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Esther McCoy 7
I was stunned. It had happened so fast. Seasoned draftsmen were getting around $2 an hour, and now I was a learner at $1 an hour. . . .
On my first day we went over a set of drawings he wanted ready to send to the blueprinter when he returned from the job sites. It was a small task, blow up two elevations now in rough sketch. It seemed simple enough since he used a four-foot module, and with the grid marked on the margins I couldn't go wrong.
"Don't etch them," he said as he was leaving.
I soon discovered that the dimensions for the living room windows were missing. The width of them was not indicated on the plan and there was nothing to give me the height. Don't panic, I urged, they're some place. So I worked on the other elevation. Finally it was finished and I had to face up to my inexperience. At Douglas I would have called for the master plan. But where did an architect hide the dimensions of windows? I looked on his desk. Nothing. Finally I found the file of current work near his desk, a file made of panels of masonite laced loosely together at the back by leather thongs. The drawings were not filed alphabetically I saw after five minutes but by the first vowel in the name of the client. What threw me off was that the Bethlehem Baptist Church drawings were in the second tier, but not because B was the second letter but because E was the second vowel.
But I found nothing to help me, no preliminary drawingsTranscription Notes:
I
