Dave, did you
graduate from OSU (with your 99 bottles of beer of the wall)......and the
'babes? Your dad and I have in common working for the Forest Service. I did it
between high school and freshman year at the UofO. I started out as a 'grub
hoe' man on a 'slash & trail' crew (at $1.60 per hour), and then was
'offered' the opportunity to become a lookout for the rest of the summer (at
$2.00 per hour). (This wage was for a 40 hour week, even though I was up there
24/7 for the rest of the summer.)
The second summer
while I was in college, Dad 'finagled' a job as 'turn down man' at a little
'gippo' sawmill which was perched on the bank of the Siuslaw River. That's
where I learned to 'dip snuff,' when I found a can in an old 'saw bit' box
attached to the wall of my work station. It made me so high I almost fell into
the river.
My third summer of
college, somehow, I took a job with Berry Creek Construction (of Florence), oil
coating roads on the outskirts of Portland. I was mostly a flagman, but at one
point, the full time employee became ill and they literally lifted me up and put
me in his boots on the paving/oiling machine. That job lasted for a few weeks,
and when I came back to Florence, Dad 'hired' me as 'caregiver' for Mom while
she was still dealing with her cancer. I was also the cook, and everybody
bitched about my buying day-old bread, etc..
My last summer, I
went to ROTC summer camp at Ft. Lewis.
jl
Hi Jon,
Well, I eventually did graduate from OSU (Which was OSC when I started in
1958), but not until 1965 after I spent my three years in the Army. That is
where I learned to bartend (And ‘bounce’ as well!) when I was stationed in San
Francisco at the Presidio for my entire 3-years. In my Freshman summer, I got a
job in construction tearing down an old Georgia Pacific pulp mill where I
operated a jackhammer to drill holes for the dynamite used to ‘chip’ it
apparent. ‘Chip’ is the right word as this massive beast had floors 16 feet
thick filled with rebar. They were already working on it when I arrived on the
scene a couple days after June 22nd and my 18th birthday. In those days, you
probably remember you couldn’t work in the mills or woods until you turned 18.
I was paid $2.40 per hour. Later in the summer – for about a month – we
finished that job and I found myself on a dry chain stacking finished wood
planks, some of which were over 20 feet long 4 x 12’s that weighed a ton! When
I quit and went on to OSC for the year, my hands were virtually asleep due to
the stress put on the nerves in my hands and wrists from yanking those planks of
the dry chain and stacking them. Turns out they had an OR guy there who was
testing to see how fast they could run the chain and still get the work done
adequately. He would take it to speeds where it was simply impossible to pull
all the pieces and they would fall of the end of the chain in a jumbled heap
like pickup sticks which weighed in at over 200 pounds. Worst job I ever had.
Even though the job was worse than the construction gig, it only paid $2.28 an
hour.
After my Freshman year, I landed a job at Weyerhauser sawmill where the
Mill Casino is located on the Coos Bay/North Bend waterfront on the bay. My job
was to work from 11:30 PM to 7:30 AM (Graveyard shift) using a compressed air
gun to clean the saws, blowing away the accumulated sawdust compacted together
with grease from the saw so the grease monkey could lay fresh, clean grease.
Much better job; it was interrupted in July when I was in a head-on collision at
Triangle Lake while driving my buddies MGA back from OSC to Coos Bay. Somehow I
survived with only some broken teeth and lacerations; the car did not.
Totaled!
I dropped out of OSC after winter quarter and volunteered for the draft,
working for Evans Products company right next to Dad’s warehouse. Again, I
found myself pulling on a dry chain, but this time for plywood which wasn’t
nearly as hard a job – other than the time a wood fragment about 6 feet long and
as sharp as a needle got jammed into my right thigh! It was stuck in their so
hard that I couldn’t pull it out; I had to go to the doctor to get it removed.
What a splinter! I went back to work the next day though; I was a lot tougher
then than I am now. In October, it was off to the Army where my starting pay as
a Private GI was a grand total of $67/month and absolutely shitty food. The
work was called Basic Training, something you and I know about but the younger
generation has no clue about but should. Everyone at some point in their life
should learn how to kill people with guns, knives (Bayonets) and grenades, don’t
you think?
After I got out of the Army, I never had another summer job. Instead, I
went to summer school – except for the year after I graduated when Dad, as a
graduation payment, gave me the summer off as well as a summer membership at the
Coos Country Club where I played golf virtually every day. Two of the guys I
played with all summer long eventually became successful touring pros. Pat
Fitzsimmons, who won the first PGA tournament he entered but didn’t win another
one, and David Glenz who runs the Glenz Golf Academy in New Jersey. By the end
of the summer, I was playing them even-up and was every bit as good as they were
except for the chipping and putting where they excelled and I was so-so at
best. I then left for Graduate School at Georgetown in mid-August and didn’t
play much golf until Charlie and I got together and I moved to Bear Creek
Country Club in June of 1988. The only summer job I have ever had since then –
other than regular fulltime jobs, of course – was when I taught one course at
summer school at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969.
Dave
No comments:
Post a Comment