“You Oughta Be in Pictures” – Transcript

[INTRO/MUSIC PLAYING]

VERONICA CAREY
But we do have the ability to change the world.

PAUL FLANAGAN
In my world, I’ve never anticipated easy.

AROUTIS FOSTER
We’re also trying to change the paradigm.

CHARLES COOK
We’re more than just a collection of hammers and saws.

KRISTEN BETTS
It is such an exciting opportunity to really change brains.

JOE HANCOCK
We always lose touch with common things that everyone uses and where they come from.

MAURICE BAYNARD
Welcome to Drexel’s 10,000 Hours Podcast. Our goal is to mine the stories behind our region’s innovators, inventors, and thought creators. We’ll be talking to experts in subjects from fashion to neuroscience to find out where their passion for work and inspiration for ideas comes from. I’m your host, Maurice Baynard.

CHARLES COOK
We would love to have people spend more time with us, because we’re more than just a collection of hammers and saws.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAURICE
Master builder, writer, director, and history buff Charles Cook, an assistant clinical professor in Drexel University’s Construction Management program in the College of Engineering, can do it all. As a member of the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia, he knows a lot about what it took to build this city and the secrets behind some of its most iconic structures.

MAURICE
Yeah, I’d really love to start by you talking about where you grew up, what your parents did, and how that influenced your later professional choices in life.

CHARLES
OK.

MAURICE
Yeah, because that seems like a really interesting story about what your father was interested in, and what he did, and what his expertise was sort of laid the foundation for your own. Yeah, I’d start there.

CHARLES
He always wanted to be a builder. His father and his uncle, all of his uncles– he had five my uncles– were builders in some fashion– carpentry.

MAURICE
Was your grandfather a tradesman as well?

CHARLES
He was a tradesman initially. And then he worked his way up through night school to be with a major company at that time. And one of the exciting projects that my grandfather did was the Circle Theater here in Philadelphia.

Now, imagine this. It’s the middle of the Depression. It’s the middle of the summer. It’s in August that it’s to open up.

MAURICE
Wow, OK, so it’s like summer of 1933–

CHARLES
Yeah.

MAURICE
–’33, ’34– got it.

CHARLES
Yup. It’s to be the first air-conditioned theater in Philadelphia. And theaters and movie theaters in those days, you could fit 3,000 people in this theater. So people were going to come to this–

MAURICE
It’s going to be pretty packed.

CHARLES
This is going to be important. People are coming. And in fact, it was so important Jack Warner from California from the studios, Warner Brothers studios, was coming out for the opening very, very important.

But one problem– first air-conditioned theater, and the chillers weren’t going to work. So my grandfather– the show must go on. You’ve got a construction project. You’ve got to finish it. So what he did was he got giant blocks of ice.

MAURICE
I knew there was going to be big blocks of ice involved, and fans– really giant fans–

CHARLES
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

MAURICE
–involved in this story. I already know this story.

CHARLES
And nobody knew the difference.

MAURICE
You can’t even tell, except you couldn’t hear the film over the fans. Blah.

CHARLES
Whatever. Just turn up the volume, right? OK? But it opened. So my father’s father was very much involved.

So the family had always been involved. But my father thought he would be a trades carpenter until that day that someone asked him if he’d like to go to college. And sure enough he did.

MAURICE
So he decides to go to college, and what happens?

CHARLES
Well, he goes to college, and he becomes employed by United Engineers and Constructors. He went around the country quite a bit until he arrived in Rhode Island and met a sweet young thing named Hope. And so they got married, and he started to settle down a little bit.

The war interfered. They had their first child, my brother. World War II came about. And when he did get home from service in the war–

MAURICE
What branch of the military?

CHARLES
He was in the Army Corps of Engineers.

MAURICE
There you go.

CHARLES
And in fact, he was there at Remagen Bridge, the last bridge across the Rhine that the Germans hadn’t destroyed.

MAURICE
Wow, that’s an amazing story.

CHARLES
So worked on that. He was always involved, and I was always tangentially involved in construction. But I had a desire I guess to also do media production and get involved in theater or ultimately television or whatever.

But then one day my father said, there’s your desk. Sit at it. And I guess I got the message from that point forward.

MAURICE
But it seems like you’ve been trying to marry the two the entire time.

CHARLES
Oh, absolutely.

MAURICE
Even with your father’s support or ignoring him.

CHARLES
Well, he was the one who said you can do both, and I’ve given it a try anyway.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CHARLES
I was very fortunate. I was elected a member of the Carpenters’ Company here in Philadelphia, and I did a movie related to the Carpenters’ Company that ultimately received a regional Emmy nomination.

MAURICE
Absolutely. We’re definitely going to get to your Emmy, but I want to talk about your earlier work. So I’m assuming that Moving the Gruber Wagon Works was something that you wrote, produced–

CHARLES
Yeah, I did it. The whole idea there was the Corps of Engineers. And this was an absolute combination of construction and video.

