Gene Pollock on the grounds of St. Stephen Diocesan Center’s Castle building, June 10. (HCH photo by Darlene Dela Cruz)
Tall, tanned and fit at 74 years old, wearing a T-shirt, walking shorts, athletic shoes and a broad-rimmed canvas hat, Gene Pollock was up for a tour of St. Stephen Diocesan Center, his domain as its jack-of-all-trades for 34 years.
Last week, the Hawaii Catholic Herald asked him to share his knowledge of the 21-acre campus, a place he knows intimately through its woodwork, gutters, floor tiles, window fixtures, water pipes, paint and varnish, electrical circuit boxes, stone walls and nearly every other physical attribute of the place.
Pollock said cheerfully that he’s “graduating” at the end of the month, his word for retiring. One gets the impression that “retirement” is not part of his vocabulary.
He said the thing he will miss the most is his workshop, a garage/basement arranged in an organized clutter, with everything from a computer to a wooden mallet he made out of an old seminary baseball bat.
On one wall is his collection of tools, mostly old-school stuff: hand drills, hammers, chisels, clamps of every size, each in its properly outlined hanging place.
“No matter how many clamps you have, you don’t have enough,” he said.
He pulled out an impressive 12-inch-long wood chisel he compares to samurai sword and proceeded to tell the story behind his chisel collection.
Pollock has stories for just about everything.
A campus in three phases
St. Stephen Diocesan Center sits below the Nuuanu Pali just beyond the hairpin turn. The complex was essentially constructed in three phases. The first building, put up in 1927, was designed by nationally-known architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue as a mansion for the wealthy Windward Oahu landowners Harold and Alice Castle.
The Spanish-style Castle building has nearly 30 rooms and features ornamental ironwork and large redwood beams.
The Diocese of Honolulu bought the place in 1946 for the site of St. Stephen Seminary.
The seminary in 1951 added a second structure, a dormitory and classroom building now called the Cullinan Building after Sulpician Father Richard Cullinan, the former seminary vice rector and science teacher.
The third set of buildings, built in 1962 for the college seminarians, today houses overnight retreat facilities, a chapel and an auditorium.
St. Stephen is currently the address for about 15 diocesan offices, the residences of Bishop Larry Silva and several priests, the Carmelite Convent, a couple of private homes and a meeting site and retreat center.
Pollock, who is from Iowa, first visited Hawaii in 1973 with his wife Maxine who was here for a hair dressers’ convention. He fell head over heels for the Islands.
They sold their Mainland home, he quit his Proctor and Gamble job, and they moved here with nine boxes of belongings.
Pollock got his first local job at Foremost Dairies, attracted by the life-size cow statue out front.
“I’m from Iowa,” he explained. “It looked like a nice place to work.”
He started in the shipping department loading milk trucks and eventually progressed to production manager.
It was Father Bartholomew O’Leary, director of St. Stephen Diocesan Center in the late 1970s, who first asked Pollock to help with some renovation projects there. At the time, the former seminary was being transformed into diocesan offices and retreat center.
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph A. Ferrario hired Pollock full-time in 1980.
Pollock helped turn the former dormitories, chapel, recreation hall, classrooms and shower rooms into work spaces and conference halls.
He served as administrator of St. Stephen Diocesan Center for most of his years there.
Gene Pollock, in his St. Stephen Diocesan Center workshop on June 10, holds the mallet he made out of a baseball bat. (HCH photo by Darlene Dela Cruz)
Today he is listed as maintenance staff along with his co-worker Romeo Alejandro, whom he describes as a man with many talents and skills. For years they were a trio with David Moniz, who died in 2011.
Most of the labor-intensive maintenance done at the center, like lawn care and groundskeeping, housekeeping, painting and roofing, are done by contractors, Pollock said. So is major work that requires up-to-date expertise like appliance repairs, electrical work and plumbing.
Pollock and Alejandro do the rest.
Making it work
St. Stephen did not come with an instruction manual. Pollock had to pull from his wide range of experiences — from his time as a Navy electrician, his correspondence course in carpentry, his hobby fixing boats.
But a lot of it was his natural affinity for solving problems with his hands.
