b"Where did you work?Well, as a trainee, I went to Langston Hughes Houses in Brownsvillefor about two years.Then after two years, I got promoted to maintenance worker and I went on to other projects, like Farragut Houses. That isby the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After a year or so, I got transferred to a project opening up in Williamsburg, Borinquen Plaza. It was brand new and through recommendations, I was able to call up the superintendent. They took me on as a maintenance worker and we opened the buildings one at a time. It was a great experience, because you stop you go inand you get to work with the intercoms and not charge into everything, but everything opened gradually. That was a goodexperience. We had a lot to say, we were very close, it was a small family at Borinquen Plaza. We built one building, 160 Boerum Street and that was done. Then we opened up the other building, that's where they put the management office. Now there's quite a few buildings, but I was there from the beginning, in on the ground floor. So, it was interesting, it was rewarding, it was good.Where did you go after that?Well, what I used to do during those years was I worked all day and then at night time, I used to find myself comingto lower Manhattan. The Smith Houses used to have classes. Across the way, there's Metropolitan Vocational High School.They used to have courses on steam distribution, heating plant operations. And that prepared me for future examinations,for promotion. I used to get home 9:30, 10 o'clock to my wife, Grace. It wasn't easy, but it paid off, years later. I was ableto get the promotion. I took the civil service test, and I became Assistant Resident Building Superintendent. I was incharge of all provisional staff. It was set up by someone else and here I'm in charge of all the carpenters, bricklayers,glaziers, maintenance workers, you know, and we were rehabbing Red Hook. We would take on one building at a timeand we used to go and we made certain repairs. We had incinerator chutes; do you know what that is? Incinerators? Well,what they used to do, some of the tenants, some of the kids, they used to take them out and drop them out of the windowand throw them. This was iron andDangerous! people could get killed. So, with the guys, I had a crew that were rivet-ers, we used to anchor them.This was in Red Hook?I was the Assistant Superintendent in charge of the crew. There was the East [Red Hook] and West [Red Hook][houses] and we did both while I was there. From Red Hook, then I worked with modernization because the people thatwere in charge in 250 Broadway, they wanted me back to repair certain windows. In the Coney Island area, because of thesalty air- the ocean, the windows would rust. We had to make repairs.Were you sent out to different places then?Yeah. The person that was in charge, Mr. Snyder, he liked me and then he saw this assignment that [he] thought wasgood for me, even though I had to go all the way to Queens, near Park Houses in South Jamaica. It was a group of homesfrom the federal government that were boarded-up. They thought for not too much money, they could rehabilitate thesehomes. They thought they could either sell them or rent them to qualifying tenants and . We did quite a bit of work likethat. They called them FHA-acquired homes. They were throughout all the neighborhoods here. I was driving, go here,there. I also was coordinating with the South Jamaica Water, that's the tap water they drink. We don't get the same water,81 "