I wasn’t even a teenager when I started helping my father cater events.

But it wasn’t my dad who did this to me. It was Stu Hunt.

Stu managed Turasky’s Catering, and Stu was older — a lot older. I couldn’t have told you back then what year he was born. I can tell you what era he came out of, because you could see it in how he worked. How he set a tray down. How he moved through a room. He came from a time when a party was something you put on, and he was still putting them on long after the world quit asking anybody to.

So there I am, twelve years old, eating rumaki. Silver dollar sandwiches. Half that menu, none of my friends had ever heard of — and wouldn’t have touched it if they had. To them it was old-people food. To me it was just what was on the tray. That’s what you ate. I had no idea anybody was handing me anything.

But here’s what I picked up standing next to that man, and I didn’t know I was picking it up:

There’s a difference, and you can feel it from across a room. A drink somebody made has their attention in it. So does a room that got set right before anybody walked in and noticed nothing. And that’s the whole point — you’re supposed to notice nothing. That’s the craft.

People dressed for each other back then. Not to be seen. For each other. Think about that one for a second.

Here’s the part I only learned later

Stuart Wayne Hunt was born in Springfield in 1933. Before I ever met him he’d been a switchman on the Illinois Central Railroad. He’d been a barber at Brown’s. He spent a career in the Springfield Fire Department and retired out of it. He owned The Shack. He ran The Livery downtown. He was a foster parent. He helped start a chicken dinner fundraiser at Ursuline that fed people for years.

And he sang in the Land of Lincoln Barbershop Chorus.

Four-part harmony. On purpose. For years.

That’s the one that got me when I found it. Because it explains everything I couldn’t have explained at twelve. The man wasn’t imitating anything. He was born in ’33 — that music was just what was playing. The bearing, the tray, the drink made instead of poured, the room set before anyone arrived: it was all the same instinct. You take your part seriously, you hit it clean, and you blend it with everybody else’s until the thing sounds like one thing.

That’s barbershop. That’s also catering.

I’m 56 now. Twenty-five years running catering, tending bar, setting up events for ten thousand people and tearing them down at 2 a.m. when the only sound left in the place is chairs folding. And I still get pulled backward.

Not because I miss a decade I never lived in.

Because Stu Hunt taught me — before I was old enough to know it was a lesson — that how you do it is the thing.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s a standard.

— The Xaminer

There is a block in south St. Louis — the 5400 block of Elizabeth Avenue — that carries a second street sign. It reads Hall of Fame Place. The neighborhood is called The Hill, Italian since the 1890s, when the immigrants came for the clay works and the brickyards and then stayed.

Two boys grew up on that block, facing each other across the pavement. One was Lawrence Berra, who the neighborhood called Lawdie long before the world called him Yogi. The other was Joe Garagiola, nine months younger, born there in February of 1926.

Both were catchers. Both were sons of Italian immigrants who barely spoke English. Both made the major leagues. Only one of them ended up in Cooperstown, and it was not the one the scouts liked.

That became the joke Garagiola told on himself for the next seventy years — that he wasn’t even the best catcher on his street. He got a lifetime of material out of it. He also had it exactly right, and he never once seemed to mind.

The clay works

Joe’s father worked at Laclede-Christy, a clay pipe plant, like most of the men on The Hill. Long days. A lunch pail. A paycheck stretched across a family and a mortgage, with a little going to the church every week.

Read that again, because it is the whole neighborhood in one sentence. Nobody down there was making pipe because they loved pipe. They were making pipe because a house on Elizabeth Avenue does not pay for itself, and because a man’s job in 1938 was to see that it did.

In 1942 the Cardinals ran a tryout. Branch Rickey had both boys out for it, along with a coal miner’s kid from Germantown named Red Schoendienst. St. Louis offered Garagiola a contract that day — five hundred dollars to sign. They offered Berra half that. Berra, sixteen and too proud to take less than the kid across the street, turned it down. St. Louis lost him. New York found him.

Garagiola took the Grand Avenue streetcar with that check in his hand and rode it straight to the plant, where his father and the rest of the men from The Hill were just sitting down with their lunch pails. He put the check in his father’s hand. It was enough to pay off the house. He wrote later that neither of them said a word, because neither of them had to.

Nine seasons

He was seventeen at Columbus, still the youngest player in that club’s history. The Army took him in April of 1944 — Jefferson Barracks, then Fort Riley, then the Philippines, where he caught for a service team. Discharged in the spring of 1946, twenty years old, and the Cardinals needed catching badly enough to hand a kid half the job.

