An HVAC love story
It was not “women’s work” at the time, but Grampa got a job application from a young woman who was very skilled with heating systems
I always knew that my grandpa was a successful business owner, but I never knew much more than that. He was a grumpy old man by the time I came around, and never particularly kind of friendly towards me. This made it all the more surprising when he reached out to me last year and asked if I would help him write his memoirs. He had read some of my journalism work from college, and thought I was the right choice to help him tell his story. At first I thought memoirs about the HVAC industry would be dull, but I could not have been more wrong. It turns out that grandpa was the first man in this area to hire female HVAC techs. Before that point, women were only allowed to be secretaries or office drones, and not allowed to work with the furnaces. It was not “women’s work” at the time, but Grampa got a job application from a young woman who was very skilled with heating systems. He broke the “gender line” and made her a full heating installation tech, something that a lot of the male employees didn’t like. Grandpa told them all to accept this woman as a heating expert of equal standing to the men, or they would be fired. He lost twenty good heating techs that day, he said, but replaced them with new, better people, including a lot more women! That first female heating expert that grandpa hired was very well known to me, because one day she would be my grandma!