Three Generations of O’Maras Help Build the West

Local 4 California Gold Card member Thomas E. O’Mara.

Three generations of O’Maras – Thomas, Thomas F., and Thomas E. – stone and brick masons whose work spans more than one hundred years, “helped build the west,” writes retired 67-year Local 4 California member Thomas E. O’Mara of his family’s collective contributions to the “community of bricklaying” in the Pacific Northwest and California.

According to O’Mara, his grandfather, Thomas, arrived in the U.S. “around 1855 to escape the potato famine in Ireland. He worked as a stone cutter and belonged to the ‘Brotherhood,’ an early union in New York state before traveling west to “work on the giant stones of the first Columbia River lock.”
O’Mara’s father, Thomas F., “learned the bricklaying trade in Portland, Oregon.” In 1906, however, he “heeded the call of work in San Francisco [where] he experienced the wrath of the great earthquake.”

After returning to Portland, Thomas F. married and raised a family. But when another building boom beckoned – this time in Los Angeles – the family moved permanently to southern California in 1925. O’Mara’s father worked on many significant projects, including City Hall, one of the tallest buildings in the west at the time. He built the northeast corner from bottom to top, and managed to maintain his BAC membership through the Great Depression.

In 1938, Thomas E. O’Mara followed his father and grandfather into the trade as a member of then Local 2 CA, eventually becoming a journeyman bricklayer. Prior to WWII, O’Mara enlisted in the Navy, and credits his construction experience with helping him earn the Second Class Petty Officer C.M.2.C status. Following a stint in welding school in Gulfport, Mississippi with the Seabee Pontoon Assembly Detachment, O’Mara “spent the better part of three years welding pontoons in the beautiful South Pacific.”

After the war, O’Mara resumed his work in the trade. His Union service increased substantially – he was elected to consecutive terms as Local 2 Recording Secretary, then Business Agent, and finally Financial Secretary.
“I am proud of the many breakthroughs that brought about safer working conditions for the members on my watch, such as height requirements for mortar board stands; sanitary drinking water containers; mandatory coffee breaks; and maximum wall heights and ladders on scaffolds that eliminated hopping boards and old wood saw horses, and helped bring metal scaffolding into the mainstream,” O’Mara says. “I was also an early advocate of a health and welfare package for the members.”

Brother O’Mara’s concerns about the future of the industry, although informed by the past, are very much centered in the present – a present that includes too many unscrupulous employers, ready to exploit the “thousands of people who come to the U.S. seeking a better life...[a way of life] obtained through the efforts and sacrifices of union members,” says O’Mara. “[U]nions should make every effort to take these people by the hand and show them the way,” he says. “The rebuilding of flood damaged areas will be the immediate test for all unions. Remember, if he has a trowel in his hand, he should have a Union card in his pocket.”

With members like the O’Maras, it’s a safe bet he or she will.