Patrick Branley, owner of Wardsboro Brick Salvage, talks about the business of recycling old bricks.
WARDSBORO — Patrick Branley was born on September 3, 1954 on Staten Island very close to the Hudson River and New York Harbor. (The Verrazzano Bridge over it to Brooklyn was 10 years from completion.) In a way, he never left that river, though he has had a home with his family in Wardsboro, Vermont since 1979.
Pat has worked as a bargeman for 54 years, much as his Dad did. These barges, primarily for delivering petroleum products, can be up to 400 feet long and 60 feet wide with a capacity upwards to the equivalent of 100,000 barrels and manned by up to nine men. They are maneuvered in ports or rivers (like The Hudson) by one or two tugboats moored to them. For those 54 years, Pat has worked and lived on a barge: at first, seven days on, seven days off, then a few years later, 14 days on, 14 days off when he returned to Wardsboro where he and his wife Patricia raised three children. Now he works 21 days straight and then returns home to Vermont for 21 days.
He remembers, as a boy, that Staten Island – where he and his Dad were born – was rural. “There was a dairy farm just down the road from where I grew up. When I was six, we moved to Gouldsboro in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. We had a house with a lake nearby we could just see from the far corner of our lawn. I had a mentor there when I was in high school. His name was Joe Battista, a Cuban who taught English. I’m wearing long hair, work in a gas station at night… He took me under his wing. He gave me books to read; I read every one: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald… Then I’d read most everything else they’d written.
“My dad, always a bargeman working on the Hudson and East rivers around Manhattan mostly, though occasionally he went to Texas shipyards in the Gulf of Mexico to oversee construction of new barges. In 1964, aged 10, I went on one of his barges shortly after he became a captain. I painted barges for a two-week hitch. When I was 18, in 1972, with long hair and an attitude, I remember calling my mother to say, ‘I want to work on the boats like Dad.’ A few days later I asked him directly. He looked at me and he said, ‘Get a haircut!’ I did. When he saw me afterwards, he said ‘Get a man’s haircut!’ I did. I looked shaved but I interviewed for a job in the Manhattan offices. I knew I was blue-collar all the way. No college for me. I got the job on a barge and am still at it 54 years on.”
When Pat was named an official of the International Longshoreman’s Union Local 333 in 1986, an organization he has been a member of since the outset, he has the clout to look after all the other 220 engineers, bargemen and fellow workers on the tugs and barges in New York harbors. “And I just won a safety award and will go to Baytown, Texas (Oil City) near Houston soon for an award ceremony.”
“I always tried to work in sight of Manhattan Island. My job was on the barges loaded with gasoline, diesel or asphalt – even nasty styrene. Our tugs, for example, moored to and then hauled those barges up The Hudson. We’d go up to Albany, for example. When on small canals off the Hudson, we’d deliver heating oil to riverside tanks of mom-and-pop terminals. We flowed up those canals slow – like an old train – me admiring the marshes, the fields and farms, sort of ‘Huck Finn’-like. Those runs had a kind of chug-chug-chug echo like a train. A few times we went all the way up to Lake Champlain. And I always had a book or three with me. Read and read and read.
“Boats and barges have been good to me. I hated being away from family but I didn’t want to be poor. My Mom was a child of two recent Irish immigrants who became an orphan but she had drive that’s in me too. And I’ve got a bit of my Dad’s smarts even though he came up out of poverty. I got the fear of poverty from him. He was on the barges his whole working life.”
“The first time I stepped on Vermont soil was at the old stone city docks in Burlington. I was 18. I jumped off our barge to swim ashore. There, on the dock, were two girls in hippie garb smoking and a guy in a VW van playing guitar. He sent me to a deli for my six-pack. The town looked majestic, there on the lake. I thought, ‘This is a place of interest.’”
“Today I work on barges on The Hudson, The East River and points well beyond like the canal on Cape Cod. I had a 15 year contract with a small barge in Nantucket Harbor. I’ve worked the Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound, out east to Maine, the Atlantic coast… (Today, Pat is secretary-treasurer in the Richmond Terrace bargaining union representing 220 highly-skilled tugboat mates, engineers, bargemen and deckhands. He recently flew to Houston, Texas to receive a safety award.)
“In 1973, Pat Neuweiler from Allentown, Pennsylvania and I got married. We lived for a while on Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks and surfed and lived the beach life but it just wasn’t us. We came back north. We took a trip up to Vermont and saw trout in the streams, hayfields, hills and mountains covered in trees. We rented a place in Green River just west of Brattleboro where we had a big garden. For three months we went out pretty much every day looking for a place to buy and finally found it in Wardsboro: a beautiful custom-built house built beautifully in the ’60s by Lindy LeMarshe and one of the Bills’ clan. That’s where we live today: trout in the stream, cows in the farmers’ fields around us, a big old apple tree… and the General Store in town – everything we need including my study full of books.
“I always wanted my own business that I could run during my couple weeks off from being – for the last 10 years – lead tankerman on the barges. One day I was raking the lawn and turned up a lot of old brick. I wondered if I could sell them. I could and started Wardsboro Brick Salvage 41 years ago specializing in recycled old brick. I provide and source and sell brick all over Vermont and further afield – even Nantucket.
“My kids did well in Vermont. Our daughter Rene graduated from Champlain College as a paralegal, got her master’s degree and became a teacher. Today she works at UVM. My oldest son Colin also graduated from Champlain with a degree in criminal justice and is now the owner of Lakeside Painting and Restoration in Burlington with 11 employees. My youngest son Kristian is an amazing boy. He bought his first dump-truck at age 17 and started Timber Ridge Landscaping and Logging. By 21 he had four trucks, a trailer and skid steer. Unfortunately, oxycontin took him down and he’s been successfully fighting it.”
So when Pat and wife bought a condo in Burlington recently so they could have a place near two of their children and their grandkids, Pat brought a big Vermont circle ‘round. Decades ago he swam ashore from a barge to get a six pack in Burlington. Now he drives from Wardsboro to Burlington to visit family.