He said later he wasn’t ready. He was right. He fought to keep his average over .200 that first summer and the town loved him anyway, because he was theirs. On the fifth of August they held Joe Garagiola Night at Sportsman’s Park and gave him a car. People came out from The Hill who did not follow baseball at all, to stand up for one of their own.

Then October. The 1946 World Series against Boston: six hits in nineteen at-bats over five games, and in Game 4 he went four-for-five and drove in three. Ted Williams, playing the only Series of his life, managed five hits in twenty-five tries across the same games. A twenty-year-old rookie out of the clay works outhit Ted Williams. He was the first rookie catcher to put up a four-hit postseason game, and it stood alone for sixty-four years.

That was the summit, and he reached it at twenty. Nine seasons after that, four clubs, a .257 average, 42 home runs. In 1950 he was hitting .347 on the first of June when he collided with Jackie Robinson and separated his shoulder. It was the best year he ever had at the plate and it ended in the dirt.

The second career

Here is where it turns. A journeyman catcher with a good story and a quick mouth started getting asked to speak at off-season dinners. He was good at it. He was better at it than he had ever been at catching.

KMOX put him on Cardinals radio in 1955. From there: NBC, the Saturday Game of the Week, the Today show, the game shows, a best-seller in 1960 about how funny baseball is. He worked beside Tony Kubek, then beside Vin Scully. In 1991 the Hall of Fame gave him the Ford Frick Award, the highest honor the game hands a broadcaster.

His trick, and he said so himself, was that he called games from the point of view of a man who was never sure he’d get in. Not the star’s seat. The bench’s. He had been the guy hitting .107 in 1948 and getting sent down, and he never pretended otherwise. That is exactly why people trusted him in the booth for thirty years.

What the block taught

There is a version of this story where Garagiola is the cautionary tale — the can’t-miss prospect who missed, living out his life in the shadow of the kid across the street.

That version is wrong, and the man himself never told it that way. In the winters, before either of them was famous, he and Berra ran a Christmas tree lot in the neighborhood. It started out as an off-season job. By the late forties they were doing it to raise money for an orphanage.

He grew up on a block where your job was to take your part and hit it clean, and he took his part in four different rooms — behind the plate, at the microphone, at a thousand banquets, and later at the fundraising tables for ballplayers the game had forgotten. In 2014 they gave him the Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award for the second half of his life. He died in Arizona in 2016, ninety years old.

He wasn’t the best catcher on his street. He knew it before anybody had to tell him, and he built a whole life out of knowing it.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a standard.

— The Xaminer

Every so often a build shows up big enough to move labor across the country. Pipelines did it. Casinos did it. Stadium decades did it. Hurricane rebuilds still do it. Right now it is data centers, and it is larger than any of those.

Start with the size, because the numbers do not sound real. Federal estimates have these buildings taking up to 15 percent of all electricity consumed in this country by 2030. One Meta campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, covers 3,650 acres — four times Central Park. Construction cost has climbed from roughly $7.7 million per megawatt in 2020 to about $10.7 million in 2025, and it is still climbing.

The fight

The public is not having it. A Gallup survey this March found roughly seven in ten Americans opposed to a data center going up in their own community. A separate poll found people now more comfortable living near a nuclear reactor than near a server farm, which is a genuine reversal of forty years of American opinion.

The complaints are consistent everywhere and they are not partisan: electric bills, water for evaporative cooling, noise off the chillers, land, tax abatements, and the sense that a town is being asked to carry the cost while somebody else books the return. Coming into this year about one in six U.S. households was already behind on the utility bill.

Organized opposition has gone from a few hundred people to hundreds of thousands across forty states inside of a year. Pennsylvania pulled data centers out of its fast-track permitting program and started requiring local approval and enforceable commitments on power and water. It is a live issue in the November midterms in states that were courting these projects eighteen months ago.

The work

And yet the concrete is still going in the ground, and somebody has to put it there.

This is not a white-collar boom. It is electricians, HVAC technicians, pipefitters, welders, controls and instrumentation techs, operators, and commissioning crews. Electrical work alone accounts for roughly half the labor on a data center project. The industry is short something like 439,000 construction workers nationally, most of them in exactly those skilled positions, and the shortage is the reason projects slip.

