Labor...a Midwesterner's Saga

Labor Day weekend has been good.  Busy, but fun.  The fact that it’s Labor Day and helping my younger son move today got me to thinking about work.  My students often ask me about all the jobs I’ve had.  They like to hear my stories about the different things I’ve done.  One of them told me a couple of years ago that I needed to make a list.  Here goes:

My first job—getting paid by someone other than a relative—was teaching private swimming lessons.  I was eleven.  My first student was four years old, I think.  That same summer I started mowing yards.  Dad let me use his mower in trade for mowing our yard.  I probably had half a dozen yards that summer.  Usually I was paid for the individual yards, but sometimes worked by the hour.  The most I think I ever made for mowing that year was about $2.00.  I got fifty cents for a half hour swimming lesson.

I spent several years at the pool in Rock Port.  I taught private lessons and eventually Red Cross.  I was a lifeguard from the time I was twelve.  Eventually I was the head guard and in charge of maintenance.

During high school I put up hay for years, even after I was married and had kids.  I enjoyed it, actually.  Sure there were barns that were beastly hot and dusty, but sunny days and good friends (and traditional farm food!) made the days fun most of the time.  I had a schoolmate who lived on a farm, of course.  His parents were friends of my parents.  I worked for his dad off and on: moved cattle (on horseback—I always wanted to be a cowboy!), milked cows, cared for horses, mucked stalls, walked beans, detassled corn, raked, baled, and put up hay.  Of course, living in the Midwest, I traded mowing for shoveling snow in the winter.  I was probably twelve when I started that, too.  One summer we had a thunderstorm that dropped thirteen inches of rain in about two hours.  I was at the movies and we couldn’t get out of the theatre for a while because the water was two feet up the doors and ten rows of seats high inside.  The next day I helped clean houses.  I've also worked cleaning up after tornadoes.  What a mess they leave behind.  Not many boys in small towns escaped work in a grocery store.  I carried groceries, stocked shelves, mopped the aisles for sixty-five cents and hour.  When I was promoted to butcher's apprentice, I hit the big time!  I got a raise to $1.10 an hour and learned to make hamburger, cut meat, and be nice to the customers.  It was one of the best jobs I had during high school.

When I started college, I was only eight miles from home.  I was running projectors for the local movie theatre.  That was a great job!  Then I worked maintenance and housekeeping at the college and for one year worked in the kitchen at the cafeteria.  Before I graduated, I also was part of campus security.

After my freshman year, my roommate and I went to Boulder.  I worked as a day laborer, showing up at the employment service to get any work I could.  I moved office furniture for Mayflower at the National Bureau of Standards.  Pulled weeds in someone’s garden.  Moved refrigerators and stoves into new apartments.  Shoveled wet sand into a hopper with concrete to spray on a huge water tank (try doing that for eight hours a day when you’re more than a mile above sea level!).  It was a great five weeks.  Later that summer I was staying with my cousin and we got jobs helping to set up carnival rides at the Harrison County (Missouri) fair.  I was a carney!

After I graduated from college, I waited to start my full-time teaching career while my wife tried to finish school.  I drove a truck for Kitchen Klatter products—south Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa.  Then I sold advertising for a local newspaper for a while.  Worked at a service station—pumped gas, changed oil, fixed tires.  For nine months I ran a bowling alley and did substitute teaching.  The summer before I got my first full-time teaching job, I worked on a construction crew.  We were building a grain elevator.  I tied steel, shoveled sand (again), and did odd jobs.  When we started pouring concrete, during the day I counted cement trucks and hired night crew and at night was part of the night crew—moving concrete or running a vibrator to get the bubbles out.  We worked for something like eighty hours before a lightening storm and downpour forced us to quit.  We were only 100 feet in the air with another thirty to go.

Since I started full-time teaching in 1973, I haven’t done much else.  Some hay work or bean walking when I was younger.  I’ve taught high school English most of the time, but I spent thirteen years teaching teachers at UNL, Peru State, and Midland Lutheran College.  I taught freshman composition one year at Iowa State.  One year I taught a night class in composition for Iowa Western Community College.  At one point I was the Midwest Regional director for the National Council of Teachers of English.

One of my best friends and I helped our Optimist Club put on a three-day bicycle stage race fundraiser for several years.  In order to save some money, we qualified as Category One officials for the United States Cycling Federation.  We worked three or four other races each year for three or four years.

When my sons were part of our community swim team, I was the coach one summer.  I learned why parents are the worst part of coaching.

I got paid for writing a piece about the author Julian Thompson for a book about literature for young adults.

No wonder I’m tired.

I tell these stories to students to encourage them to stay in school.  I'm glad I did.