“You kind of evolve into the job. You do it to make it work. That’s the whole concept. You just got to do it to make it work.”
When he could not find a solid redwood beam big enough to replace a rotting one in the Castle building, he created a hollow one of planks and recreated the original decorative curves and notches with a saw. “Zip, zip, zip, zip,” he said.
He made it sound simple.
Pollock said the old building is filled with construction lessons. He would admire and sometimes try to duplicate the techniques of the 1920s carpenters.
“I would see how things were built,” he said. “I think it is a good thing to continue that tradition. You learn a lot that way. On purpose, I would go out and buy these old antique tools.”
Where others might rent a cherry picker, Pollock would hoist 12-inch-thick beams in place with block and tackle.
Where others would just rip out the old wood and replace it with new, Pollock would swap out the rot with Bondo.
“I just love restoring things,” he said.
“And it is really interesting up here because you have buildings made in 1927 and in the ’50s and ’60s” he said.
Besides, “You can’t find redwood nowadays.”
Big and small touches
There is hardly a fix-it or upgrade project he hasn’t tackled.
He bought two 40-foot ladders to put up gutters on the edge of the Castle building’s roof. He installed new backboards for the basketball court. He stripped the unsightly paint from the library’s red stone floor tiles and replaced it with scuff-proof sealant. He replaced the corrugated metal roof over the center’s walkways.
He also liked to do small touches. He scraped the discolored varnish off the large koa cross above the main chapel’s front doors and restored its rightful luster. In the Castle building’s courtyard, he kept its big brass bell polished and, for the well, ordered from Pennsylvania an Aunt Helen’s decorative pulley and an Amish wooden bucket.
Working at a place for more than three decades also means adjusting to the preferences of different bosses. Obliging the liturgical styles of several bishops, he has modified the main chapel through a number of reconfigurations which have included reducing the size of the main altar, reshaping and lowering the sanctuary, and rearranging the pews.
Pollock is a recycler. Renovations in the Cullinan Building and the retreat center left him with slabs of ohia, a Hawaiian hardwood, and oak, which became everything from wall studs for the climate-controlled basement archives to wall crosses for the overnight retreat rooms.
Last year he directed the installation of a new 50,000 gallon steel water storage tank in the forested slope above the center to replace a redwood tank built in 1965. The tank, which serves all of St. Stephen Diocesan Center, collects its water from springs he maintains that flow out of the mountain.
Pollock also oversees the center’s septic tank system, testing the pH and oxygen levels of the effluent weekly.
He is licensed by the State of Hawaii as an “operator grade 1” in both drinking water and wastewater management, requirements for a plant this size.
And even after three decades on the job, there is always something new. When Hawaii Electric Company shut down the power for St. Stephen for a full day last week, Pollock found himself with flashlight in hand in a small basement alcove whose walls are covered by electrical circuit and distribution panels. The metal boxes are all armed, like slot machines, with power-on levers of all sizes, and he was in there turning off switches he had never turned off before.
Sublime moments
Pollock said his work is sometimes blessed with sublime moments, like when he came to the realization that the redwood planks and beams he works on, lumbered in California in the 1920s, could be 1,600 to 2,000 years old.
Or when he was working on windows, sitting on a window ledge, looking out on the blue expanse of ocean.
“Oh, my gosh! I love to sail,” he said.
“Graduation” will give him more time with his passion, a classic l966 Cal 36 sailboat docked at the Kaneohe Yacht Club.
“I love to work on that. I love to sail. I love to free-dive and scuba dive,” he said. “The bay out there, it’s my playground.”
Pollock said his fondest memory of St. Stephen Diocesan Center is not a project but a person — “Father Dever.”
The late Msgr. Daniel Dever, the longtime superintendent of Catholic schools who lived at St. Stephen for many years, was the center’s resident philosopher and sage.
Whenever Pollock was dealing with “a lot of frustrations,” he said, “Father Dever just kind of nurtured me through the whole thing.”
Sometimes all it took was a simple, “Good job, Gene.”
Msgr. Dever died three years ago, but the walls, beams, railings, stairs, pipes and floors of St. Stephen still echo those words.
“Good job, Gene.”
