Mike Rowe Proves Grime Does Pay in Discovery's "Dirty Jobs"

Rowe39s never encountered a job that requires physical labor true grit and mechanical skill that he looks down on He39s a man on a mission reminding us that people who know how to work with their hands built this country and keep it running He shows his respect for laborers by highlighting their work on the show and trying to do what they do explaining how hard and necessary amp8211 their jobs are And he39s encouraging youth to go into the trades through his mikeroweWORKSfoundationAll this stems from his lifelong desire to be like his grandfather quotHe was an electrician and a plumber and a steamfitter and a pipe fitter and a mechanic and a welder and an architect and a guy who went to the seventh gradequot Rowe said quotAnd he could build houses He could take your watch apart and put it back together blindfolded He just had that mechanical knack I was pretty sure I was going to follow in his footsteps because I wanted to I just didn39t get the skills The handy gene is recessive right I didn39t know thatquotSo he told me when I was probably 15 39Mike you can be a tradesman if you want just get a different toolbox because none of this stuff is coming easily for you39quot he recalledGrowing up outside of Baltimore Rowe was a shy kid with a stammer In the Boy Scouts he read to blind people everything from newspapers to Dr Zhivago quotwhatever they wanted to hearquot That helped his stutter to a degree But Rowe credits his high school music teacher for stopping his stutter The teacher a retired Army colonel asked him to audition for a school play Granted the way the teacher approached this would not fly todayquotI did it because I loved him and I trusted him and I went on stagequot Rowe said quotI started stammering through a monologue and I got about 20 seconds into it and he said 39Mike stop I love what you39re doing with the character but this character doesn39t stutter You do that on your own time Just try it once without the whole Porky Pig routine39quotI wish teachers could be less careful today with their kidsquot he continued quotBut look there was a lot of trust between us I didn39t think about how glib it wasquotAnd so Rowe became comfortable speaking in front of others and putting his rich voice to work He sang professionally with the Baltimore Opera and this Christmas had a song quotSanta39s Gotta Dirty Jobquot with John Rich that reached No 1 on iTunesBefore he had his own shows Rowe was working in San Francisco at CBS quotimpersonating a show hostquot On Evening Magazine he wound up shooting the first segments of what would become his trademark amp8211 telling viewers about an unseen dirty jobquotI took my cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco to host the show from a sewerquot Rowe said quotThe roaches the rats the excrement It was horrible and there was a guy down there knocking the bricks out of the wall and replacing themquotA star one destined to be coated in very nasty stuff was bornquotIt was a segment originally called Somebody39s Gotta Do Itquot Rowe explained That eventually morphed into Dirty Jobs beginning in 2003 on Discovery All along ideas of what fields to feature came from people telling him about their work or their relatives39 jobs And then of course I said 39Well okay what do they do39 And then we started to get these elaborate descriptions of these really odd jobsquotYou know it39s very rare for a show to inspire that level of interaction with fansquot he notedRowe loves the odd jobs the jobs no one even thinks about but which make the world runquotSeason one was feces from every speciesquot he said laughing quotWe were just absolutely focused on all the different kinds of shit and all the different ways to clean it up Season two we kind of stumbled into this weird world of artificial insemination And once the network saw me coaxing the sperm out of a bull they were horrified because standards and practices was like 39We don39t even know what to blur and what to look away from39 But the ratings went through the roofquotThis season kicked off with a very tough dirty job where the result is intentionally unseen Rod busters install reinforcing steel in massive structures that other layers of construction hide By the next episode Rowe added a layer of epoxy to a restaurant floor which like all these dirty jobs sounds far more pleasant than it isquotThe guys who do it are truly a band of brothersquot Rowe said of his adventures in Florida building a bridge and carrying heavy steel rods in the sweltering heat quotThese guys will come in and they39ll bend the rebar and they39ll shape it and they39ll tie it and they39ll construct this elaborate skeletonquotIt39s beautiful and it weighs many tons and it39s just this giant thingquot Rowe continued genuinely impressed quotAnd then the cement guys come in There was something about the combination of art in the work pride in the art and the invisibility of it all that just made me think 39Man somebody39s got to spend some time with these guys39quotDirty Jobs is telecast Sundays at 8 pm on Discovery and streams on DiscoveryClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Mike Rowe Proves Grime Does Pay in Discovery's "Dirty Jobs"

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Jacqueline Cutler

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Mike Rowe Proves Grime Does Pay in Discovery's "Dirty Jobs"

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