They gathered in the lowland forests bordering Seattle, arriving by wagon or horseback for secret meetings under the shroud of towering evergreens. It was too dangerous for the young president of Local 77 and his band of brothers to discuss their plans anywhere else.

They were preparing to demand safety reforms at a time when industry-funded "goon squads" might have broken their bones, or worse, for daring to act collectively.

But taking risks was nothing new. As linemen in the early 1900s, their life expectancy was little better than a flip of the coin.

Barely one in two survived North America's deadliest job for more than three years. IBEW dues in those days had one purpose: paying grieving families' funeral expenses.

George L. Brooks, the activist leader of the local based at Seattle City Light, knew nothing would change unless labor forced the utilities' hands.

In 1913, armed with a clandestine draft of a safety code and an arsenal of arguments for legislators, Brooks and his members trekked south to Washington's capital in Olympia.

Against all odds, they beat the utility and industrial lobbies, making Washington the only state with a law protecting electrical workers, one that later would serve as a template for federal safety codes.

For the first time, the men installing poles, stringing wires, powering streetlights and maintaining the nascent electrical systems in rugged terrain and growing cities had legal safeguards, and companies could face steep fines for violating them.

Branded a troublemaker, Brooks was promptly fired from City Light and blackballed at utilities up and down the West Coast.

But the indomitable 24-year-old wasn't done leaving his mark on linemen's safety. Over the next two decades, he would invent the revolutionary Brooks Hooks that are still the model for gold-standard climbing gear.

Brooks died in March 1934, not knowing that his patent would be approved six weeks later or the impact it would have on generations of IBEW members.

Or knowing that Local 77 would grow into a powerful statewide union where his legacy is an enduring source of pride.

"His gift to our trade was bigger than what he achieved during his lifetime," Business Manager Rex Habner said. "It was a perpetuation of safety practices. Once you see one thing working, it multiplies, and that started with George Brooks."

THE KEEPERS of Brooks' flame at Local 77 place him in the same category of IBEW pioneers as Henry Miller, the union's founding president.

Miller himself died after a fall from a power pole during a storm in Washington, D.C., in 1896, one year before Local 77 was chartered on the other side of the country.

"Just like Henry Miller, George Brooks understood strength in numbers," Habner said. "He saw that 50% of the line trade was dying, and he organized his brothers to take a stand that saved lives. Then he spent years perfecting a device that made it safer and easier for linemen to do their jobs."

In Brooks' time, Local 77 was part of a patchwork of locals at upstart utilities across the Pacific Northwest.

Today, after a colorful journey of splits and mergers, it is Washington's largest local geographically, encompassing the state and parts of Idaho.

Brooks was hired as a City Light lineman in 1908, became chair of the union's safety committee and — the records are murky — was elected president in 1910 or 1913.

He'd been working half his life, first at a lumber camp at age 12 in his home state of Michigan and then as a railroad brakeman, the job that took him west.

Local 77's Rick Luiten, who supervises high-voltage/telecom compliance for the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries, said it speaks to Brooks' courage and character that the rails didn't scare him away from union membership, let alone activism.

It was the era when American industrialists had the ruthless police of the Pinkerton Agency in their pocket, along with vicious goon squads, corrupt sheriffs and thuggish yard bulls at rail stops.

For linemen, miners, loggers and other trade workers traveling by train in search of work, any hint of union affiliation or solidarity could put them in jeopardy.

Luiten, a labor history hobbyist, described brutal beatings that left men broken or dead, and for those who survived, the further threat of being thrown in jail and doing hard labor on a chain gang.

Workers with union leanings who slipped through the net were wise to keep their mouths shut. "Just sitting down at a bar and talking about safety problems or saying you heard that guys a town over were making a penny more an hour could make you a target," Luiten said.

Still, union jobs could be found, however threadbare the terms of agreement by today's standards. Posts in the IBEW monthly journal, which became today's Electrical Worker, alerted linemen to far-flung worksites where a union card could get them on the books.

"That's how it came to be called our 'ticket,'" Luiten said. "Just like today, their union card was their ticket to find work, but on the train they'd hide it in their shoes or boots and pray they never got searched."

The level of danger in the Seattle area during Brooks' tenure isn't clear, but Luiten said there's no question that he and his men were at risk of harm.

"Some people just stick out in the crowd as leaders and say, 'Hey, something's got to change.' And that was George Brooks."

IN 1912, Brooks twisted his ankle. It turned out to be a twist of fate.

The mishap led to what his son recalled as 20 years of "Pa tinkering with a model for climbers with removable and replaceable gaffs."

The injury put Brooks on wooden crutches that had the same flaw as his pole-climbers, as George F. Brooks described in 1978 for a Local 77 brochure:

The crutches were so short that Pa had to bend over to use them. Ten-year-old Marguerite, my sis, asked why they didn't make them adjustable like telescopes, so that they would fit anybody. It never occurred to Pa to run to a patent attorney, so later on somebody else made a bundle. But Pa realized instantly that the same principle was needed to improve the lineman's climbers.

Brooks had barely begun to fiddle with a design when his role as a ringleader for safety abruptly ended his career at Seattle City Light.

With other utilities refusing to hire him, he returned to the railroads as a brakeman for Northern Pacific. In 1917, he inherited his father's homestead and moved his family back to Lansing, Mich., where he became a member of Local 352.

His infamy hadn't traveled that far, allowing him to work as an itinerant lineman for Consumers Power Co. In 1923, he was hired by Lansing's Board of Water & Light to install the city's first traffic lights.

