Rowe thinks a civilized life is made possible by people doing________. Though not well-educated, Rowe’s grandfather had a natur

W: You have a set introduction for every show. Recite it for me and explain what it says about your regard for dirty jobs and manual labor.
M: My name is Mike Rowe. And this is my job: I explore the country, looking for people who aren’t afraid to get dirty, hard-working men and women who do the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. Now get ready to get dirty. That’s the mission statement for the show. We are finding people who are doing work that most of us go out of our way to avoid. I spend a day with them as an apprentice, trying to keep up with them and have a few laughs. The success of the show, I believe, is a result to those underlining themes about work that we constantly come back to, not just because of the exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.
W: There are a lot of things going on in your show. You introduce the audience to jobs that are unseen, even unknown, for the millions of Americans leading nice, clean, suburban lives. At the same time, you highlight the skill, the dignity, the humor of the people who do these jobs. Is it intentional that you have those dual themes?
M: It was very deliberate. The show started as a small segment on a local show in San Francisco. I was able to experiment quite a bit with what audiences responded to before I ever took the program to a network. I learned from doing these smaller profiles that there was a real mix between the interest the audience would have in the job itself and in the people who are performing the work. There is no dignity in work alone. The dignity is in the people. You can’t do a show about work that highlights the good parts of it unless you also include a show about people that highlights the good parts of them.
W: How many different dirty jobs have you done since the show has been on? And can you give me a list?
M: I finished my 200th a couple of months ago. We are now in the fourth season of the show and when we began, the intention was to do 12 programs, 12 jobs. I ran out of ideas around 50, and ever since, we’ve turned the programming of the show over to the viewers. Most of the ideas come in from people who actually watch the show.
W: I heard you say on the program once, "As my grandfather said, never trust a fellow with clean shoes. " Did he really say that? What did he do?
M: My grandfather is the reason Dirty Job is on the air. He had a seventh-grade education but was one of those fellows born hard-wired with an innate understanding of construction and technical trades. He built my first car. He built the house I was born in without a blueprint. By the time he was 50, he was a master plumber, master electrician, a bricklayer, a stone mason. At the base of his brain, he just knew how stuff worked mechanically and technically. I didn’t get that gene.
W: You’ve been an actor, a singer, a TV performer, all pretty clean jobs. When you are the age of deciding what to be when you grew up, did you make a conscious choice to get a clean job?
M: I made a deliberate choice when I was 18 years old. My grandfather lived right next door to us, and he was as present in my life as my dad. I couldn’t do all the things that my grandfather could do. I had an appreciation and respect for the kind of work he did, but I decided to go as far from it as I could and try and find something that came as easily to me as construction came to him.
W: You also had said on the show that some of the happiest people you’ve ever met go home every day smelling bad because they work with stuff like sewage and garbage. Are you saying that workers you meet in dirty jobs are generally happier people than you meet in cleaner professions?
M: It’s a generalization, but I’ll stand by it. Happiness is a tough, subjective thing to define. But I will say that after a couple hundred of these experiences, the thing I find is balance in the lives of people I’ve met. People with dirty jobs have a balance in their lives that I don’t see in my friends who are actuarial accountants and investment bankers. They start their day clean; they wind up coming home dirty, but somehow, they seem to be having a better time than the rest of us.