Description
Following weeks of fruitless 1970s job-hunting, new college graduate Mike Nolan was broke and miserable, sleeping on his sister’s couch. As a last resort, he signed on as a shipyard laborer, and discovered that the most worthwhile education often happens outside of a classroom. Indeed, when he toppled from the crow’s nest of the USS Roark while trying to impress the foreman, only his rote safety training kept him alive.
Desperate to keep his job after joining a primarily African American Ship Scalers Union No. 541, Mike lied about being a sandblaster. In reality, he knew nothing about the trade and deserved to be fired. Instead, his kind-hearted Black coworkers took the white kid under their wing, and the former honor student from a small, not-so-diverse college became “Brother Nols,” the only white sandblaster on the crew. His mentors included Eddie, on work release from prison, who sympathized with Mike’s situation and showed him the tricks of the trade, and U.S. Olympic rowing coxswain hopeful, Chris, who became his best friend.
Taking pride in his blue-collar life and developing immense respect for his fellow ship scalers, Mike’s entertaining accounts shine a light on the gritty, dangerous, yet still often humorous—world of heavy construction. Along the way, he offers insightful reflections on his growing self-awareness and empathy, ties between work and identity, and finally, his evolving perceptions surrounding race and privilege.
About the author
A native Washingtonian, Mike Nolan has worked as a dishwasher, a short-order cook, a sandblaster, a counselor, and a professional clam digger. After a thirty-year career as a guidance counselor in the public schools, he graduated and is now working as a writer. Mike and his wife Ann live in Port Angeles, Washington, where the Olympic Mountains meet the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. An earlier version of this book was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association (PNWA) Nonfiction/Memoir Literary Award, and in 2019, Tidepools, the art/literary magazine published by Peninsula College, awarded Mike Nolan first place in adult prose. His writing is included in the third volume of the Olympic Peninsula Authors anthology, and he has also had stories published in Flash Fiction Magazine, the Seattle Times, the Spokesman Review, and AAA Washington.
Recognition
“A strapping, big-hearted memoir of life on the Seattle waterfront.”
—Steve Olson, award-winning author of The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age and Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
“Mike Nolan had a bachelor’s degree in biology when he found himself in Seattle without a job in the late 1970s. He ended up waiting in line at a laborers union to snag a job in Seattle’s industrial shipyards, starting what he calls his second set of schooling. As a newcomer without any practical skills, he had to wait, listen, learn, and even lie a little to get into his new career. Then, as now, you do what it takes.”
—Allison Williams, Seattle Met Magazine
“Mike Nolan gives us an engrossing and refreshing look inside the blue collar world. From the intimate camaraderie of workers, to the triumph and heartbreak of life in the laboring trenches, Nolan’s book is a phenomenal journey.”
—Finn Murphy, Author of The Long Haul
“Hardhat Days could be subtitled: Remembrance of Shipyards Past. Mike Nolan’s memoir of working in Seattle shipyards in the 1970s and 80s caresses the gritty details with Proustian curiosity and affection, but without sentimentality. Finely etched portraits of shipyard workers come into focus, their friendships and hostilities, fears and elations. Vivid vignettes reconstruct the usually hard, sometimes dangerous jobs that were ‘scaler work.’ I worked as a ship scaler around the same time Mike did, and his evocation of sandblasting captures the dread of the simulation of World War One-era trench warfare that I recall. In the pre-Civil Rights Movement days, Ship Scalers Local 541 used to be the only shipyard union that welcomed Black members. Mike highlights the importance for them of union-wage industrial jobs with a potential management path in a desegregating workforce. In the wake of the emigration of shipyard jobs out of the U.S. during our era of deindustrialization, Hardhat Days shines a sharp light through the sandblasting haze on the emotional textures of a mostly lost industry and culture.”
—Peter Costantini, retired writer and former shipyard worker
“Hardhat Days is a coming-of-age story set against the grit and clang of Seattle’s shipyards in the late 1970s. Fresh out of college, a young man takes a union job blasting rust and barnacles off Navy vessels—and learns that not all education comes from books. With wry humor and raw detail, Mike Nolan captures the rhythms of blue-collar life and the unseen labor that keeps this country afloat.”
—Thomas Kohnstamm, author of Supersonic
