Courtesy photo An old, forgotten tractor sits as a testament to the lost art of manual work.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column was written by Lori Rose, former Daily Press staffer and sister of Friday columnist Karen Wils, who is on a medical break).

ESCANABA — When I was a kid, there was a steady stream of music from the basement.

Yes, there were countless hours of The Who and AC/DC from my brothers, but also the “rrrzingg” of the bandsaw, the scratch of the grinding wheel, and the thumps from a hammer.

My dad was a very gifted draftsman and carpenter. He built numerous pieces of furniture, cutting boards and specialty items. He loved to sew, too, beginning as a lad by making his own game bag for hunting. He inherited Grandma’s 1892 sewing machine, patching and mending everything under the sun and making homemade book bags and pencil sacks for back-to-school for us kids.

I once sat him down for a family history interview, and he told me his favorite class at Gladstone High was Manual Training. He remembered once getting out of a duller class and joining a few other boys to make cabinets for the band room, at the request of his teacher.

I found it a little funny that the idea of “manual training,” teaching kids to work with their hands, got watered down or sidelined in my generation. Everyone talked about becoming a computer whiz or the CEO of a big company.

Granted, everyone has their own talents to share, but I think our country went astray somewhat when it began to devalue the work done by human hands.

My dad worked very hard over the years, lifting nets with a commercial fisherman in his teens and patching veneer panels as a young man. Later, he got on at the Harnischfeger plant in Escanaba, making templates and cutting parts out of steel.

When the plant announced its imminent closure, it severely marked the trajectory for my dad, and for my little hometown. Many other places lost jobs to modernization or offshore competition.

Given all that, I was surprised to hear a recent economic report that now only about 10 percent of the jobs in this country are in manufacturing. Hmmm, I thought, only that tiny fraction?

It just didn’t seem right that 90 percent of our economy is involved in other things: service, entertainment, finance.

I remember covering the local ISD and Bay College back in the 1980s and ’90s, and there was a definite push for students to join vocational and technical fields. I remember reporting on the building trades and the new field of computer-aided design.

Today, there is an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, the arts and math, especially on inclusion of the genders in nontraditional roles.

When I was in high school, I nearly signed up for a voc-ed course (Health Occupations), but it didn’t fit into my college prep schedule. Today, my niece is fulfilling that idea by studying sonography in college.

I always wondered what it would have been like doing a job primarily with your hands, getting a sense of accomplishment when a new whatchamacallit was finished or looking up at a finely stuccoed ceiling.

By necessity, the quarantined masses these days appear to have rediscovered some of the lost manual arts. I’ve heard of people building decks, making jewelry, fashioning raised-bed gardens, constructing works of art from beach debris, baking bread, canning veggies and a whole host of other elbow grease projects.

There can be failures along the way, of course, but isn’t it kind of nice to stimulate a part of your brain you may not have used in years… decades?

On this Labor Day weekend, let’s rediscover the dignity of old-fashioned work by making some drawings, looking up old family recipes, or asking an elder for advice. Have the kids watch a documentary about the Pullman porters or the folks who built the Mackinac Bridge.

It’ll be a fascinating ride.

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Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.