Young Days and Odd Jobs

I wish I had been born rich instead of good-looking.

Having failed at both, and my family being of modest means, I had to find a way to scrounge up some money to, like, have a place to live, something to eat, and blow money on things I could have lived without, as I grew up in the ‘burg.

Just getting a job was a job in itself. In that time, you read the want ads in the Journal, saw a sign in a window, or heard by word of mouth. You could try your luck at the highly useful NYS Employment office down at the mall, but I wasn’t qualified for most of the jobs they could offer, nor moving to another part of the state to wash dishes was something I wanted to do. Still, it was time to move up from mowing lawns, washing cars, or other odd jobs.

Remember work permits? I recall you could get them as young as 14. For some reason, you could only work on a farm until you were 16 because working around large farm animals and heavy machinery was undoubtedly much safer than working at a fast-food place.

Having a “real” job was a proper way to be introduced to the middle class. It ensured that you knew the value of hard work, mediocre money, and doing things you don’t want to do when you don’t want to do them for people you don’t like; it’s a bit like marriage. I was also introduced to the concept of giving away at least 20% of my paycheck to the government before even seeing the check, which I was shocked at.

The Ogdensburg Journal and Advance News. Getting up early (or was it after school?)  and riding my bike down to the distribution center near the corner of Ford and State St, wrapping the papers into rolls, some 50 of them, and then riding by subscriber’s properties in my neighborhood on upper Hamilton St and hurling them with sometimes too much power, sometimes not enough, and hopefully not breaking anything. People that didn’t get their paper called the distribution center, with in turn called me, and I’d have to pedal my butt back there and deliver a copy. Every week, you’d have to collect something like $1.10 for the week from each subscriber, which sometimes was like pulling teeth. “I don’t have it,” some would say as they lit up another cigarette, trying to put it off another week. Then I’d get a $1.50; the difference was the tip. Gee, thanks.

The Advance News, on Sundays, with its massive weight of mostly ads (but included the worthwhile Parade), might have caused early onset scoliosis, arthritis, or laziness in some of us young bucks, yet was eagerly looked forward to by subscribers, and even myself.

We all were jealous of the guy who had the Riverton Towers route, causally going door to door and tossing a newspaper on the floor, with all the care of a homeless man throwing bread crumbs to pigeons. I think that kid was bribed by a lot of other kids for his route, being offered everything from cigarettes to girlie magazines, but he wouldn’t take my offer.

McDonald’s. Ah yes, my first “real” job, with the ill-fitting polyester uniform and dangerously hot cooking oil. I was a cook, of course, not wanting to deal with the public, and I spent a bit of time learning their system of how many beef hockey pucks to lay down every time you turned over so many. (The infamous “turn/lay” system). One time, a specialty hamburg order came through, which I prepared - wrong, of course - only to watch one of the managers come flying through the doors to see who the idiot was who had screwed up his drive-through order. Whoops. Then there was the job of changing the fryer oil with this specially designed device, which looked like a mini gas pump, and the extreme danger of that still lava-hot oil. And what was with the floors at McDonald’s? Always a greasy, sliding surface behind and in front of the counter?!

It’s time to make the donuts. Yes, I even had a job-making donuts at P&C at one point, coming in at around 3 in the morning to just put cream filling in them and/or top them with some sugary delight and sprinkles. Thank God I didn’t have to make the donuts with all the machinery and hot oil, as I’m not, as they say, a “morning person.” I’m not a day person or even a night owl; basically, comas are my thing.

Mason’s Laborer. My uncle “Chic” - Ed Morley - was a mason, and I got to work with him during the summer for an incredible $5 an hour under the table. $200 bucks a week clear for a kid 17 or 18 was fantastic and could provide opportunities to get into fun some would construe as trouble. The “lovely and very talented” ladies at the Manitona Lounge in Prescott didn’t seem to mind on Friday nights. I was a student of dance interpretation; don’t judge.

The work sometimes literally involved digging ditches, but the money was too good to say no, even to a shiftless teen like me.  Often, it was 90+ degrees, and water was a must, as you sweated like a prostitute entering a church.  One time, while working at Hepburn on some outside job on a scorching day, I drank very cold water from a hose (the horror!), despite my Uncle’s warnings not to do so, and promptly threw it back up, being too much of a thermal shock to my system.

