Labor Day. Work, jobs, good jobs, bad jobs, I’ve had a few. Some
I liked. A few I hated. One I wouldn’t do again but I’m glad I did it, now at
least.
The first was helping on a milk truck. My mother woke me up
at 1:30 a.m. and the milkman/boss picked me up thirty minutes later. I was 11
years old, if I remember correctly. The boss was nice but the job pretty much
sucked. The scariest part was when we parked on a street and I had to walk half
a block down a dark alley at three in the morning. Then I climbed through
a hole in a board fence and crossed a yard. I would leave two quarts of milk (the
old-fashioned kind in bottles) on the back porch of a Catholic Church and run
like hell.
The thought of encountering a nun scared the bejeezus out of me. So,
I fled when my mission was accomplished. Then one day we were delayed by engine
trouble and I didn’t make the delivery until after sunrise. Wouldn’t you know
it? There stood a nun on the back porch. She gave me the sweetest smile this
side of Heaven and I gave her the milk. I wasn’t afraid after that.
Probably the best job I ever had was as a lifeguard at a
country club during summers while attending college. I won’t go into the
details as to why. One splendiferous thing about it was that a frequent sunbather
was Sandy Seymour, now Sandy Seymore Elder. She was girl of word-class beauty
and poise—nice, friendly, and without pretense or guile. A model American
teenager, much too young and classy for the likes of me, her presence alone was one of those
things that can make a job memorable. I was proud to count her as an acquaintance
then and a FB friend now. (Not that my wife isn't classy, I simply overmarried).
From beauty to the beasts, I worked for one evening serving
meals at the athletic dormitory at the University of Arkansas. Enough said.
Even a college degree wouldn’t have been worth that.
From the beasts to the beauties, I left the pigs to work as
a janitor and busboy at the Chi Omega sorority house. Enough said. There were
pleasant memories, all in all.
Worked for nearly a year for Babcock and Wilcox’s San
Francisco office in the Mission District while waiting for the Draft Board to
catch up with me. I spent one interesting week working with an older man organizing some records in a nearby warehouse. Some dealt with boilers that had been
destroyed during the 1906 earthquake.
The man with me lived in San Jose and told me of a neighbor
who, along with his family, learned that they were to be relocated to a prison
camp, for being of Japanese descent, after Pearl Harbor. His son was in college
and his daughter was headed for Stanford. He held a good job.
He committed suicide rather than face the shame. My co-worker cried when he told me the story.
Well, we now come to the last job I had before beginning
my professional career. That was driving the Admiral of a submarine flotilla around
Charleston harbor in his boat, called “The Admiral’s Barge.” Not a bad gig except
when we had to take the Old Man (a real old man he was too, probably near 50)
out to the entrance to the harbor to meet a sub coming in from patrol. I’d have
to ease the boat between the sail planes and the stern planes of the sub while
we were all underway. Sailors on the sub would secure us and the Admiral would
jump off the barge and climb on board the sub. It wasn’t “anchors aweigh as
much as sphincters compressed,” probably more so on the submarine commander’s
part than mine.
I never dumped him, and as a reward, the crew and I would
get to take the Admiral’s wife and some wives of visiting dignitaries to visit
Fort Sumter. She would bring along a servant who served them chilled chicken,
wine or beer, and other delicacies.
She must have known that I was well-schooled in military
protocol, for she would say, as we deposited them before heading back to our ship, “Now Boats, I’m sure you know how properly to dispose of the wine,
beer, leftover food.”
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| America would sleep well that night. |
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