Way back in 1972, I was working high steel, and we were laying out new Butler steel roof panels. Craig and I had started the same week and worked well together. Walking 2-inch tops of the bar joists did not come easy, but we had mastered doing that. They connected to 4-inch-wide steel beams, which seemed like a wide sidewalk-in-the-sky after balancing on the 2-inch ribbons of steel. The new roof panels were greasy and wanted to slip from our grips, but we carried each one out across the maze of elevated steel to place them on top of the girders where they would soon be fastened, and then their seams rolled over using a heavy mechanized seam-roller machine.
As we turned to retrieve yet another roof panel, I heard metal buckling and turned to look at Craig, who was no longer topside! He had stepped on the end of a roof panel not supported by any underlying structural member, it buckled, and he now lay motionless some 30 feet below. Everyone scrambled to get down off the steel — Craig was not breathing. Floyd, our foreman, was the first to get to Craig and started on CPR, when Craig started breathing again. In the final analysis, nothing broken except for pride and the lone injury, aside from bruises, was a dislocated thumb. It was at that moment in time that I decided working high steel was not going to be my life’s work.