Buoying the value of blue-collar work
Our friend Steph Perry is hands-on at Yellow Bird Cafe in Harrisburg, which she owns with husband Ammon. She’s the perfect model for our Working Hard in Harrisburg Tee.
The shaggy middle-aged man approached the Stay table at the Harrisburg Flea in March 2024 wearing an Appalachian Brewing hat and tee or sweatshirt under his jacket.
He confirmed that he worked at the brewery, and I pointed out our Graupner’s Silver Stock Lager Tee, which honors a long-ago brew by a long-gone Harrisburg brand.
I had learned in December that Appalachian was resurrecting Silver Stock Lager with its own recipe. I asked him whether it was available in cans or only on tap.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m only a dishwasher.”
Maybe he should have known, or maybe he wasn’t told. I found my answer on Appalachian’s website (draft and bottles), but what really struck me was the man’s seeming dismissal of his position.
We all have our roles to play in this working life. In the maker community, Stay is at the bottom of the pecking order in that we don’t sew our own tees and we use an outside printer. We are dilettantes relative to the artisans who hand-craft jewelry, candles, leather, etc.
But what we lack in maker bonafides, Stay makes up for by championing American labor, the makers, yes, and the doers, and the fruits of their efforts. (Have you seen our Working Hard in Harrisburg Tee or visited our Made in USA Shopping Directory yet?)
‘Sweep streets like Michelangelo’
For too long in America, we’ve dismissed and diminished the contributions of blue-collar workers and the value of labor in all its permutations. We pushed too many young men and women into college when maybe their true talents were better fit for a vocational education.
In rank of importance in my everyday life, I’ll put a plumber, an electrician or an auto mechanic miles ahead of any lawyer, accountant or business executive.
In May 1964, a year after his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in San Diego about the value of work.
“We must set out to do a good job and to do that job so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. And so to carry to one extreme, if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.’
Showing up to your job every day, performing it to the best of your ability, setting an example for co-workers, caring about customers, there’s great value and beauty in that.
As I’m finishing this, the waste truck has made its weekly pass down the alley behind my house. The men today are working in the rain; often it’s frigid or sweltering. I am ever grateful for the service they provide.
To the man from Appalachian Brewing: only a dishwasher? Hardly. I’m looking forward to having a Silver Stock Lager, confident it will come in a clean glass.