Staying Upwardly Mobile : Careers: Paul Gavlak was tempted at a chance to make more money. So he became a steeplejack and he’s rarely looked back, er, down.
Paul Gavlak is hanging in there. At least until he teaches his replacement the ropes.
That explains why the 70-year-old was clinging to a tower 250 feet above Hollywood’s Vine Street over the weekend as he reached for the stars.
The stars, in this case, are the three illuminated outlines that help turn the famed Capitol Records building spire into a bright electric Christmas tree each holiday season.
Gavlak is a steeplejack. It’s his job to put up and take down the 4,374-bulb, 109,235-watt display.
“It’s second nature to me to be up in a place like this,” Gavlak said as he strapped himself into a battered boatswain’s chair Saturday before hoisting himself up. “It has to be. I’ve been doing it for over 50 years.”
Appearances can be deceiving in the steeplejack field.
For one thing, the work is not dangerous, Gavlak said. For another, age is an advantage.
“Property owners look at me and figure if I’ve been in business this long, they can depend on me not to fall,” he said with a laugh.
Gavlak became a steeplejack after a World War II military stint. He was working as a roofer in Pennsylvania when he decided to move up.
“My roofing partner and I were going to lunch one day when we noticed this fellow coming down the face of a building in a boatswain’s chair,” he recalled. “I said let’s invite him along.”
Gavlak was astounded when the man told him that a steeplejack could earned up to $500 a day.
“On the way home that day, I passed Washington & Jefferson College and saw they had a spire on one of their buildings. So I stopped in and told them they had some slate missing and that it needed some painting.”
When Gavlak offered to do the work for $875, he was hired on the spot.
“I had no idea how I was going to do it. It was 100 feet off the sidewalk. So I made my own boatswain’s chair out of a plank and some rope,” he said.
Gavlak quickly devised a way to hoist himself up using rope looped around the spire. In two hours, he finished the repairs.
“I figured this was the way to go. All the towns back there had churches with steeples. So I hit the road, and within a week I had a dozen jobs lined up.”
He reached the pinnacle of his career in 1958 when a Zanesville, Ohio, newspaper ran a front page picture of him working atop the 130-foot St. Nicholas Church cross. The newspaper proclaimed him “the head man of the nation’s steeplejacks.”
When Gavlak moved to California in the 1960s, he had trouble getting the steeplejack business off the ground: “Out here on the West Coast, there aren’t that many steeples.”
There are plenty of sliding hillsides, however. So between steeplejack calls, Gavlak, of Woodland Hills, runs a business that specializes in jacking up endangered houses and installing caisson supports underneath them.
Along with church work, his Los Angeles steeplejack business often includes flagpole repairs and earthquake damage inspections on high-rises.
When he goes up, he attaches a safety line to a 40-year-old brass alloy safety lock that automatically closes if the rope slips six inches. It, in turn, is attached to a nylon safety belt that Gavlak replaces every 20 years.
Gavlak has installed Capitol Records’ holiday lights for more than 25 years.
He is training his nephew, Joe Dianni, 36, of Silverado Canyon, how to hook up the heavy, 100-bulb strings of lights and the three six-foot aluminium stars onto the top of the building’s distinctive tower--which resembles the top of a stack of records.
“I tried to talk John Piro, Capitol’s building engineer, into taking over. But he said no way,” Gavlak said.
“So I’ve been breaking Joe in for two years. When he gets adept at it, maybe in another year or two, I’ll quit.”
Another nephew, Dan Karllo, 37, of Anaheim, helps from below.
“He lives for this,” Karllo said as he watched Gavlak swaying in the breeze above Hollywood. “Going up there is not my style. I keep my feet on the ground.”
One hundred feet up, Gavlak was smiling. He was on top of the world.
