Famous Plumbers
Lon Chaney Jr.
The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, the man destined to star in classic horror movies was born Creighton Tull Chaney. Old man Chaney raised his son in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness and absolutely forbade young Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession. This may have deprived the movies of the world's greatest Wolfman but it gave Chreighton the chance to join the world's greatest profession. He trained to be plumber. It was only after Chaney Sr. died in 1930 that Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until Creighton was (by his own recollection) "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jnr. The roles quickly followed including Man Made Monster, the Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, the Son of Dracula and The Mummy. These horror films apart, his greatest roles were in High Noon, Of Mice and Men and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Lon Chaney Snr. was known as The Man with a Thousand Faces but his son achieved greater fame. Lon Jnr. always put his success down to the time he spent as a plumber.
Tom Finney
Known as the Preston Plumber, this 76-times capped winger is still considered one of the greatest British players of all time. He became an apprentice plumber at 14, a trade he continued all his working life, even at the height of his international fame. Yet during the 40s and 50s he was never paid any more than any other player, getting just the £20 a week maximum wage. These days, of course, he could earn a fortune - simply by working as a plumber. In 1952 Italian side Palermo offered him a £10,000 signing on fee, £130 a month wages, bonuses of up to £100 a game, a Mediterranean villa, a luxury car and free travel to and from Italy for his family. They also offered Preston £30,000 by way of a transfer fee. This was 1952 and such sums of money were unimaginable. Finney turned it down. Even then being a plumber was lucrative work. "Tom Finney would have been great in any team, in any match and in any age. . . even if he had been wearing an overcoat." - Bill Shankly.
Rashid Abdul Dostum
General Dostum is the whisky-drinking former plumber who rose through the ranks of the Afghan puppet army that the Soviet Union ran in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was eventually appointed head of Khad, the hated Communist secret police agency, where he had ample opportunity to indulge his penchant for ruthlessness and savagery. Dostum is a nickname which means "everyone's friend", and since the collapse of the Communist regime he has shown himself to be an expert player in the byzantine world of Afghan politics, changing sides three times. Whether it be the Uzbeks, the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance, the Americans or the International League of Plumbers, Dostum always wants to be on the winning side. Dostum is said to have grown hugely wealthy from his various side-switches. He certainly fared better than those who crossed him as his death squads acquired a reputation for ruthless brutality. He is earmarked by many as a future leader of Afghanistan.
Ozzie Osbourne
Born in 1948 in Aston, Birmingham as John Michael Osbourne, the fourth of six children. The Osbourne family lived in poverty and a crowded house. Ozzy was beaten regularly by his father, mainly for behavior such as trying to kill his siblings. Constant fighting and arguing between Ozzy's parents about their financial situation finally prompted him to try and do something about it. At the age of fifteen, Ozzy took his first job as a plumber's assistant. Ozzy also tried some jobs in crime; this later landed him in Birmingham's Winson Green prison for a short time for burglary. Once he was released, he never wanted to go back, so he decided to try and make a career in music. Ozzy joined and left many bands which never went anywhere before forming Rare Breed which became Earth which became Black Sabbath, named after a Boris Karloff movie. After a successful solo career he only became really famous when he let a documentary crew film his dysfunctional family and he became an MTV superstar.
Michael Flatley
The Lord of the Dance was born in Chicago, the son of a plumber, and he followed his old man into the business. He went from Roto-Rooter to multi-millionaire in just seven years, simply by flinging his freaky little feet at five thousand miles an hour. Michael, whose parents emigrated from Ireland a decade earlier, began dance lessons at the age of four, taught by his grandmother. He went on to become the first American to win the World Irish Dance Championships. He tried to start a dance studio after graduating from high school, but the opportunities for a working wage through traditional Irish dancing were not exactly bountiful. Flatley made his living with a variety of manual labour jobs, ultimately starting his own business, Dynasty Plumbing. "I'm no stranger to hard work," he said. "I think any man who works for a living should be proud." Well said Michael. Flatley was 36 before he left the problems of intractable garbage disposal to become the star of Riverdance, taking traditional Irish steps across the world. One year later he went in the huff over the choreography and was fired so he set up his own version, Lord of the Dance. It was a bit similar to Riverdance but he got more money out of it. Much more.
Mack Sennett
While not the first producer of Hollywood comedies, Canadian-born Mack Sennett was one of the best organized and most successful and the man who made them into real box office. He was known throughout Hollywood as the King of Comedy. His lesser-known, but nonetheless apposite, soubriquet was the King of Plumbers. Growing up in Canada, Sennett had dreams of becoming an opera singer, but economic considerations forced him into such blue collar jobs as iron worker, boilermaker and assistant plumber when his Irish immigrant family moved to the US. He wandered into the Biograph Company in 1908 where DW Griffith hired him as an actor and part-time director. Soon he was directing all of Griffith's comedies and then set up his own Keystone Studios where he hired one Charlie Chaplin. Sennett lost a fortune in the stock market crash of 1929 but still enjoyed a long retirement. He always had the plumbing to fall back on. He died in California in 1960.
Zinzan Brooke
Former New Zealand rugby captain Zinzan Brooke was a plumber before he turned to playing his sport full-time. The number 8, reckoned by many experts to be one of the all-time greats, played 82 times for the All Blacks, scoring 190 points in the process and captained his country on many occasions. Zinzan was born on the 14th of June, 1965 in Ahuroa. He went to Mahurangi College and he lived on a farm. He first began playing rugby for the Puhoi club where his father was the coach and his mother was the manager. He went on to play for Auckland before starring for the All Blacks.
