Summer job stories

Two summer jobs to finance education.

First - sorting mail at a USPS hub in the city. Besides being incredibly boring, tightly monitored, making absolute mess of my fingers. Skin cut constantly from the edge of letters. It was like I sandpapered them and then put them in a blender. I have been more respectful of letters being tossed at me since then. I had a shift a day, but then it snowed: a lot! I got some serious benefits from no one else being able to get into the facility.

Oddly, many years later I built and ran a data center for the USPS with a nice new national network.

Summer job 2. A Carny. Big Carny. First benefit: you can go most anywhere free and behind the scenes if you are not working. Interesting.

Being a basic newbie/presumed drifter sort, I put up the rides and tents and stuff. After things were running, I wound up running a ride for small children on the ride I had just put together. I was innocently running the rug rats through the ride. One of the bosses came by and said that their cashier had not shown up. He asked if I could make change. This appeared to be a rather selective job with better pay. So I disclosed that I could pretty much move money and tickets around at the ticket kiosk. It was almost like being designated a god.

My only instructions were: if there is extra money left at the end of the day; it is yours. If you are short, you gotta pay.
It was interesting working around the carny people. Very "family" focused and overall quite pleasant. Some attention from the female people. New blood was not real common.

When it was over, the boss asked me if I would travel with them. Turns out, it was a really rare person that can handle tickets and collect money. Put up and take down the carny was an extra benefit. That could have been an excellent experience, but I said to myself; engineer/carny. It seemed like a good idea not to travel. But later dealing with higher level math, I occasionally thought about the carny. But I designed a novel research probe that went to low orbit. It made me feel better.

@EBEBRATT-Ed

Back in the late 70's PPE wasn't as available as today. A face mask was a dish towel tied in the back. Safety glasses were the kind worn in high school chemistry labs and the elastic was always stretched out, the plastic lens clouded.

Formal LOTO protocols wasn't heard of back then, or at least not to us, but the old man taught me my first safety lesson.

He walked into the boiler room while I was scraping the walls of the combustion chamber- a tight fit, had to belly crawl in.

The combustion blower came on and it was instant blackout. I couldnt belly crawl backwards fast enough and banged my head a dozen times trying. Coughing and spitting. Then the burner was turned off.

When I got out, my father was standing there with fuses in his hand. He said, " Don't make it easy for one of us to kill you. It would give us nightmares for the rest of our lives. Keep these in your pocket when you're in a boiler. "

I drove the garbage truck occasionally when I worked at Snowbird ski resort. Hauling down a steep snowy canyon road was part of the adventure, across the Salt Lake valley to the dump. You see, and smell some wild things when you unload the truck at a dump site.
A truck backed in right next to me once and started unloading waste from a packing house, blood and guts oozing around my feet. I'm sure he did it on purpose, plenty other places for him to unload at the site

I spent 3 summers working for our local school system, performing a variety of janitorial and maintenance projects.
The Board of Education had purchased some property for future buildings and it also included a nature walk area and a pond.
The summer was 1975, 1st school on the property was built in 1984.
One afternoon we went into the pond to swim one my fellow student workers found a fence post in the pond, there was dirt road back to the pond. All of sudden we noticed a cloud arising from dirt road a green Plymouth Fury come down the road, we noticed this car as Mr. Curtis car, he was a big man with a crew cut.
When he was a Junior High Principal, we called him Bear.
We raced out of the pond, I had shoulder length hair at the time, I stood next to Ralph the head of Maintenance as he & Bear discussed something. And reaches over casually, and grabs my hair, tells "Ralph you better quit this working this boy so hard he is about to sweat to death." Then Mr. Curtis got back in his car and left the premises.
Next morning Mr. Curtis, the Assistant Superintendent of Schools, his new job, whose job duties included handling funds for building & grounds, came out to the shop.
I, and 3 of my friends were gathered there along with Ralph (head of maintenance) and his assistant Elmer.
The pond mentioned above had a fence around it, and there had been some vandalism. This was a concern because of the liability issue if someone were to enter the pond and drown, the School System would sued.
Mr. Curtis demanded we swim until every post fence was found, 4 of us got paid for swimming the whole day, but we only making $1.65/hour. Now this property is a school campus with 2 Schools and soccer fields, baseball & softball fields, but the pond is still there.

