Montpelier
Generally speaking, I’m in favor of change; it keeps you on your toes. But here’s one that I wish weren’t occurring. According to an Associated Press article by Economics Writer Paul Wiseman in the June 24 Valley News, fewer students are working summer jobs between terms. Instead, apparently, they’re taking academic enrichment courses or volunteering in various charitable enterprises to improve their chances of getting into the college of their choice.
One argument I’ll never countenance is one that begins with the words, “Kids these days …” Kids these days are doing just fine. A lot of us fogies get carried away by the sight of droopy drawers (which, I’ll admit, are kind of funny), tattoos and rows of faces glued to tiny phone screens. So it’s easy for us to think the younger generation indolent when we note the diminishing percentage of them gainfully employed for the summer. Those of us who sweated out the hottest days of summer in the hayfield, or schlepped burgers and root beer at an A&W, or stocked ice-packed lettuce and cabbage onto supermarket shelves tend to believe that if only they could get a crack at our experiences, they might amount to something, like us.
The reasons for the decline are many, but none of them have anything to do with lack of ambition. For one thing, the message is finally getting through: Young, would-be attractive applicants for desirable jobs need an education beyond secondary school; and the way to improve the odds of landing those jobs is polishing your resume. Success in college is not, sad though it may be to say it, made more likely by days in the hayfields.
Second, there are apparently fewer summer jobs to be had. Employers who once relied on an infusion of high school and college kids are now able to hire full-time older employees at the wages only students would once accept. Many of these full-timers are foreign-born and eager to get a start up the ladder. If there is any truth to the political saw that foreigners are “stealing our jobs,” it’s here. Not many years ago, the “croos” of the Appalachian Mountain Club huts in the White Mountains were pretty reliably Ivy Leaguers, or at least Amherst or Vassar. Now there’s an occasional Constantin or Irena mixed in, especially in the wait staff at the Highland Center in Crawford Notch. If we could speak Romanian as well as they speak English, the world would without doubt be a more peaceful place.
My first summer job, in 1951, was as a pearl diver in a camp on Little Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod. (Nobody knows anymore what a pearl diver is. It’s a dishwasher; think about it). It paid $150 for the summer, with room and board. But it was so much more than washing dishes. It was an almost private access to a Snipe racing dinghy in the anchorage that nobody else wanted to sail, so I made epic voyages in my down time all over the elbow of the Cape. It was learning to drive a stick-shift woody Ford to slop the hogs during siesta time each day. It was pulling poison ivy up by the roots because I was the only one who wasn’t affected. It was learning that burning poison ivy is a very bad idea, when a few dozen staff and kids came down with it. And I got my first grown-up kiss from one of the cooks, a Simmons undergraduate who I guess liked younger men.
The following summer one of my father’s parishioners got me a job on a shoe factory assembly line. I spent all day in a huge, sweltering room with overhead shafts and flapping belts, with nobody else but the boss speaking English, pulling brads out of lasted uppers with a machine like a bird’s beak, for 75 cents an hour. Two high points: first, reaching out, without looking, for the usual shoe in the rack to my right and coming up with one as small as a sparrow: size 3 and 1/2 half AAA. There were three pairs there; the tag said “Betty Hutton.” If you didn’t know what a pearl diver is, you don’t know Betty Hutton, either. Played Calamity Jane opposite Howard Keel in Annie, Get Your Gun. The other memorable moment was at lunchtime, when Mr. Flagler, the manager, asked what I was reading. Pickwick Papers, I answered. That afternoon I got promoted to the stock room, where all I had to do was fill out, pack and label the day’s orders for shipment, after which I could read all I liked. Promotion, but no raise. The following summer I went to work in a GE television assembly plant, at the dizzying rate of $1.43 an hour.
Those jobs were about as different from each other as they could be, but consider how they enriched my life, if not my wallet. I honestly think I learned more from my summer jobs, and — during college — the interstitial jobs between spotty attendances, than I ever did in any classroom.
But there was better yet to come. I’d fallen for a girl from Texas whose daddy owned a hardscrabble ranch in the limestone hills of the Permian Basin. He was a retired China missionary. I worked for him the summer of 1954.
It was another world: rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows — everything had a stinger, fangs or sharp spines — and a Biblical drought. I learned some simple Spanish from my fellow workers, undocumented Mexicans who called themselves mojados; burned prickly pear spines off the fruit so the poor cattle could eat it; marveled at Canopus low in the southern sky; learned to milk a recalcitrant cow; trotlined for channel cats (side catch: angry snapping turtles); learned not to fall down in a pen full of 400-pound hogs that could bite a jackrabbit in two like a French fry; and disagreed, very gently, with the old man at our daily reading of Saint Paul. If there’s any other way to learn so much — including what jobs you never want to do again, if you can help it — I don’t know what it is. So I’m a bit sad that fewer of our kids are getting to work summers anymore.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
