Climbing buildings a tall tradition for family
Kells Phelan is 17, a senior at Sacred Heart Cathedral high school in San Francisco. He took a day off last week for a most unusual extra curricular activity. He climbed to the top of the flagpole on the Ferry Building, 280 feet above the Embarcadero.
Kells is a steeplejack — well, an apprentice steeplejack — who works with his father, Jim, climbing flagpoles, working on rigging and other jobs up high. It’s the family business.
His great-grandfather learned the trade in County Waterford and passed it on to his descendants. Kells is the fourth generation of climbing Phelans. It’s not just a male trade. His aunt, Dody Mancuso, works at it part time.
“I’m a steeplejack,” Jim Phelan said. “She’s a steeplejill. So is my niece, Julie. My nephew, Ty Mancuso, climbs, too.”
Jim’s father taught him to climb when he was a little kid, and Jim followed suit with his son. He had Kells climbing trees in the Sierra foothills not long after other little boys learned to walk.
Kells went up to the top of one of the light towers at Candlestick Park when he was 12, and he has a picture to prove it. He also planted a flag atop one of the foul poles at AT&T Park.
Only last weekend, Kells climbed the flagpole at Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge to make repairs to the gear. Jim was there to help, and watch.
Both Phelans worked the Ferry Building job, slowly, carefully. The Ferry Building flagpole gets an annual inspection just before the winter rains.
The two wore red climbing helmets and were tied in with safety harnesses. They lowered the big flag, which flies day and night, inspected the flag halyards. Kells went up to the top, 30 feet above the building, raising himself in a device called a bosun’s chair, something steeplejacks use to get to the top of the pole.
He looked like a human fly, like Spider-Man in the movies, swinging around the flagpole.
Down below, the Ferry Plaza was busy, a good noontime crowd. Hardly anyone noticed Kells.
“That looks dangerous,” said Helen Wallace, one of the very few to watch from below. Would she do it? “Oh no,” she said.
The Phelans, as you might imagine, don’t think of the danger.
“You have to focus,” Jim said. “Focus on what you are doing, know the job, plan ahead.”
It’s only dangerous,” Kells said, “if you don’t respect the job. You have to respect the job.”
Jim Phelan smiled like a proud father when he heard that.
“His apprenticeship is almost over,” he said. “He’s almost there.”
Jim, 65, is clearly the senior partner. Early in his career he spent some time as an ironworker on the Bay Bridge. He was young then, he said, and took chances.
“I slipped once,” he said. “I was going from one beam to another.”
It was different back a few years ago, more dangerous.
“We didn’t tie in then,” he said. “We walked the beams, no harness.”
Now, he said, it’s safer, and he’s older and wiser. Like all people who do high-risk jobs, he has stories.
His worst day, he said, came at the Ferry Building tower after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The quake had rocked the tower pretty well and bent the flagpole.
Jim Phelan’s job was to remove the flagpole. The plan was to cut it loose and use a helicopter to take the flagpole down. The city got the use of a Marine Corps helicopter for the job.
“But it was too windy, and the copter moved up and down. It looked once like it might impale itself on the flagpole,” he said. “There was an equipment failure, too, and the copter dropped the flagpole right into the Ferry Building. Luckily, nobody got seriously hurt.
Jim travels all around the country, New Mexico last month, Kansas City next week. Flagpoles are the biggest business. Rigging is second. Kells likes the trade. “I enjoy it,” he said. But he also wants to go to college. He’s not sure where.
The family business is always an option.
“Every single day is different,” he said. “You can’t duplicate this job anywhere in the world.”