I loved working with Mr. Curtis, he was a great Boss & a good man sadly he passed in the 80's

Jim Walls

My first job was at a McDonalds. I lasted a week. Hated it . It wasn't for me. Then I worked at a Bar/banquet Hall. Washed dishes, set up tables and chairs, mopped floors and cut the grass took out the trash. Best job I ever had.

Then I worked at the old Todd CEA in Stamford, CT wiring control panels. That was a good job and paid about $5.00/hr which in 1972 was good money. My first full time job was at an Oil Compant for 2.35/hr 1973

Worked at the local McDonalds and quickly learned that if you weren’t doing anything you better have a mop or broom in your hands. So I kept making Apple Pies even though we were closing in about a 1/2 hour. When the manager saw my mountain of pies he hit the roof and bawled me out good and put me to work with the mop. As we were all leaving I asked him that since we had so many pies if it was ok for me to take a couple home. I’ll bet he is still mad. 

  I come from a long line of Thoroughbred Horseman going back to Ireland 🇮🇪 and originally from Scotland before 1700.  The Sweeney Clan were Gallowglassers, Paid Mercenary soldiers for the Kings of Scotland and Ireland and Master Horseman.   Think Braveheart.   I'm descended directly from this line and it explains my work ethic, passion and wild 😜, take no prisoners gusto for life.  
My father Bart & Grandfather were  renowned and revered Thoroughbred Horseman on the NY tracks.  My whole fambly worked the track.   My pops started in the Stable of Sunny Jim Fitzsimmon's Greatest trainer of all time...70 plus years on top!  My Grandfather Bart Jr was his right hand man from 1927 when he came directly from  NYC docks & Went to work the same day till 1957 when he died at Hialeah after getting Bold Ruler,  Secretariats Sire (dad) and 1957 Horse of the year.,.settled.in  He worked 7 days a week 14 hours a day for Sunny Jim who was the trainer for The Phipps" (US Steel) and The Woodwards (Famed Atty).  My Papa grew up very poor over a Bar called the Rainbow 🌈 on Rockaway Blvd in South Ozone Park Queens . Being poor Irish, among wiseguys and street toughs my father and his older Brother Pat became Standout Football players and street fighters,  but my Father was the Life of the party.   Pat started hanging around the corner gas station at age 9 or 10 and began a long career as a car mechanic.  Pat loved to brawl so much,  that if he drove past a bar brawl (not knowing a soul ) he would pull over with his fiance, mother, Et cetera jump out and dive in to the Donnybrook! My father started going to Aqueduct (4 blocks away they had no car....not until my father got one at 18) at age 5 on weekends and after school.  He learned.the trade watching his dad toil away, doing all the jobs a Horseman had to DO.  Nashua was the top horse they had in the 1950s.  When I was 5, I started to go to the track with my Papa to learn all the basic horse care. Rake the shedrow? refill the 40 pound water buckets, Walk the Hots 🔥 Off (Hot horses back from a work out on the track), climb up in the loft and throw down bales if hay and straw to replenish the stalls. Muck the stalls (horse manure) hold horses while they were washed,  groomed, re-shoed.  Learned to clean the riding tack, tiny saddles and leather bridles with Murphys Oil soap and finish with Lexol. I don't remember getting paid until I was 9.  My father's close buddy Dave Rich Sr. Started his own horse breeding farm and training Center 8 miles from The Spa,  Saratoga Racetrack. The farm dated back Pre-Revolutioniary War with the original Brickhouse House and Barn.  They bought the dilapidated farm in 1968 and with the 4 boys.  With our addional help in the summer, Dave Rich and his 4 boys built the farm up piece by piece, fence post by fence post.  Every summer we came up for The Saratoga Racing meet, they would have something else done or built...new paddocks, new barns, a deep water swimming 🏊‍♂️ pond for rehabbing 🐎 horses, lunchtime plunges and all night keg  parties and skinny dipping.  My 9th summer, 1976, they announced that I was no longer working for fun...I would be paid!  My mother barely saw me because I moved right in with my "brothers" on the Farm.  At dinner, All the kids would pick the corn for the night in the patch next to the 250 year old brick smoke house.  We drilled fence post holes wiith big, giant John Deer Cork Screw.. after cutting down the posts and letting them season a for a few years,  we nailed up the slats, all cut and milled on sight.  Dave Jr, the oldest was a big boss man at age 12...He ran the crew (The Other 3 brothers).  Dave just jumped in and did it.  