We seem to have this in common, my mother was a night club entertainer, singer, pianist and entertainer, she performed some of her acts for us 3 kids at times, Put the Blame on Mame, Wish I could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, etc., I guess that is why I'm so well acquainted with music of all eras and kinds. Our father remarried and we hardly saw him. We moved to the country, and she became a gun toten sure shot Calamity Jane and self-appointed Human Society. We were always putting burnt motor oil on mangy straw dogs and picking up cats.
I think my father's first job was delivering ice to homes. He was born 1894. He drove a horse and buggy to deliver the ice in Palo Alto. He and his brother had always worked for their father, a building contractor, until each struck out on his own. During WW2, he worked as a civilian liaison between the military and internees at Camp Manzanar and an earlier camp where there had been some kind of riot. He interviewed or maybe just visited with the Japanese, found out what they needed - extra blankets, special food, writing paper, whatever - and arranged for them to get it. Before that he had worked in construction, especially schools. Afterwards, supervising a community home construction project for GI homes near Berkeley, then a building superviser in Oklahoma - school and university buildings. He took me with him, when I was 6 or 7 I guess, for overnight stays, where I roamed some of the buildings under construction, learned the smells and feels of wood, nails, cement, and discovered why they kept a bucket of cement in the office.
To test. I thought they just poured the concrete and that was it, that they already knew it was good. But no, they had a last stage quality control check. They checked the concrete after a while for whatever could go wrong - crumbling, I suppose. I didn't think to ask, "Well, what if you decide you don't like the concrete, do you unbuild the building!?" I don't know if testing has gotten lax, or the quality of concrete diminished and builders stopped caring. Because I have been in many buildings with horrible concrete. One example, we were all excited about a brand new library at a university where I worked. It was a magnificent change from the old library. So we thought. The first day that it rained, in less than an hour, rainwater was seeping through the walls. Sometimes older is better.