the Bank of America Building. Oh, and this Lovotti Brothers assignment, a very fine building at One Market Plaza. I loved being on that building."

Gasper is quick to describe the feeling of being up that high in the sky with a bucket, sponge and squeegee. He is an expert concerning the set-up, rigging and strapping of his trade - a trade that uses terms like Bolson chair, block n' tackle, U C and horse hooks, "sky genies," scaffolding, 60-foot-tall extension ladders and half-inch manila line rope.

"You'd get up on the roof about 6 a.m. and prepare your tackle. Hang the best hook over the firewall and tie it back to something secure. You'd check your lines and check them again. Then go over the side to do your drops."

The work was always assigned as a series of drops, with window cleaners typically covering four to six drops on a six-hour shift. That means four to six stories of windows have to be cleaned on all four sides of a building during that shift.

During that time Gasper would sit in a leather-strapped swing-like chair, while running his rope pulley up and down while kicking his feet out to swing laterally left and right. The faster they moved, the more glass territory got covered.

"But we were really pros," Gasper says. "The work had to get done and the professionals who stayed in this field took pride in it. Plus, the foreman would always know if it was done sloppy, so you always strived to do a great job.

"The only thing I'll add is that your time was your own. You'd always work in pairs with a partner and we'd always try to beat the shift clock in finishing your drops. If you got done a few hours ahead of time, good for you, you're done for the day. Go get a good lunch."

In flipping through Gasper's photo collection, there are numerous up-close pictures of Gasper's and his partner's wristwatches proudly displaying the early finishing time of work assignments. The need for speed was one of the thrills of the profession.

But the biggest thrill was danger's adrenaline rush. Gasper starts sounding like a retired pro football player talking about Sunday afternoons when the risks of sky-scraping come up.

"First, there's the fear. That's why we checked our rigs over and over again. In fact, I wouldn't work with a partner who didn't express fear about the job. If you didn't fear this profession, you were not a professional. Plain and simple as that," Gasper said.

"Ah, but when you climb over that building's ledge, you get a high you don't get anywhere else. It's indescribable. When you're up in the air on the outside of a building, no one can touch you but the man upstairs."

And sometimes the man upstairs came touching.

Gasper speaks hesitantly about the subject, and he gets choked up a bit when he does. He knows a handful of guys who have died on the job and many others, including himself, who had near fatal accidents.

But the saddest story, he says, is about his best friend Mike Valero, his first partner.

"I worked with Mike Valero off and on ever since day one. He was doing block n' tackle between the sixth and seventh floors of a building on the campus of the University of California Berkeley and his rope split on him. He plunged to his death - died from internal bleeding. It hit me hard. We were close. He taught me how to rig, for heaven's sake."

As for Gasper's near-fatal accident, he blames it on pigeon manure and a woman.

"You see, a lot of buildings have pigeon droppings all over. It's a big problem," he said.

"I'm looking at a woman inside the office building and she's looking at me. She smiles, I smile back, you know how it goes. Anyway, I'm crossing over my strap, doing what we call an eagle spread to get from right to left, and I'm not really looking at what I'm doing. I take a step on this ledge and slip on a pile of pigeon manure and lose my footing, dropping between floors in the process. I banged off the building a few times hard going down so I'm dazed and confused. I'm damn lucky my strap held me. The woman was shocked. She came to the window, looked down and tried to make a joke of it. Then she realized what happened and she started to cry. It wouldn't have been the first time a window cleaner died from slipping on pigeon manure."

With a humble sigh, Gasper switches the subject and talks about what he loved the most during his 34-year career.

"You know what I miss most? The beauty of it all. Breathtaking beauty. Sights only a few of us can say we've seen. We'd be on the side of a building and the sun would peek through the fog and you'd see the tip of the Transamerica Building or a glorious view of Alcatraz.

"You'd stop what you're doing and just watch for awhile. The streets sounds muffled from below and there was no one around who could jump up and get you. You had time to reflect on your thoughts. It was peace on Earth. In fact that's why many of us kept getting fired from jobs - we heard they were looking for window cleaners for another building cross town and we'd say, hey, I haven't been upside that building yet - wonder what the views are like from there."

And there he goes again, Paul Gasper telling more tall stories.

Tom Barquinero is a partner at Steve Martin & Tom LLC, an advertising and marketing services agency. He can be reached at tbarquinero@att.net.