In 1998. after being honorably discharged from the US Navy, graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in Economics, and working as a tax accountant for Seagate Technology, the only thing I knew for certain was that I still hadn’t found what I was meant to do. A family friend was a general contractor, and he was working on his sister’s place down in the Seabright neighborhood. I asked him if he would consider hiring me as a helper since I had a little experience in construction building houses for Habitat for Humanity with my dad after leaving the Navy. I had just recently gotten married to my beautiful wife, Julie, who encouraged me to leave my safe and lucrative tax accountant job that was sucking the life out of me and doing something that inspired me. So, when Kevin O’Laughlin hired me I went from a corporate salary, benefits and a retirement plan to $11/hour. Julie never flinched and just wanted me to be happy.

My first project was to take down an old brick chimney that had been compromised in the 1989 earthquake. He was going out of town for a few days and left me with an old truck and a sledgehammer. I went after that chimney with vengeance and never looked back. In a fairly short amount of time, I knew I found what it was that I was supposed to be doing. Working with my hands, being outside, creating and getting stuff done was where I was meant to be.

When that project wrapped, I was going to be out of work, so I put the word out to some friends and by the grace of God I got connected with the Gettri Company. I was hired by Scott Tribble and David Getchel who are incredible builders with a long track record of building some of the finest homes in Santa Cruz.

 Working for David and Scott was not only challenging and sometimes brutal, but also inspirational. Scott was always ten steps ahead of everyone else on the job and seemed like he knew just about everything about everything. He would be grilling me about how to properly nail plywood one moment and then be lecturing me about history or politics or poetry the next. Luckily, for me the I could handle the grilling part thanks to my early days in boot camp back in the Navy. Scott has little in common with your typical general contractor. He is driven by his core principles of creating spaces that are as functionally superior as they are beautiful and pleasing to the eye. He does this while always being dedicated to accomplishing his goal while using the absolute minimum resources and maximizing efficiencies. I remember seeing him showing up on the job with a couple 20’ 2x4’s on his old beat up pickup truck, the back full of recycled or leftover supplies. All the carpenters would be excited to see that he had gone to a store and bought some new material. Then he would get out and look at us over his glasses and say “don’t even think about touching those 2x4’s.” He would break out his color-coded notebook and tell us all what he wanted us to do- and with what material- while ensuring we always had the absolute minimum necessary to get the job done. The knowledge and wisdom that this man has in terms of building is unparalleled to any person I have ever met.

Then there’s his partner David Getchel. David was more the GC, where he would be behind the scenes making sure the job had everything it needed to keep flowing. He would spend endless hours with clients, designers and engineers helping them make decisions, tracking down custom materials, drawing sections and elevations so the team knew how everything would go together. I would often hear Scott and David off in a corner having intense conversations, superlatives flying, about how we would do this or that, how much it’s going to cost, who’s going to do it, how long it will take. Being around these two I learned how important it is to use both sides of your brain in building and why it is so rewarding to create beautiful and inspiring spaces efficiently and time and budget.  On one job in particular, up in Pasatiempo, I remember talking with Scott about some trim that accidentally got primed and was supposed to be natural. Before deciding whether to rip it out and start over he had called his good friend and house painter Glenn Carter to come take a look.

Glenn came in and took a look and said something like “don’t touch it I can deal with it” to which I was like “oh he’s gonna have his crew come in and strip all the primer off to get back to the natural wood grain below. But no, what he meant was he could just paint it to look like wood. The finished product was beautiful – I was stunned how talented he was and later learned after working on Glenn’s house for a year or so that anything in the physical world can be painted to look like anything he wanted it to. He grew up in San Francisco as a fine artist. After getting married and having a kid he needed to start painting houses to support his family. He brought his fine art to house painting and his work is the evidence of his talent. Once again, there I was, right in the middle of these three amazing men learning as much as my little brain could possibly absorb. Going to work every day was exciting and always an adventure into sound building practices washed in artistic expression.

A lot of the projects that the Gettri Co were doing over many years were the creations of a local building designer/architect named Clarke Shultes.

After seeing several of the houses the Gettri Co had done for Clarke I was so impressed by their beauty and scale that I decided to try and look him up on line. I found nothing - no website, no listing, no newspaper articles – nothing. He didn’t need it. He had all the work he could ever handle by virtue of the beautiful trail of houses he and the Gettri Co had left behind. Neither one of them ever spent a single dollar on advertising. Clarke’s sense of scale, level of detail and understanding of flow through houses is what sets him apart. Whenever he can work on a house he takes cues from the neighborhood and always ensures his creation compliments what’s already there. This is a skill that is often sorely absent on some of the projects you will see around our town.

After deciding to get my own general contractor’s license I worked on a beautiful Clarke creation up in Bonny Doon with David Getchel for a couple of years.

The owners were very involved and knew they wanted a true “Clarke House” so I proceeded with extreme caution, care and attention to detail. Along the way I developed a deep friendship and working relationship with Clarke that has forever changed my life in the most profound ways. We became like long lost brothers that get to make our living creating beautiful structures for amazing clients who are always so appreciative and thankful.

I’m not sure what I did in a past life to deserve the opportunity to “cut my teeth” under the tutelage of Scott, David, Glenn and Clarke but whatever it was it must have been special. Now my goal is to keep this legacy going and teach what I was taught to the new generations so that our town continues to   shine and be a beautiful place to live and work.

                                                                                                             With gratitude,

Carl Ray