Women in construction: Four friends reminisce on careers in a male-dominated industry

It all started one afternoon in 1972 when Kay Bolyard was playing bridge with three of her friends.

One of the women was watching her nephew because her sister had gotten a job cleaning up a construction site.

“We sat there and thought, ‘Gosh, we could do that,’ ” Bolyard said.

The chance insight led the four women – Bolyard, along with Maureen Snider, Judie Hole and Janet Jones – into decadeslong careers in construction and roadwork, making them some of the first women in the city to join Local 238, the laborers union.

Now in their 70s, the women reflected on their careers over lunch recently, interrupting each other to finish stories and laugh over their early mishaps in the construction world.

Their first job was for Goebel Construction cleaning the Delaney Apartments following a renovation. They carried their own supplies and quickly learned how to work with acetone and remove stray paint splotches. It was hard work, but the four enjoyed a chance to be out of the house and take a break from child care.

Eager for work, they submitted the lowest bid for the job.

“At the end of it all, we put our hours in and found out we were getting about 10 cents an hour,” Hole laughed.

Early on, they were self-taught and didn’t always know the safest ways to do a job. The women recalled holding each other out of windows to clean the outside of buildings. Bolyard said she once dropped a screen out of a window while cleaning. She yelled that she’d dropped something and went to go grab it, only to run into the project superintendent on the way outside.

“He was just white and he said, ‘Kay, I thought you dropped Maureen out the window!’ ” Bolyard said.

The four had become friends a few years earlier. They all moved to Spokane around the same time and went to a newcomer’s social event to meet others. That led to bridge lessons, then a regular bridge-playing group that met at Hole’s house because her husband was often out of town for work.

Once, Bolyard said, they looked up from the game because they heard robins chirping and realized it was 5:30 a.m. They’d been playing bridge all night.

“We’ve been friends ever since,” Bolyard said.

The women took on their first construction job to earn extra money, but they kept at it. It wasn’t a planned career – they just never talked about quitting.

Before long, the women drew attention from the union. Jim Hawkins, who was a field agent at the time and went on to be president of Local 238, said the union thought cleaning jobs following construction rightfully belonged to their members.

The four were skeptical about membership at first but came around once they found out what prevailing union wages were. The union had also threatened to picket their work sites if they didn’t join, Snider said.

Neither the women nor Hawkins remembered the exact amount union workers made in 1973, but all said it was about $5 an hour, plus benefits and a pension.

“We got them a pretty good raise,” Hawkins said. “They turned out to be excellent, excellent hands, and there wasn’t a damn job they wouldn’t take and give it a try.”

They also got certifications and safety training so they could avoid future window mishaps.

Before long, the group was cleaning pavilions at Expo ’74. Their presence caused some static with the all-male crews they worked with, Jones said, and they even got spit on by some men. When workers finished a job, they held a party but told the women they couldn’t attend.

The four weren’t the first women to join the union, and Hawkins said a handful of others were members before. They earned some pushback from men who complained they were stealing jobs, but Hawkins said that group was small and their complaints never went anywhere.

“I was too ornery for them to get violent with me,” he joked. Aside from Expo and a few comments here and there, the women said they were mostly accepted. Their families and children supported their careers.

“He wore a suit and worked for IBM and I wore a hard hat,” Snider said, referring to her husband. Bolyard even went on to get her husband a job with the laborers.

As Expo construction neared its end, workdays got even longer. On the night before opening, the women got home from work at 5 p.m., only to be called back right away because the Montana pavilion still needed cleaning.

“We got home at 4 o’clock in the morning,” Hole said. She took a shower, kissed her kids and went back to Expo to see President Richard Nixon speak at 8 a.m. A 1975 Spokesman-Review article detailed their exploits, referring to each woman by her husband’s name and noting the work “has benefited their figures greatly, keeping them slim and trim.”

After a few seasons doing construction cleaning, the group decided to branch out into flagging, so they’d have something to do during the summer. Local 238 helped them get certified, and they started working on road crews.

“We very seldom worked an eight-hour day. It was 12, 16, 24, 32,” Jones said. “Thank God for the Crock-Pot.”

The group didn’t always stay together. Snider moved to New York for some time with her family. Jones left for Alaska and California and continued working in construction, then came back to Spokane in 1992. Hole left the industry and the city in the 1980s and moved to Anacortes with her new husband, then back to Spokane nine years later.

Snider, Bolyard and Jones all retired from the union in the late 1990s or early 2000s and draw a pension. Bolyard served as a union officer and remains active, still paying her dues.

While reminiscing, the four talked nearly without pause. They talked about blasting John Denver songs on a work site and their sometimes ill-timed efforts to take bathroom breaks while flagging on the side of the highway.

The flagging job let them occasionally swap stories of interesting drivers. Bolyard’s favorite was a man she stopped who had a baby chimpanzee in a diaper sitting in a car seat in the back of his car. When she told him he’d have to wait about 15 minutes for the road to open, he said “Oh good!” then took out a bottle and started feeding the chimp.

Each woman took away different things from the job. Snider said she’s always worked since she was 12 and would have found something else to keep busy. Even in her retirement, she runs the Cabinet Mountain Bar in Clark Fork, Idaho, where customers know her as “Sissy.”

For Jones, construction offered a chance to get away from the house and kids. Bolyard earned more than her husband for much of their careers, and, all said, they are able to have a comfortable retirement thanks to their pensions.

Their evening gatherings suffered because of the long hours at work, but in retirement, they’re able to spend social time together again.

“Thirty years later, we got back together to play bridge,” Hole said.