The Corps of Engineers were building a dam, which is typical of what they do. But what was going to happen is we were going to lose under water the last example of wagon construction, 19th-century wagon construction, in the United States.

And the core had enough funds to actually move the Gruber Wagon Works, but nobody was sure it could be done. It was such an old building. It had been put together in such almost Rube Goldberg fashion that they put out bids to see if people could do it.

We had– and I can’t take full credit for this, because the architect that we’ve worked with before, National Heritage, they had a very good record. And they had already done some investigating related to the Gruber Wagon Works. They had done a historical report on it.

So we teamed up with them, and we put together what turned out to be the best price as far as the Corps was concerned. And then we decided, now we got to move it.

MAURICE
Now it’s got to be done.

CHARLES
Yeah, now it’s got to be done. And there was a deadline– again, a deadline on this. Just as the Circle Theater had to open on time, that dam was going to be finished. And the waters were going to back up, and you had to have the Gruber Wagon Works out of there.

MAURICE
Right. So the Wagon Works is this historic 19th century or 18th–

CHARLES
19th– 19th-century wagon works.

MAURICE
19th-century all-wood wagon works. And as I remember it from the film, it’s full of the things that they use to build wagons, that when you walked in it, it was as if everyone who used to work there had just walked away one day. And so it has all this antiquity in it, and you’re going to try to pick it up and move it how far?

CHARLES
Well, it was seven and a half miles. We were going to move it seven and a half miles. And what got us the bid, we were convinced, is the Corps had an idea of what route to take.

And we decided, we’re actually going to shoot across a cornfield if we can get permission from the owner. And so we did. We secretly talked to the owner. He says, well, it’s going to be the wintertime. I’m not using the field.

MAURICE
So as I recall, the strategy you fell upon was to kind of cut the entire building in half?

CHARLES
Well, in quarters, actually. it was in four pieces now. These pieces weighed several tons– 70, 80 tons.

MAURICE
How long did you have to move it? This was a two day.

CHARLES
Well, we were awarded the contract in very late June. We had from that point until February of the next year to move it. So we had a lot of time to plan, but the actual moves took place in basically four weeks’ time. The Corps expected us to match the joints as close as possible. And today, if you go there and you look at those joints, they are perfect.

MAURICE
I wouldn’t even be able to tell that the building had moved there.

CHARLES
That’s right.

MAURICE
It’s pretty amazing. So that combined kind of your love of film. Was that your first documentary that you had made?

CHARLES
Yes, it was. Yeah.

MAURICE
And so did you learn some major lessons from both working the project and filming the project?

CHARLES
Well, yeah, I– certainly the lessons are, much of what you apply to doing a film or much of what you apply to doing a construction project are the same things. Planning and scheduling become absolutely essential. You have to worry about safety.

And one of the things about construction projects is they’re not the safest areas. You have to plan for safety. And you also have to find the best place, safety-wise, to film it from and such like that.

But schedule will help you with cost in both construction and in video. And in fact, when I did the video– this is jumping forward, and we can come back to Gruber. But when I did the video for Carpenters’ Hall, the movie– a 100-minute film that I did for that– the last day, we had someone on set who had been on many, many projects.

And he came up to me at the end, and he said, there’s no way you could have done this. There’s no way I thought you could have accomplished what you did in shooting, and I’ve never seen that done professionally. How did you do it? And I says, I applied the same principles we do in construction of planning and scheduling.

MAURICE
That’s pretty amazing. So filmmaking is like engineering and construction, just at least in the way in which you both plan and execute the final product.

CHARLES
That’s exactly right.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAURICE
OK, so let’s talk about Carpenters’ Hall. So is Tete a Tete– which is your work on the Franco-American alliance?

CHARLES
Absolutely.

MAURICE
So I think we have to talk about the Franco-American alliance, because while some of us paid attention in fourth-grade history class, not everybody knows that the French came to our aid. So how about the background? Like, what was going on with the Americans and the French?

CHARLES
Sure. Well, one of the issues was we as colonies, as the 13 colonies, had no hope whatsoever of winning a war against England, the most powerful–

MAURICE
We weren’t going to win? You’re running counter to all of our national myths here.

CHARLES
Right. Right. But we weren’t.

MAURICE
Right, let’s just be honest.

CHARLES
There was no possibility. And in fact, as it all works out, as the revolution worked out, it was the French that made it possible. But here’s the interesting aspect that few people realize. And in fact, related to Carpenters’ Hall, I always say that there are three events that took place at Carpenters’ Hall, which if they had never taken place, we’d be singing “God Save the Queen” with an English accent.

MAURICE
We’d be Canada. There we go.

CHARLES
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

MAURICE
Got it.

