“When I started, I didn’t know which end of a paintbrush to grab,” said Bill Ibsen.
Three decades later, Ibsen knows painting: prep work, brush and roll, spraying and everything in between. But five years ago, the Everett native and Foss Paint Shop foreman had to start from scratch – with his son.
“I got out of high school…it wasn’t more than a month, was it,” Jeff Ibsen, 24, asked his father.
“Nope,” Bill said. “He turned 18 and I said, ‘You get your behind to work.'”
“I was looking for a job, at Safeway, at bowling alleys…you know, sitting around, being a kid,” Jeff said. “Then one day, my dad walked in and said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to work with me on Monday.’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not. I’ve got plans, I’ve got parties I’m going to.’ He said, ‘No you don’t. You’re going to work.’ He drove me to work and I started on Day Shift.”
“Sometimes it’s very hard to find painters, you know, in the shipyards,” Bill explained. “I needed bodies. He was just then old enough to get a job. Brought him in.”
Three years later, Jeff’s older brother, Ben, came onboard.
“The circumstances were similar,” said Ben, 33, “with them needing painters. I was laid off from installing drywall, construction, so I thought I’d come down here. I’m still pretty new; it’s still pretty exciting for me.”
Bill Ibsen has six children: four sons and two daughters. Ben is the proverbial middle child, Jeff the baby. Both are now lead men in their father’s shop.
“Most of the time, we’re more ‘preppers’ than painters,” Ben said. “We essentially go through and strip the boats of rust. They get beat up. It’s amazing what happens to those boats out there. They come back rusted out. So, basically, we have to go through and knock the rust off, smooth them back out.”
“And it’s always in a rush,” Bill said, chuckling. “We’re always the last crew in.”
“Yeah, we usually have four days to do two-and-a-half months of work,” Jeff joked.
“It’s stressful, but it’s exciting,” echoed Ben.
Though the Ibsen sons and father are sometimes given the opportunity to experiment with new paint products, the industry standard leaves little room for elaborate aesthetics.
“The (paint job) requests are pretty simple, usually,” Ben said. “Most of ours are work boats. They’re not fancy.”
“You get a little bit of gratification when you get it all done and then you watch it sail away,” Bill said.
Bill Ibsen, at 58 years old, has 10 grandchildren now and is “banging on the door of retirement.” He’s spent 35 years at Foss.
“I think I’m going to do a lot of fishing, a lot of traveling,” he said. “My wife and I like to travel. We’ve been on a lot of cruises: the Mediterranean, South America, Cape Horn, the Panama Canal. But I’ll miss seeing them at work. I have one kid that lives in Montana and another that lives in Connecticut. So I get to see one once a year, the other maybe once every other year. Even my other kids who are close by, I only get to see them every other week. So it’s nice to see the boys here.”
Ibsen said he’s a proud father whose never had a problem being tough at work and a father after the three punch out.
“The superintendents are always very happy with their work,” he said of his sons. “It makes it very easy for me.”
Jeff said he can easily see following in her father’s footsteps.
“I love the industry,” he said. “We have an amazing pension plan, so I have a great pension already at the age of 24. This is a great place to be. I make a good amount of money. My pension’s building up, so I have a retirement plan. I don’t really have any plans of jumping anywhere else.”
