All Hail the Hammer
By Douglas Belkin | May 29, 2005Originally Published in the Boston Globe
Work needs Harvard? Joe Lamacchia is sending his own message to high school grads: There's lot of work out there, and money to be made, if you're willing to get your hands dirty.
In a city full of Audi-driving, Ivy League desk jockeys who wouldn't know an elbow wrench from a ratchet, Joe Lamacchia is preaching the gospel of calloused hands. This 46-year-old Watertown guy barely graduated from high school and spent the next 10 years feeling like a flunky because he wasn't one of the downtown suits with soft hands pushing paper for six figures.
No city of big shoulders, Boston elevates brains and dumps on brawn. Too often we forget that if the two don't meet somewhere in the middle, the streets don't get plowed and homes don't get framed.
So a few years ago, when teachers told Lamacchia's 16-year-old son that if he didn't improve his grades, boost his test scores, and get into a decent college, he was headed for nowheresville, Lamacchia took exception. "It's garbage," Lamacchia says while sitting in a West Newton bagel shop around the corner from his garage, with two days' whiskers on his face and work boots on his feet. "But they have this idea that that's the only way to make a living, and if you're not going to be part of the machine, they don't know what to do with you. I got sick and tired of hearing it."
He launched www.bluecollarandproudofit.com, a website that tells his story: how a man with a ferocious case of attention deficit disorder and atrocious spelling started a business that now grosses nearly $2 million a year and doesn't require a clean shave, let alone a college degree.
The point? To send a message to those kids graduating from high school who aren't heading to Harvard - or any other university - that there are different kinds of smarts and different ways to make a living. And to declare that blue-collar work is necessary, notable, even noble.
Lamacchia figures it like this: America is growing older, its infrastructure is crumbling, and all those suits plugging away downtown are either too busy, too out of shape, or too lazy to cut their own lawns and shovel their own driveways. You can't outsource those jobs to China, so anybody willing to work hard and get a little dirt under his nails can make a pretty penny doing it for them.
Lamacchia is proof. After graduating from high school by the skin of his teeth, he married young, drank too much, and scraped by cutting lawns. All the while, he wallowed in the sense of failure he had internalized in school. In 1988, he sobered up and began to devote his full energies to work. Around that time, he met a successful tradesman who encouraged him to expand his lawn business to 300 customers, hire a manager to run it, and add other services. Lamacchia followed the advice, and learned how to build walls from an old Italian mason who didn't speak English but who sketched on a napkin directions so clear that Lamacchia picked it right up. Before long he was paving, plowing, building, and employing 25 people year-round. The same son whose teachers said wouldn't amount to much is today his right-hand man. At 24, when most college grads are still Xeroxing for the boss, Anthony Lamacchia is a foreman overseeing 15 workers.
Since launching his website in 2003, Joe Lamacchia has found himself something of a spokesman for the heavy-machinery set. He says his site gets about 500 hits a day and pulls in about 50 e-mails a week from confused kids looking for advice and guidance counselors thanking him for finally saying what needs to be said.
There's value in a college degree, Lamacchia acknowledges, but there's also value in knowing how to build a deck or bang out a dent from one of those Audis. For men and women willing to cultivate a different sort of intelligence and who aren't afraid to lift something heavier than a computer mouse, there's life beyond State Street. "This is still America," he says. "You can make it on hard work and balls."
