If I were a carpenter, it wasn't for very long. About three days, in fact.

That wasn't a bad run, however, with all the development and jobs around Tampa, Fla., in January 1973.

We'd had enough of winter after spending autumn on the New Hampshire apple farm. With little heat and no running water at the bunkhouse during the last several weeks, all we could think about was getting back to Florida.

My friend Murphy and I, armed with our philosophy degrees from the previous summer, were in no hurry to settle down and stop traveling. So, with maybe a couple of hundred dollars between us, we headed south in my 1964 Valiant.

We hooked up with my brother, Marty, who had a '65 Valiant, and landed jobs with a backhoe-and shovel gang laying water and sewer lines for a new subdivision in Melbourne. (Probably the one Eddie Clough and Nick Lambros are living in.)

Getting up at 5 a.m. every day to catch a worker bus was deadly, though. And we heard that Florida's west coast was really happening. After two weeks, we were on the road again, heading for "¦ hey, how about Tampa?

What we found right outside Tampa, in a suburb called Temple Terrace, was a building boom. On Fowler, on Busch, on 56th, wherever you turned, there were shopping centers and apartments and condos sprouting. And there were jobs, jobs and more jobs.

It took about 15 minutes for the three of us to find work as carpenter helpers. We figured if we could work as helpers and learn enough about the trade, then we could be carpenters and work for ourselves.

We found a duplex in Thonotosassa, a few miles out off Route 301. The landlord was cool; he took a few weeks rent and trusted us that we'd have the rest in a week.

We bought hammers, utility belts, and a skill saw and reported for work. We learned how to read blueprints, frame out rooms, tie-in walls, and do fir strips _ basic rough stuff. But, as helpers, we also had to pick up and carry a lot of wood and sweep out too many rooms.

After a week or two on the one job, Marty got tired of picking up wood and quit. He went down the street a block or two and got another job immediately. Eventually, Murphy and I did the same. If you didn't like what was happening on one job, you went down the road and found another.

One day, at a condo site, Murphy was sweeping out the next apartment and I heard the foreman, Woody, go in to tell him how to use a broom. I went to take a look and saw Woody grab the broom from him to illustrate.

Murphy took one look at me and we were out of there. "Nobody's going to show me how to sweep,'' he said. We had other jobs within an hour.

All told, my brother must have set some kind of record with 11 different jobs in about six months. Murphy and I were far back at six or seven.

After a few months of bouncing around the condo projects and shopping centers, we decided it was time to make the leap and hire out as rough carpenters for a contractor building houses. We lasted three days.

We were doing good work but didn't have enough experience to work quickly enough. At least that's what the contractor said when he stopped by on the third day, took one look at our progress and said, "that's it. Follow me to the bank.''

What we had discovered was that the best way to learn was to do houses, not complexes. So, next, we found jobs working with a real carpenter, Wayne, building houses. The first site was north of Tampa near Lake Como, where there was a nudist colony. Roofing had never been so much fun.

Wayne was a strange guy. For lunch he'd go down to the convenience store and buy a thick pack of bologna and some white bread. He'd pick up the meat and cut it like a deck of cards _ two halves, two sandwiches.

Next, Wayne and we hooked up with some Cubans building houses in a subdivision back in Temple Terrace. That was fine for a while, but then the bosses sent Wayne to another site. All we heard all day from the Cubans was "worky, worky'' every time one of us slowed the pace a bit.

By then it was June and getting hot out in the sun. Most people working outside in Florida downshifted during the summer, but not these guys.

It didn't take long to realize it was time to hit the road again, heading north, to seek our fortunes under a cooler sun.

And believe it or not, I still use that Temple Terrace hammer with the 16-ounce head and wooden handle. They don't make 'em like that any more.

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Cary Brunswick, managing editor of The Daily Star, can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.