The True Book of Mostly Unrelated Stories: If I Had a Hammer

by John Mooy

If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land.

   And those are the first two lines of the Pete Seeger song, “If I had a Hammer,” which he wrote in 1949.  Seeger wrote a multitude of songs and was best known for being a voice for social justice.

   On the other hand, in my neighborhood in Marcellus in the mid to late nineteen fifties, most of us were following the beginning words to the song quite literally.  With hammers, saws, nails and boards we were learning the art of carpentry.  

   There were always boards that could be found and ideas we had to build something.

   We were sitting down on the beach several days ago watching our grandson Jack as he was armed with a hammer and his desire to learn how to drive a nail through a piece of wood. You may well recall holding the hammer by the handle up very close to the head of the hammer so you would have a bit more control while aiming at the head of a nail.  I sat and watched as Jack became a bit more proficient with each swing of the hammer.  Hand eye coordination.  And the joy he found when he successfully drove the nail all the way through the board and into the board underneath.  

   Clearly a lesson in mastering a skill.  Sometimes I think this is a bit of a lost art.  When I was Jack’s age, I remember two stories centering around the ability to use a hammer.  When the Cree Coach industry had a shop on Main Street you could wander in and watch the men working on the wooden structure that would become the frame for the Cree Coach.  Bernard Kahler, my neighbor, worked there for a while and I vividly recall how well he could operate a hammer.  It seemed he never missed the head of the nail and in doing so he could do something that we as kids could not, which was to avoid hitting our own thumb with the hammer.  Bernard could drive those nails flawlessly one right after another all day long.  He was a master.

   And right across the street from me lived Mr. And Mrs. Staley.  On occasion, I would go over to the Staleys and Mr. Staley would go with me down into their basement.  He would let me sit at his workbench with the overhead light on and he’d place a board on the bench in front of me. 

   As I recall the board was maybe a piece of 1” x 8” and maybe twenty inches in length.  Mr. Staley would produce a jar of nails with very tiny heads and that were, I’d say, an inch and a half in length. He then heightened the degree of difficulty by giving me not a regular hammer but a ball peen hammer and all afternoon I would sit there and pound those nails into the board.  The better I got the further out on the handle was my grip to establish more leverage.  

   Then it was time to take the skill out into the neighborhood.  We built forts, hot rods and wooden guns to occupy hours on end.  And just like anyone else learning this craft we bent over nails, split the wood we were attempting to attach and continue to hit our thumbs.

   And as the result of those miscues, we learned how to use the other end of the head on the hammer.  That was known as the claw and it helped us to pull out nails that had gone astray.

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   As for this article.  Well, I hope I nailed it.

Have a great week, Marcellus.
You’re the best.

Bonus:
A blacksmith said to his new helper, you see this piece of iron?
When I nod my head, you hit it as hard as you your hammer………………..those were his last words.  

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