A Summer Adventure That Never Ended: Kathy Hill on Immigration, Masonry, and Making Time for People

Kathy Hill got into the masonry trade because somebody was watching how she treated her coworkers.

She was closing up at a Hardee's late one evening. A man finishing dinner with his wife came over on the way out.

"I've been watching you talk to people, talk with the folks that you work with. If you're ever looking for a job, come find me. I work at this company down the road. This is my name."

She took it as a nice compliment and thought nothing more of it. Four months later she and her husband had bought a house, the expenses were real, and she needed better pay. So she went and knocked on his door.

"I went into the company and said, hey, do you remember me? I was fortunate. I had an accent, so people remember that generally."

They hired her. More than two decades later she is still in the masonry and landscape industry, now with Jireh Brick & Stone.

Taught by the people doing the work

She did not learn the trade from a manual.

"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 and good soils and bad soils."

What she describes is an apprenticeship that nobody formally arranged. She was selling to tradespeople, and the tradespeople taught her what they knew, the way it has always been handed down.

She is clear about where her part of the job stops. Jireh supplies materials. It does not install them.

"I can sell the product, but that's just a pile of rock on the ground. It takes a skilled installer to make it look like that."

So a lot of her actual work is connecting people who want something beautiful with the people who can build it.

The wild card

Ask her how she solves a client problem and you get a method, not a platitude. Clients describe color in feelings, not specifications.

"They'll say, I want warm tones or cool tones. You've got to remember, everybody sees colors slightly different, and we get feelings from colors slightly different."

So she asks until the feeling becomes concrete. When you say cool, do you mean gray tones? Show me some pictures. Then she brings samples that match what they asked for, plus one that does not.

"I always bring a wild card because even if you've asked all the questions, you think you've nailed it. They showed you a picture. You brought them products that look just like the picture. Sometimes they don't even know what they don't know."

How a client reacts to the thing they did not ask for tells her where they actually want to go. They might come in asking for stone and leave wanting brick.

There is a lesson in there for anyone who sells anything. Taking a brief at face value is not the same as understanding it.

What old buildings hold

Her favorite work is restoration. There is a church being worked on now, built around 1927, where the brick has to be matched.

"Well, the kilns that they used to bake those brick are no longer in operation. Advancement in technology has made things more efficient, but it also affects how they fire those colors, so it's tricky."

The match has to be found rather than ordered, which means knowing which of the brick companies currently makes new brick that convincingly reads as old.

She also pointed out something about the buildings most of us walk past. Growing up in South Africa, her family home was solid brick, two wythes on the outside walls.

"This idea in Hollywood movies where people get mad and they punch a wall, yeah, it doesn't. Nobody punches a wall."

Most of that brick was structural, the cheap kind, and it got covered in stucco. Only a few courses across the front were the good stuff. Here, she says, almost everything we call brick is face brick, the quality material meant to be looked at and weathered, which is why century-old downtowns still look the way they do.

Make time for people now

The other half of the conversation is about time, and it comes out of the hardest part of her story.

Kathy left South Africa at twenty. She was not emigrating. She was going on an adventure and fully intended to come back.

Ten days after landing in Cleveland she met the man she would marry. They married six and a half months later. Then his industry took a recession hit, his family was up here, and they moved to Wisconsin in 2000 and bought a house in Baldwin in January 2001.

She did not get back to South Africa for six years, because that is how long it took to afford the trip.

"When I got on that plane, I didn't know that I wouldn't make it back for six years. And during that time, loved ones would pass away. I didn't know."

That is where the rule comes from, and she repeats it more than once.

"You never know when it's going to be your last hug."

It is not abstract for her right now. She lost her mother in 2011. Her father died this past May, and one of her brothers died unexpectedly two and a half weeks after that. She is the youngest of six, and she talks about the four brothers she still has as a genuine piece of good fortune.

Her practical version of the rule is unglamorous, which is what makes it usable. When a friend calls in the middle of a workday and you can hear in their voice that they need twenty minutes, give them the twenty minutes.

"20 minutes to make somebody feel valued and important, it'll change the trajectory of your relationships."

And it runs both directions. She is blunt that you cannot pour out indefinitely without refilling.

"You're giving a part of yourself there, all these different things that you do every day, it's like you're watering and watering and watering. Well, at some point, you got to fill the can."

Positivity as a discipline

Kathy hands out pens with positive messages on them. She walks into offices, offers people a pen, asks nothing, and leaves. She started doing it during a stretch when she was struggling herself.

She is careful to say this is not the same as feeling good.

"Just because you choose positivity doesn't mean that you don't get sad or have bad days or have tough moments or challenges where you really struggle through it. Positivity is more of a choice."

Her mother's version was a daily arithmetic: start the day deliberately high, because the day will knock you down, and you want to land at normal rather than somewhere worse.

Her aunt and mother also gave her four words she still uses.

"Four words that will keep you humble and hopeful, this too shall pass."

On the construction calendar, where a year of work gets compressed into the months without snow, she describes the atmosphere she is managing.

"It's almost like that atmosphere of an ER, but no one's going to die."

Sewn into the fabric

She quotes a Tim McGraw line about someone being sewn into the fabric of a life, and she means it as a description of how business actually works over a long enough period.

"Long-time clients, customers, they're friends now. We just know each other so long. We've sewn into the fabric."

Which is why she frames her job the way she does.

"I don't just sell brick. I want to have friendships with who I'm selling to."

In a small company, she says, that has teeth. If she gives her word that somebody is good for it, that means something internally.

The long view

Kathy grew up on the east coast of South Africa and later lived outside Johannesburg, which put her in the country through the years after apartheid ended. She watched history books get recalled and reissued, monuments redone, street names changed. She left in 1999, five years after the first open election.

What she took from it is a wariness about received stories and a real respect for the people who preserve the ones official records miss.

"I think the artists will save us."

Her argument is that reading fiction and poetry and listening to music outside your own taste is how you build empathy for a life you have not lived, because artists channel experience into something a stranger can feel.

"We didn't have much money, but man, I was swimming in love."

Her grandmother had told her to travel young, calling it studying at the university of the world, on the theory that you can sleep on a floor at twenty and will want more comfort later. Kathy took the advice. It cost her more than she planned, and she does not regret it.

Listen to the full conversation

We also get into the difference between a homeowner and an architect describing the same color, why a building's value is the meaning people give it rather than its age, the plant a friend left on her doorstep chosen specifically because it would survive her, and the nine years it took her to become a citizen.

Listen to the full episode of East Side Enterprise with Kathy Hill at mckinneycv.com/podcast, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can learn more about her company at jirehbrickandstone.com.