She didn’t quit, she didn’t cry, she became a carpenter

When Tenika Chavis’ husband was in the Army overseas six years ago, she was working, fretting about the repairs their South Oakland home needed.

She worked nights cleaning banks. Her mother baby-sat her two daughters. When she could afford a contractor, the work was often shoddy or incomplete.

“I thought I could learn to do it better than that,” she said, “and if I could learn to make my own repairs, I could make money doing repairs for other people.”

She couldn’t have imagined her path to self-reliance would lead onto a bridge above Route 51, where she would be the only woman, and the only African-American, on a crew of heavy highway carpenters.

A few years before, in college, she had prepared for a career in information science and technology, graduating from Penn State University. But her first “dream job” hogged her life, from before daylight to long after dark. She never saw her daughters.

Other forces were tugging at her, too, notably an entrepreneurial spirit.

Ms. Chavis, 36, grew up in Prattville, Ala., sort of. The family moved a lot because her father’s work was erratic.

“By the time I was 17, we had lived in 23 places,” she said, pausing to let that sink in.

Her mother left her father when Tenika was 12 and moved her five children to Clairton to stay with a friend. Pittsburgh took hold.

After leaving the IT job, Ms. Chavis worked for social service agencies, then started her own cleaning company, but she wasn’t making enough. Home repairs seemed more lucrative.

She began taking basic construction classes, then found some property investors who would train her in property management.

“They taught me how to evaluate real estate, how to do repairs, how to fill out a sales contract, how to do comparative property analysis, and if they needed a door unlocked at 4 a.m., they couldtext me,” she said.

“Then I heard the union had a program” for apprentice labor, “and I took every job they offered.”