In my late teen years, my dad worked the 4 pm-12 am shift at a Ford assembly plant in Mawah, N.J. To make ends meet, he painted houses, both inside & outside during the day. When school was out for the summer, to earn gas money I would help him. I'd head to the job early & he would come along after he woke up. Then he would head straight to work. If we had a big job, he would recruit one of my uncles for the weekend.
So along came this 3-story monstrosity to be painted on the outside. It was a chore. We had a 24-ft
wooden (think 1950s!) extension ladder, which was barely enough to reach the upper areas. I did much of the climbing.
So one day the owner comes along and asks my dad if we could trim a limb off the backyard tree that was precariously hovering close to an upstair's window about 18' up..
The limb was fairly big, maybe about 10 inches thick thru the middle where it was to be cut. And the part to be lopped off was about 10'-12' long. We didn't own a chain saw, so the task was to be accomplished using a carpenter's handsaw. Yup, you guessed it; I was the delegated one to wield the ripsaw while my dad and uncle steadied the ladder at the bottom.
We extended the ladder to 20 feet, enough to reach past the branch about 1.5 feet, and I climbed aboard and started sawing away. It took me quite sometime with a break here & there. But eventually, I got to the point where the branch started to break. As it began falling, the part of the limb the ladder was resting on, now rid of many pounds, moved skyward. Suddenly, there was no limb there for the ladder to rest against. Of course, we hadn't planned on that hapening.
Luckily I was up high enough where I could grab on to the limb above me, while my dad & uncle stabilized the bottom. Once I got up the nerve, I let go and climbed down while they held the ladder upright.
