Construction worker’s act of kindness delights 5-year-old boy: ‘You helped build the cancer center’
Rasun Bey, left, of Turner Construction, recently had a special helper on the job site. (Jordan Porter-Woodruff)
When Blake Wehlage picked up his son from a daycare center on the University of Chicago campus recently, the 5-year-old stared across the street at the giant crane being used to build the new AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion.
The boy started waving to Rasun Bey, a second-shift laborer foreman for Turner Construction, the contractor building the 575,000-square-foot, seven-story facility.
Bey waved back.
Then Bey walked over — and with his father’s permission — let the boy hold the large Stop/Slow sign used to direct traffic around the site at East 57th Street and South Drexel Avenue.
“I told him: ‘Now you can tell your classmates you helped build the cancer center,’” Bey said.
The kind gesture made the boy so happy, he immediately asked when he could “help” again, his father said.
“There are some good people out there who bring good energy and goodness into the world,” said Wehlage, who lives in the South suburbs. “I really appreciated it.”
Bey, a 26-year construction veteran from the South Side who has an 8-year-old daughter, said he has “a huge soft spot” in his heart for children. So do the others on his team, including general foreman Brendan Splon and superintendent George Solomon.
“It’s not just me. It’s reflective of the guys I work with,” Bey said. “We spend a lot of time together, away from our families, so we’re always talking about our kids.”
Bey said many children from the UChicago Drexel at Bright Horizons daycare — which is across the street from the construction site — stare in amazement at the large construction equipment.
“My daughter, Noa, always wants to come to the construction site,” Bey said. “She says all the time, ‘I want to be a builder like you.’ I say, ‘That’s cool, but I want you to own the company.’”