Simone DeCavalcante
AKA Sam DeCavalcante. AKA Sam the Plumber. He was the boss of the Mafia's New Jersey based DeCavalcante Family from the 1960s until the mid 1970s. In 1961, the FBI planted a listening device in DeCavalcante's plumbing supply shop, and recorded him discussing criminal activities with other Mafia members and with politicians until they removed the device in 1965. In 1969, two thousand pages of the "DeCavalcante Tapes", also known as the "Goodfella Tapes", were made public but were never used against DeCavalcante because the FBI had never obtained a court order to plant the listening device. DeCalvacante was convicted of another crime that same year and served three years in prison. He retired to Florida in 1976 and died there of natural causes at age 84. The DeCavalcantes are now believed by many to be the leading and most powerful crime family in New York.
G. Gordon Liddy
The former FBI agent who helped plan the Watergate break-in has capitalized on his burglary legend and taken his political views to the airwaves. George Gordon Liddy's ultra-conservative radio talk show based in Fairfax, Virginia is broadcast on 232 stations nationwide. Liddy was convicted for his role in the Watergate break-in, for conspiracy in the Daniel Ellsberg case and for contempt of court spending nearly five years in prison. In 1986, a federal appeals court found Liddy liable for $20,499 in back taxes on Watergate slush-fund money, rejecting his claim that he did not benefit from the more than $45,000 he had received. As one of the White House plumbers, Liddy spent about $300,000 engineering political dirty tricks and the Watergate break-in. Amongst his many outrageous claims, Liddy says he once ate a rat to conquer his fear of rats. He once asked, "Why is it there are so many more horses' asses than there are horses?" If anyone knows, he should. Now 66, Liddy lives in Fort Washington, Maryland.
Joe Cocker
One of rock and roll's enduring performers, Cocker has survived the sixties, a low period in the seventies, made a comeback in the eighties, and continues to be a solid and consistent performer in the nineties and on into the 21st century. Known for his gutsy, gravelly, vocal style, Joe started out in Sheffield in the mid sixties, working as a gas plumber by day and performing in the clubs of the area by night. The perfect life. Cocker writes very little of his own material, plays no instruments, and finds himself completely at the mercy of whatever producer and backing musicians he lands with. The lot of plumbers everywhere. His major hits were With a Little Help From My Friends, Up Where We Belong and Unchain My Heart. Joe's mum Marjorie, God bless her, once said, "When Joe left school at 16, I thought he was going to take up plumbing as a career. I even got him a lot of books on the subject, and he was interested in plumbing for a time, but there was always the music. That was what he wanted to do."
Smith Wigglesworth
A world-famous Christian evangelist and one of the few men named Smith with the power to raise people from the dead. Born in Yorkshire in 1859, Wigglesworth was picking crops for a living at the age of six and working 12 hours a day in a woollen mill by the age of seven. His family were very poor. Aye but they were happy though. He became a plumber by trade but he was not an ordinary plumber. He preached the good news to all of his customers and many were saved. News spread far and wide of The Bradford Plumber who healed the sick and restored life to the dead. Wigglesworth conducted healing meetings worldwide to audiences of thousands. Smith is said to have told God, "I'm going to trust you to provide for me. If ever I have less than three good suits in my closet, I'm going back to work as a plumber." He never did plumbing work again. Smith Wigglesworth died in 1946, aged 87. If he had only been in his prime in the television age, he'd have made his fortune.
Allan Williams
The first manager of a Liverpool combo known as The Beatles. This plumber and owner of the Jacaranda club was the man who took them to Hamburg in 1960 and set them on the road to a relatively successful career. He first met the Fab Four when they came into the Jacaranda and was the man who fixed him up with their first, and best, drummer, Pete Best. However after one packed gig in the German city, the Beatles didn't bother to give Williams his £14 cut. He immediately sacked them, vowing that they would never work again. Williams' parting shot was to tell anyone interested in taking over The Beatles that he "wouldn't touch them with a f*****g bargepole. Brian Epstein didn't take Williams' advice. Nor did he take him up on his offer to have his piping reworked and a new-fangled shower fitted. In hindsight, possibly the correct decision.
Roscoe Arbuckle
A comic genius from the golden age of the silent cinema, the Prince of Whales was the first comedian ever to be hit by an on-screen custard pie. He was working as an overweight plumber in 1913 when he was discovered by Mack Sennett. He had come to unclog the film producer's drain but Sennett had other plans for him. He took one look at his hefty frame and offered him a job as a Keystone Kop. Eight years later, Roscoe signed a three-year contract with Paramount for $1 million - an unheard of amount at the time, even in Holywood. To celebrate, Arbuckle and his pals booked into a room at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. It was to be his undoing. It was there that he was falsely accused of the rape and murder of starlet Virginia Rappe. The courts eventually cleared him but the public never did. After a huge media witch-hunt, Fatty never regained his popularity and died of a heart attack aged 46.
Lee Marvin
Born February 19, 1924, in New York City, Lee Marvin quit high school to enter the Marine Corps and while serving in the South Pacific was wounded in the Battle of Saipan. That sounds pretty heroic until you realise he was wounded in the buttocks. He spent a year in recovery before returning to the U.S. where he began working as a plumber's apprentice in New York. The Marine's loss was plumbing's gain. He got his break when filling in for a sick actor and that inspired him to study at the New York-based American Theater Wing. He made his Broadway debut in a 1951 production of Billy Budd and also made his first film appearance in You're in the Navy Now. Soon Marvin began appearing regularly onscreen, including a lead role in Stanley Kramer's 1952 war drama Eight Iron Men. He then went on to a string of major roles including The Big Heat, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Dirty Dozen. He won the best actor Oscar for his dual role in Cat Ballou. Lee Marvin died of a heart attack in 1987 and was buried in Arlington cemetery next to fellow services' veteran Joe Louis.