As Chuck Angus scooted up the 30-foot flagpole with the ease of a monkey in search of coconuts, I yelled skyward to ask him about his shoes. They must be specialized climbing footwear, I assumed.

"Your average Kmart tennies," he replied, sounding all too relaxed for a man nearing the top of the slippery aluminum pole. A strap hugging his waist and circling the pole allowed him to mock the laws of gravity.

This is Chuck's job, or one of them anyway. He is a factory maintenance mechanic by day, and then he heads out to service ailing flagpoles. He and his brother, Mike Zold, recently incorporated the Racine-based business as American Climbers LLC.

"The nylon straps allow me to walk up like it was a telephone pole with spikes sticking out. It's a lot of balance, a lot of nerve, gonads, whatever you want to call it," he says. "If you don't do it right, you can slide back down."

If others around here are fixing flagpoles by climbing them rather than using a lift truck or crane, Chuck and Mike would like to meet them. Chuck had one possible explanation why the profession is so sparsely populated: "I'm blanking crazy!" he said.

There are times when it's impossible, impractical or too expensive to get a truck up to the pole, like at the Pfister Hotel where the brothers recently serviced the flagpole atop the circular tower. Chuck enjoyed the view from the pole's heavenly end and even took some photos.

This week I met Chuck and Mike at the River Park Apartments in Shorewood, where a flag-less pole in the courtyard was crying out for new ropes. Chuck braved a chilly wind and remedied the problem in about half an hour as Mike spotted him from below.

When the weather is nicer, they climb 20-30 poles a week. They operate year-round, even after dark, except when it's raining, too windy or, God help us, lightning. And their business is not confined to Wisconsin.

"I've been in around 22 states so far. I travel all over the place because there's not many people that do it," Chuck said. "In the winter of '08, we went to Bismarck, N.D., and it was 17 below . . . . Wind chill was 37 below. We did three poles. We drove from here out there, turned around and came right back. A week later we were in Washington, D.C., during a blizzard."

Business has come mostly by word-of-mouth, though their company now has a website: flagpoleclimbers.com. It says they install flagpoles, tear them down, paint them and replace ropes, pulleys, tops or other components. The fee for climbing most poles is $3 per foot, plus parts and other labor. If the pole rises from the top of a building, there's an extra $10 per story charge.

The next time you're at Lambeau Field, note the 70-foot flagpoles on either side of the scoreboard. Chuck has climbed and serviced both. He's intimately familiar with the flagpoles at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, Wisconsin Club, the Catholic Financial Life tower, MillerCoors and the newspaper where I work. He climbed all 33 poles outside Manpower headquarters downtown in one day, and the 13 at Navy Pier in Chicago before lunch.

This may sound like a young person's game, but Chuck is 55 and Mike is 50, and they both climb. Chuck said he grew up climbing trees, antennas, water towers or whatever else he could find. At age 15, he started working for a steeplejack who taught him the art of scaling a flagpole. He has done it on and off ever since.

"I haven't had an injury except for falling off a step ladder. I can climb a 135-foot pole, and I tripped and fell off a step ladder. It wasn't good," Chuck said.

He's thinking about early retirement from his regular job so he can climb flagpoles full time.

"I do a job that not very many other people would ever want to do, or be able to do," he said. "And I enjoy it."

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@journalsentinel.com