CHARLES
That’s exactly right. But one of those events was what I was to make the film about. And the French were very eager. They were very eager to see if these colonies really were going to revolt against England. They saw it and thought they saw it as an opportunity to get themselves back into North America, that the British had pretty much effectively moved them out.

Here’s the interesting thing. Franklin, he was a chess player. We know Ben Franklin was a chess player. So he was always thinking several moves ahead. He had a belief that democracy was going to take place.

But he knew that if we have a democracy, the underpinning, the most important part of democracy, is educated populace. So he wanted to form a library. He decides that he needs a librarian, because he’s not going to be there full-time.

MAURICE
He’s busy printing books.

CHARLES
Exactly.

MAURICE
He’s got stuff to do.

CHARLES
Exactly.

MAURICE
Right.

CHARLES
So he hires the one person that we know of that speaks French in Philadelphia, and he hires him as his librarian. Now, we’re not sure– nothing in his diary says that he was thinking this far ahead. But he knew that we were going to need an ally, and he knew that the real ally would be France.

So he hires Francis Daymon as his– and he starts to learn French from Francis Daymon, knowing that he may be dealing with them shortly. What happens here is just an extraordinary coincidence of history or maybe fate, if you believe in such things, because the French are getting very interested.

And they decide to send over what we would call a spy to find out, are these colonies actually going to try and pull this war off? So a French spy– I’ve talked with the descendants of this person, and they prefer ambassador, but either way.

MAURICE
One man’s spy is another man’s ambassador.

CHARLES
That’s true. We’re finding that out, aren’t we?

MAURICE
Indeed.

[LAUGHTER]

CHARLES
So in any event, Julien Achard de Bonvouloir comes over, and he doesn’t know who to contact. But he does know that this Parisian-born Francis Daymon is living in Philadelphia, so he goes to him. And Francis Daymon says, wow, you got to meet my employer, Ben Franklin. He’s in the middle of all this revolution stuff.

So for three nights between Christmas and New Year’s of 1775, Francis Daymon acting as interpreter for Julien Achard de Bonvouloir, and Ben Franklin, and also John Jay was there at the time. They meet, and they actually solidify the concept of a treaty between the French and the Americans, and, in fact, from that night forward, although it took a little time for the letters to get sent back to France–

MAURICE
Email’s slow.

CHARLES
Yeah.

MAURICE
Got it.

CHARLES
It was.

From that point forward, 80% of the gunpowder that was used in the revolution was coming from France. And so we basically had the understanding Franklin was going to get an invitation to go over to Paris and form a formal treaty. But we basically had the treaty from those meetings.

MAURICE
So I always feel like talking to you is this education in both building– well, those two things– building and faith, or building an Americana and history. And so there are so many things in and around Philadelphia that you have these kind of unique insights into.

So I was wondering maybe if I could get you to talk about how innovation and buildership came together to make Philadelphia not just a unique place but a unique metropolis that it would kind of become?

CHARLES
One of the issues that most of us don’t give enough credit to is, William Penn really wanted a green country town. He’s credited with that, but we don’t really understand that. But he wanted parks. He wanted a system of recreation for people.

And one of the– well, two of the issues that William Penn should be credited for is, he experienced the fire of London, which destroyed and killed many, many people. He did not want a city of that nature, so you see a lot of the colonial is masonry buildings. So he wanted them as fireproof as possible, not that they were totally fireproof– as fireproof as possible.

But he also wanted buildings designed in orthogonal methods, which is 90-degree streets so that streets were easily accessed, and you could easily get from one place to another. But at the end of no street would be a government building or a religious building. He wanted it to be a democracy in construction.

And he really truly wanted people living in a democracy. And in early Philadelphia– it’s a beautiful thing, and we have to figure out how to do it again, is we had rich and poor people living on the same block together. Tradespeople, the President of the United States– everyone was living together.

Now, there were some problems at that time, and the president was contributing to them. But everyone was working and living together in the same area. There wasn’t the segregation that we see today through economics, let’s say. But Penn should be credited with structurally creating a democracy.

But then, going back to the green country town, one of the things that most people don’t realize about Penn is he wanted to ventilate the city. Now, you have to realize that cities were not all that clean. Bedpans were emptied out windows and things like that, so you needed to ventilate the city.

He created eight sets of steps, only one of which partially still remains. But he created eight sets of steps from the city level down to the river level to literally bring that freshwater air through the city and ventilate it.

It’s a concept that he deserves a lot of credit for. I don’t think most people realize it. And unfortunately, today there’s only about a dozen steps left of that. But they’re there.

MAURICE
That’s pretty amazing.

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MAURICE
Dr. Charles Cook, thank you for being on the 10,000 Hours.

CHARLES
Wow. Thank you.

CHARLES
The 10,000 Hours podcast is powered by Drexel University Online.

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