My older brother Mike often worked with me and we had another older man, Walt Bushy, who was a nervous guy and belonged to some laborer’s union. He wouldn’t sit down during breaks, only lean on his shovel. When asked why, he said, “Because I won’t want to get back up,” which I found both logical and funny. Another time, while waiting for my uncle to do his thing before we could do our thing, he was shoveling one pile of dirt to another for no apparent reason, just moving it for the sake of doing something. I asked why, and he told me never to let “them” see you just standing around, lest you get yelled at or fired. Sometimes, he was so funny I couldn’t even work. He asked me, “Where did you put the Henway?” I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. “Henway….what’s a Henway?” I asked. “About 4 pounds!” he quipped. That’s a guy joke, and I see all you ladies rolling your eyes right now. He had all kinds of funny things like that, and was fond of the weekends, as he’d go to see the races in LaFargeville.

“Professional” Painter. My uncle, who didn’t have work for me that summer,  got me a job with a painting contractor who was hired to paint the inside of the Notre Dame Cathedral in the summer of 1980. He was an old, cranky son of a biscuit from Boston named John Hobbin. We also had a pro team out of Chateaugay, an old man and his two sons, who were like latter-day Laurel and Hardy.; they were definitely characters.

To paint the ceiling, we had to construct a huge scaffolding structure over the pews and bring planks up to the top of it to make a floor, essentially, so we could walk about as we rolled our paint, 5-gallon buckets at a time, on the ceiling and walls.  And of course, I, being the youngest guy, did most of the complicated - and dangerous - parts of building that structure, walking on a single bendy plank as I would go back and forth, adding one scaffold frame above another, with nothing underneath me but air, being the construction worker version of Karl Wallenda, the tight rope walker. Had an OSHA rep walked on site, he would have left the site after several hours of writing citations, his right hand no longer a hand but more of a grotesque, twisted claw.

Gas Pumper. For a while, I even pumped gas for people (when that was a thing) at the Mobil station right there at the corner of 37 and Canton St, in both the hot summer and in winter when it was colder than a mother-in-law’s kiss. That was $3.35 an hour, as I recall. One time, as I was going from car to car - as you did service more than one car at a time - I told a guy he was “all set” after paying me, meaning you gave me the money required, and he took that as meaning his gas was all dispensed, and drove off - of course, with the gas pump still in his car, ripping it off the pump, and spilling some gas. Whoops. That was probably the lowest-paid job I had, as I was only working 15 hours a week at one point. I was so poor that poverty seemed like the big time.

Cheese plant worker. God, what an awful job. Yes, the one they just tore down near Hosmer’s marina.  I recall I wanted the job so badly because it paid an impressive $6 an hour - a higher than average wage you’d find the ‘burg -  that I would go sit in the office every day for a couple of hours to show them how earnest I was to have the position, getting the job after they got sick of looking at me. Unbeknownst to me, it was a union position, so a couple of bucks every week went to them, and you couldn’t opt out, which I wasn’t too thrilled with. The work was arduous. I recall working on this one machine on which you’d place a steel tube about two feet tall, throw a lever, and the cheese-to-be would come glopping down to fill the tube, at which point you’d pick up the now heavy tube (around fifty pounds) and place it in a steel cage hanging next to you, eventually filling this cage with about thirty or so tubes, which would then, in turn, be dunked into an icy brine to cure for some time. After a shift of some 8 hours, I calculated I had moved over 10 tons of cheese and steel.  No wonder I was so weak after work, I thought I had instant-onset muscular dystrophy or something.

The shifts….oh, what a beautiful thing that was. No, your eight-hour shift didn’t start at normal times, like 8 in the morning, four in the afternoon, or 11 at night…no, that would be normal. Our shifts would start at ridiculous times, like one, two, or three in the morning. I didn’t know whether to go to bed or stay up before my shift.

And the guys I worked with were just total jerks, sometimes spraying me with brine water as I wore my uniform, which was something like white scrubs, and I’d have to wear that the rest of the shift, smelling like whey. Oh it was funny, they thought. I didn’t stay there but a month or two; the money was not that Gouda.

I lived.

I learned the value of a hard-earned dollar, and was just a wee bit more careful on how I spent my money.

I learned a lot from those jobs, as hard as they were, and decided, by gosh, I would go back to college again and not flunk out the first semester and not have jobs like this the rest of my life.

And I did.