As his duties expanded, he was promoted to foreman and occasionally served as acting superintendent. His experience and ingenuity even led company engineers to tap him as a consultant — until his obstinance about safety got him in hot water again.

In 1931, after scrapping with management about protecting his men, Brooks was demoted back to an inexperienced traffic-light crew.

THE OUTLOOK was better at home, where he and his son were on the verge of an engineering breakthrough.

The younger Brooks had enrolled in a high school drafting class to experiment with his father's designs after discovering for himself the limits of the era's climbing hooks.

At age sixteen, one beautiful morning in August 1930, I decided to be an electrical lineman, just like my Pa. I walked across Alpha Street and started up a pole. It was easy to drag the gaff (spur) up the pole six to ten inches at a time, alternately shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

Climbing down was a different story:

The gaffs were tightly embedded in the pole — I couldn't pull either foot off the pole to step down. I was trapped. Finally, I managed to get one foot loose and step down a ways but [it was] even more difficult to free the other foot from the pole. After a half hour of struggling, I had gotten down only about six feet, and I was tempted to holler for help. But the embarrassment would have been just too much.

Eventually his feet touched ground. When his father came home for lunch, he fessed up:

He laughed, gave me the raspberry, then explained, "You don't pull the gaffs up; to get them out of the pole, you bend your knee outward, away from the pole, and at the same time, you twist your ankle so that you can pry against it with your foretoe. This way, you break a chip out of the pole, sideways, and the climber is out."

The teenage Brooks asked if the climbers got heavier for linemen throughout the day.

Pa replied, "About 4:30 p.m., they weigh sixteen ton!"

He theorized in drafting class that lighter-weight climbers could be made equally strong by using half as much steel in a channel or T formation. He brought the concept to his father.

His eyes lit up as he blurted, "Yup, and that ain't all! I think I've got the answer to a problem that's had me stymied for years!"

IN GEORGE F.'s lively retelling, Brooks brought home a half-inch T-iron and a piece of sheet metal he'd fitted around it. He'd drilled holes in the contraption about an inch apart and inserted pins to create an adjustable model.

Pa said, "Now, any lineman, regardless of his height, can wear his hooks just where he likes them best — low on his calf or high up to the knee." He handed me his new telescoping gadget, along with his ten-year-old aluminum model with the replaceable gaff. He said, "I want you to ask your drafting teacher if you can make a drawing of this."

Before long, Brooks had a diagram to take to a patent attorney. While waiting for the government's answer, he traveled the Midwest seeking manufacturers, bids and investors.

Though he didn't live to see the patent issued on May Day 1934 — his cause of death unknown — he'd made enormous strides that would lead to mass production of Brooks Hooks, a design that is still a staple of the trade.

"I like to say that George Brooks invented safety," said Mike Brown, assistant business manager of Local 77. "He invented Brooks Hooks, but he also helped invent safety laws at a time when there weren't any — for any workers."

Other states gradually began to adopt electrical codes in the 1920s, and a national code was finalized in 1926. But there were no enforceable federal protections for workers until the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created in 1970 under President Richard Nixon.

Brown and his colleagues couldn't be prouder of the fact that OSHA "plagiarized" Washington's electrical code, as he put it.

"It is literally the electrical safety standard across the United States, and it originated with George Brooks and his Local 77 brothers."

BY NECESSITY, the politics of safety in Brooks' day targeted the most immediate threats to life and limb.

His own men undoubtedly suffered joint pain and, even in the temperate Northwest, suffered heatstroke in the summer. But it would be decades before anyone was talking about ergonomics and extreme heat. Even longer before worksite safety would include defibrillators, GPS devices and other life-saving technology.

Longer still before mental health would be on the table, a matter of urgency today as the building trades confront an alarming suicide rate.

It was one of the topics in May at an annual member-driven safety conference named for George Brooks at Local 77's Spokane office in eastern Washington. This summer, the building itself was renamed George Brooks Hall, with its lobby transformed to honor him.

Along with a variety of presenters, the peer-to-peer event encouraged members to open up about safety concerns and brainstorm solutions. But first, they learned about Brooks.

"I think members are kind of in awe when they hear his story," Business Representative Dave Garegnani said. "They sit back and say, 'Wow, I had no idea.'"

Brown urged participants to see themselves as Brooks' modern-day counterparts.

"We say, 'What do we need to do to move the needle on safety to have just as large an impact today as he and the brothers did back then?'" he said.

The conversation ranged from jobsite and equipment issues to conflict de-escalation when dealing with hostile customers, managing stress and depression, and the signs that a colleague may be in trouble.

"Safety is not just about making sure that you have protective cover up on the lines or that your gloves are good or that your hot sticks are up to code," said Garegnani, who coordinated the conference. "It's about safety in our lives and in our heads and even in our hearts because if we're not functioning well, it affects our ability to do the job and have each other's backs."

The question came up: What would Brooks think if he were in the room?

"One of our members said, 'I bet George Brooks would have no idea we'd be sitting around talking about our feelings,'" Garegnani said.

The consensus at Local 77 is that he would approve, that Brooks would see today's safety issues and the myriad subjects of bargaining as the natural evolution of the fight he led.

"I wish more people understood the sacrifice he and his brothers made," Habner said. "It's not a folk story. They were essentially doing the same thing we are today, working for the betterment of IBEW members and all workers, but the difference is that we have a huge labor movement around us.

"They were on their own and they must have been fearful. But look what they accomplished. They changed history."

Scan this QR code to read George F. Brooks' full story about his father's invention. www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/24Daily/ 2410/241009_TwentyYears