The money follows the shortage. Data center construction work pays up to 30 percent over ordinary commercial construction. Over the twelve months ending this past May, overall U.S. pay rose about 2.4 percent while construction wages rose 3.4 — and commercial electricians came in near 10 percent. In Northern Virginia, where a third of the world’s internet traffic lands, every active project is bidding against every other one for the same union halls.

The scarcest thing on the board is not a warm body. It is a superintendent who has already turned over a live data center. Crews can be assembled. That cannot.

The honest part

Construction jobs are temporary. That is the piece the press releases leave out. A campus that employs two thousand tradesmen for two years might employ fifty people once it is running, and the towns fighting these projects have generally done that arithmetic already.

Which is the right way to read this if you work with your hands: as a wave, not a home. It pays above scale, it is going to run for a few more years, it will land hardest in secondary markets picked for cheap power and open land rather than for an existing trade base, and the outfits that do best in it are the ones who can move a vetted crew into a county that does not have one.

Know your license reciprocity. Know your per diem. Know which general contractors pay in thirty days. Then go where the work is.

— The Xaminer

There are somewhere north of four thousand named knots. A working sailor in 1850 might have used forty of them in a season. You need two. Learn these two properly and you have covered the two problems rope actually presents: making a loop that will not close, and joining one line to another.

Everything after that is a variation, a convenience, or a way to show off.

The Bowline

They call it the king of knots, and for once the nickname is earned. The bowline makes a fixed loop at the end of a line. Under load it will not slip and it will not tighten down on whatever is inside it. Take the load off and it unties with a push of the thumb, even after it has been strained hard and soaked through — which is the part that matters, because most knots that hold well are miserable to get back out.

It is the knot you put around a person. It is the knot for a mooring line over a piling, a tie-down through a ring, a tent corner, a tarp grommet, a tow point. The name comes from the bow line that held the edge of a square sail forward into the wind, and it is old — a bowline was found tied in the rigging of a pharaoh’s ship, sealed in a pit at Giza for four and a half thousand years, and it is the same knot you would tie today.

The old rhyme is the fastest way to learn it. Make a small loop in the standing part — that is the rabbit hole. The working end is the rabbit. Up through the hole, around the back of the tree, and back down the hole it came out of. Snug it. If the tail finishes on the inside of the loop, you tied it right; on the outside, you tied a cowboy bowline, which mostly holds and occasionally does not. Retie it.

The one thing a bowline does not like is being shaken with no load on it — a slack line flogging in wind can work it loose. If it is going to sit unloaded, put a half hitch in the tail and stop thinking about it.

The Sheet Bend

The other problem is joining two ropes. Most people reach for the square knot, and the square knot is the reason things fail. It is a fine binding knot for a package or a bandage. As a joining knot it is genuinely dangerous, and it is worst exactly where people trust it most: if the two lines are different thicknesses, the thick one straightens out under load, rolls, and spits the thin one out. It goes from holding to gone with no warning in between.

The sheet bend solves it. Bight in the thicker line; the thinner line comes up through the bight, around behind both legs of it, and tucks under itself — not through the bight, under its own standing part. Pull it up. The harder you load it, the harder the thin line jams against the thick one. Different diameters, wet line, slick line, a rope tied to a strap: it holds.

Both tails should finish on the same side. If they end up on opposite sides you have tied the left-hand sheet bend, which is measurably weaker. Flip one and go again. If the size difference is extreme or the line is very slick, take one more turn around the bight before you tuck — that is the double sheet bend, and there is no reason not to.

This one is older than the bowline by a wide margin. It is the knot in Neolithic fishing nets. Mend a net and you tie it a thousand times a day. The name is from sheets, the lines that trim a sail — nothing to do with bedding, everything to do with the fact that a sheet had to be joined and could not be allowed to let go.

Why Two Is Enough

Look at what people actually do with rope on a job. They tie something off to a fixed point. They extend a line that came up short. That is it. That is the whole catalogue. A loop that will not slip and a join that will not roll covers a tent, a load on a trailer, a tarp over equipment, a canopy in wind, a barricade, a boat.

Learn them with your hands, not with a diagram. Tie each one forty times in an evening while you are watching something else. Then tie them behind your back, and in the dark, because the day you need a bowline in a hurry is not going to be a well-lit day with good footing.

— The Xaminer

A necktie is a knot you wear on purpose, which makes it the only knot most men tie in public. That is worth taking seriously for about ten minutes, once, and then never again for the rest of your life.

