"Pop" Hill

One of the characters that I was fascinated by as a child was "Pop" Hill. Pop was always mixing cement in a trough, always building walls. He would build wooden forms, mix and pour cement into the forms, and throw in some rocks. He was building cement retaining walls to hold back the hillsides behind his properties on lower Main Street. Along this area there is a lot of decomposed granite, and it's always being washed down the hillsides. It seemed like every day, there he was, in his 60's, carrying 40 lb. sacks of concrete mix up 50 stairs, to the top where the work was going on. I don't know what Pop's background was, and I don't know where he learned to build, but he could take abandoned shipping pallets, some angle iron, some cement and build a building. I know this first hand, because after watching him build all those walls in the early 1960's, I was later employed rebuilding some of the buildings he had built earlier. We constantly found pieces of shipping crates and pallets used to build interior walls. He in many ways the original re-cycler, must have been learned it by living through the Great Depression.
Now, I find myself, nearing my '60s, building retaining walls for my own property, wonder where I got that from...