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Kathy Hill left South Africa at twenty for what was supposed to be a summer adventure. Ten days after landing in Cleveland she met the man she would marry, and she did not make it home again for six years. She has spent more than two decades in the masonry and landscape trade, a career that started because a stranger watched how she treated her coworkers at a Hardee's and told her to come find him if she ever needed a job. We talk about choosing positivity as an actual discipline, what old buildings hold, and why she tells people to make time for each other now.
Kathy Hill's career started because somebody was paying attention. She was closing up at a Hardee's when a man finishing a late dinner told her he had been watching how she talked to the people she worked with, gave her his name, and said to come find him if she ever needed a job. Four months later she needed one. She knocked on his door, got hired at a concrete manufacturer, and fell for the masonry and landscape trade hard enough to stay in it for more than twenty years.
She learned it from the people doing it. "It was crusty old masons that taught me all about brick and mortar and stone. It was the landscapers that taught me about how retaining walls are built. It was excavators that taught me about soils." Today she supplies brick and stone for new builds and restorations, including the ones where the original kiln no longer exists and the match has to be found rather than ordered.
The other half of the conversation is about time. Kathy left South Africa at twenty intending to come back, met her husband ten days after arriving in the United States, and could not afford the trip home for six years. It took nine years to become a citizen. She lost her mother in 2011, her father this past May, and one of her brothers two and a half weeks after that. What she draws from it is not despair but a rule she keeps repeating: you do not know when the last hug was until it already was, so make the time now.
Also in here: why nobody punches a wall in a South African house, what face brick is and why almost every old building downtown is covered in it, the difference between asking a client what they want and showing them a wild card they did not ask for, and her case that the artists will save us.
Learn more about Jireh Brick & Stone at jirehbrickandstone.com.
The people and stories behind the East Metro and St. Croix Valley business community.