Three knots cover everything. Which one you want depends on one thing: how much space is between the points of your collar. A narrow collar wants a narrow knot. A collar that spreads wants something wide enough to fill the gap. Get that pairing wrong and the tie looks borrowed.

The Four-in-Hand

Long and slightly lopsided, and deliberately so. It is the knot for a standard point collar, and it is the one to use with a heavy tie, because it uses the least fabric — wool and knit ties strangle in anything bigger. The name comes from the four-horse carriage: the reins were held in one hand, and the driver's knot was this one. Some say it is from the London club of the same name. Either way it is nineteenth century and it has outlasted everything fashionable that came after it.

1. Cross the wide end over the narrow and turn it back underneath.
2. Continue around, passing the wide end across the front of the narrow once more.
3. Pass the wide end up through the loop at your neck.
4. Holding the front of the knot loose with your index finger, pass the wide end down through that front loop.
5. Remove the finger and tighten carefully. Draw it up snug by holding the narrow end and sliding the knot up.

Its asymmetry is the point. It is supposed to lean a little. If you fight that, you have picked the wrong knot.

The Half Windsor

A medium symmetrical triangle, and the most useful of the three. It fills a standard collar without looking like you are trying, works with almost any tie weight, and it is the one to learn if you are only going to learn one. This is the interview knot.

1. Cross the wide end over the narrow and back underneath.
2. Bring it up and turn it down through the loop.
3. Pass the wide end around the front from left to right.
4. Then up through the loop again.
5. And down through the knot in front. Tighten carefully and draw up to the collar.

The Windsor

The full Windsor is the wide one — a broad symmetrical triangle for a spread collar. Start with the wide end noticeably longer than usual, because this knot eats tie. Named for the Duke of Windsor, who never actually tied it; he just liked thick ties, and the world reverse-engineered a knot to match the look.

1. Set the tie so the wide end hangs longer, and cross it over the narrow.
2. Bring the wide end up through the loop between collar and tie, then back down.
3. Pull it underneath the narrow end and to the left, then back up through the loop again.
4. Bring it across the front from left to right.
5. Pull it up through the loop again.
6. Bring it down through the knot in front.
7. Using both hands, tighten the knot and draw it up to the collar.

Two rules regardless of which one you tie. The tip should land at the middle of your belt buckle — not above it, and not in your lap. And the dimple under the knot is not an accident: pinch the fabric just below the knot as you draw it up, and it stays. That single crease is most of the difference between a tie that looks tied and one that looks put on.

— The Xaminer

Barbershop is not old-fashioned singing. It is a specific piece of engineering, and the whole thing turns on one chord.

Take a major triad — C, E, G — and add a flatted seventh on top. B flat. That is the barbershop seventh, and it appears in barbershop music far more often than it has any business appearing. Roughly a third of the chords in a well-arranged piece are that one shape. It is the sound.

What makes it worth building a whole tradition around is what happens when four singers tune it precisely. Sung in just intonation rather than the tempered tuning a piano uses, the overtones of the four voices reinforce each other and produce audible tones that no one in the room is actually singing. Singers call it the ring, or expanded sound. You do not sing it. It shows up when you have earned it. Miss the tuning by a few cents and it vanishes, and four men are just singing a chord.

The parts are stacked the way they are for that reason. Lead carries the melody, in the middle. Tenor harmonizes above it, light and thin. Baritone fills whatever note is missing from the chord, which means it wanders above and below the lead all night and is the hardest part to learn because it almost never makes sense on its own. Bass anchors the bottom. Four parts, and every one of them is a compromise in service of the chord.

It came up out of American close harmony around the turn of the last century — street corners, front porches, and yes, barbershops, where a man waiting for a chair had time on his hands. It nearly died in the thirties and was hauled back by a society founded in Tulsa in 1938 with a name so long it was clearly a joke: the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. The chapters and the choruses that followed are why the tradition is still standing.

Stu Hunt sang in the Land of Lincoln Barbershop Chorus in Springfield — the same man who ran the catering line and who is the subject of the first piece in this issue. That is not a coincidence, and it is the reason this article is here. A quartet works the way a catering crew works. Four people, each doing something that is not the interesting part, all of it timed, none of it announced, and when it is right nobody in the room can tell you why it is right. They just know it is.

That extra tone you hear is not magic and it is not nostalgia. It is what precision sounds like.

— The Xaminer