He made the grade, the one this city is built on
Jim Kneller helped build many of the city’s major projects
Jim Kneller clamps his hand onto mine as we shake at the front door of his house, just east of King and Pottruff, in a neighbourhood which he helped smooth the way for, literally, a few decades ago.
Jim tells me he’s on the home stretch to the big “nine-0” (his birthday’s in March) but he looks far younger. Square-jawed, robust, and he’s got a grip like … well, like a heavy equipment operator. You remember a handshake like that.
He started work in 1949, loading sand for Ready Mix on the dock by the beach bridge when the Skyway was just sky. He kept getting bigger jobs.
“I lifted 25 feet of slag into the Parkdale Works,” he says, leafing through the pages of a book. He keeps this photo album/ job ledger in which are recorded, in pictures and in words, the outlines of a long and great career. Just about every project he ever worked on over the course of nearly 45 years. He retired in the early 1990s.
The list is like a contour map of the city’s central nervous system. He helped build and shape the things, the infrastructure, that makes this city run: Stelco’s Parkdale Works (now gone); the Garth Street reservoir; Mount Hope airport; Jolley Cut; the Royal Botanical Gardens; a part of the Skyway Bridge; Piers 25, 26 and 27; several golf courses (King’s Forest, Beverly, etc.); Chedoke ski slope (now gone) and many great parks (Sam Lawrence, Sackville Hill), Puddicombe Farms; Lime Ridge Mall; Meadowlands. More.
He runs his finger down the handwriting on the first page — the names in ink of companies he worked for, like Quigley Construction.
Jim moved up the labour chain quickly. Before long he wasn’t just loading but landscaping. He rode diggers, scrapers, loaders, trenchers. He was a heavy equipment operator, paid-up member of the International Union of Operating Engineers. “Best union there is,” says Jim. He’s still got the cap.
It’s not everyone who can look out a car window and say, each block or two, “Yeah, I did that.” Jim can. What didn’t he build?
“I loved the work. Sometimes you’d be working in a team but often it was just you on the machine. I remember two and a half months working on the Meadowlands being alone for 10 hours a day.”
And he was exceptionally good at it. He’d buck these 40-ton behemoths up and down steep slopes and slew them around tight angles. He’d grade surfaces, contour slopes, landscape, clear overgrowth, move rocks, plow out roots, smooth golf course greens.
Someone paid him the compliment once that his work was so precise “he could cut someone’s hair with a six-way blade.”
And he never turned over. Always kept the machines upright, despite some crazy challenges. A press clipping in his album from The Spectator in the 1960s features a picture of the terraced excavation at Sam Lawrence Park. The angle is frightening. Perhaps not as bad, though, as the Chedoke ski slope.
“You’d be going down and start sliding on wet grass — wet grass is the worst — and so you put the ripper in the ground and your foot on the brakes at 20 miles an hour.”
Did he get scared? “You didn’t have time to be scared.”
One of the jobs he’s most proud of was the 16 Mile Creek overpass at Speers Road in Oakville. It was all marble and two-inch stone. “That was such a slope. I couldn’t even walk on it,” without slipping. But his machine? Kept it steady as a circus elephant standing on a beach ball.
It was great work, says Jim, but he has no lingering pang to get back on the old Tonka-toys-wrote-big that he once jockeyed so ably. And he doesn’t miss the cleaning.
“If you were working on heavy clay, there’d be 25-feet of it, thick gumbo (soil), and you couldn’t let it get frozen.”
No, no more cleaning. You’ve earned your rest, Jim. Job well done, sir. Job well done. This city thanks you.
Sometimes you’d be working in a team but often it was just you on the machine. JIM KNELLER