"a job for the boys"

From "On Building A House" by Rev. Jesse Halsey, circa 1930

Hoover says that building a house, under modern conditions in Ameria, is as difficult as negotiating a foreign treaty. Having gone into Russia and Poland on diplomatic errands during the war for the State Department, I agree.

I had been having miserable headaches. "No cure;" "Vacuum;" "Inherited," "Grin and bear it;" said a procession of doctors. But from one, "Exercise and serum."

The inoculations each morning at the hospital made me more miserable than ever, and work in the study became impossible. I don't like golf, so I bought some back lots at the top-notch prices of three years ago and, after the morning visit to the hospitil, would get into overalls and go to gardening in these lots five miles from where I live.

Summer was coming on. I have two boys in their late teens with some practical ability. They wanted excercise, but don't like gardening.

Charles Henry Halsey, 1932

I neglected to say that I am a preacher, in a church in the quarter of our city considered fashionable. But, having been a missonary with some responsibilites for business and building enterprises, I am not altogether ignorant of construction, and the problems connected with building. Having grown up on a farm, the use of a saw, axe, shovel, pipe threading tools, and a soldering iron has for a long time been in my equipment, though seldom useful in the sort of parish that I now serve.

Frederick Isham Halsey, 1932

I needed more violent exercise to combat the 'misery' induced by the serum, and a job for the boys, so we set out to build a house on one of our vacant lots. My more-or-less crude sketches an architect friend put into drawings would be intelligible at the City Hall; and then we started.