Cars, Barn building, wells, plumbing, cesspool, Birthing. FOALS, Breeding the Stallions to the Mares  we were up at 545am.. In the first barn at 6am. First all the horses got water refills.  150 horses over 8 barns.  Then we'd take the by this (the nicer ones) to their Paddock and close the gate). Then we'd pull the John Deere and the S-'- spreader in to the barn and start mucking out the stalls...this took until about 1130am...Farm breakfast-  Back to work at 1230.  Now the Horse training started down at the huge training barn we had an indoor all season track im the barn .  The older boys would ride and gallop the 🐎 horses, the Old Man would direct the training.  I'd tack them up, Help the rider with a leg up.  And on to the next.  This would go on all day till about 3pm when we would switch gears and either cut, scatter up the rows and bale hay in the mid day sun, Fix the 🚜 tractor, the Hose.Hydrants, well, unclog the septic system, walk the 5/8 training track (which the built from scratch..  pick large rocks from the training tack so we didn't lose a Million Dollar Racehorses to a busted foot.    The 1970s was THE GOLDEN ERA of Thoroughbred racing History.  1973, The Greatest Racehorse of all time, SECRETARIAT,  shattered the field to become the first Triple Crown Winner in 25yrs!!  We were there every step.  Ronnie Turcotte, Secretariat's great Jockey was also a close personal friend to my Father and Dave Rich Sr.  Turcotte as everyone called him had a  HUGE Winnebago for his 5 kids and wife, and they would park it down by the Stud Barn next to the pond for the Meet,  living in it.   Ron gave The Rich Farm Secretariat's training saddle which I have used many times.  Dave Jr still owns it.  Eddie Maple a fierce competitor to Turcotte on the track but good buddies off the track would hang out too. The Rich Boys were man-boys... worked hard-play hard.  One summer when I was 11,  I got a special treat,, I got to be in a Documentary show called "SPECIAL EDITION " a 60 minutes style show about the Rich farm and their boys that manned the Farm.  I got in a few scenes and felt like a Rock Star!!   Also, Director Robert Halmi made a Movie called MY OLD MAN w Warren Oates & Christy Mc Nichol about an Old Racetracker and who  finally his "Big Horse" as we said on the track.  The Riches were in the whole movie and technical advisors  filmed entirely in Saratoga. I learned love of hard work from them and my parents of course  but they were and will forever be Fambly to me. 1977 The Great Seattle Slew took the 3 Classics of the Triple Crown.   1978 Stevie Cauthen 16 yrs old Lead Affirmed to smashing victories against super horse Alydar. The 1978 Belmont Stakes was   watched from My father's Perch 30 feet above the track on that skinny stand right on the finish line.  Papa was a top Judge now.  When we descended the stand, my older brother Bart , a Pinkerton Body Guard now said to my dazed father "Wow...that was some race,  hey Papa???" WITHOUT missing a beat, and looking straight ahead he told me and Bart "Greatest race I've ever seen boys!!"  And he had seen them all from until the 1940s till them  till now.  3 Triple Crown Winners in 5 yrs!  Took 37 years to wet down  the Triple Crown dry spell!  2016 American Pharoah  I was there sitting directly behind The Godfather's Daughter and Author Vicky Gotti whom I chatted with between races as we both grew up in Howard Beach and shared a few common friends.   Everyone was jumping up and down hugging and crying when he won.  The Parties were epic in Saratoga.   I remember my parents signing that great hit song "Those were the days my friend...we thought they'd never end..." they were right.  Who would have known that in 1978, The Great Ron Turcotte would take a fall at Belmont and His great friend,  My Father Bart, was the first to him. Paralyzed from the waist down, and  he knew it right away 😌. Father did his best to comfort his old friend.   My father cried hard at the kitchen table that night...we all.did.  3 years later the Great Horseman Bart Sweeney Jr was dead from a massive heart attack at age 43. Two great men cut down in their prime...but they went out on top!  THE irony. Good times...bad times...So THAT is how I spent MY summers. Thank you for reading my treatise! .... Mad 🐕 Dog 




 

Ha ha Larry.  Thanks  I DO have a book in the works but I'm in no rush.  Looking foward to reading yours.  I still have that belt buckle you sent me!  Mad Dog

For a while in highschool I was working weekend days at a small potato farm and an evening shift as a dj at a popular roller rink (hey, it was early 80's lol).
I wonder why I wasnt smart enough to mark the middle point of those loonngg aluminum irrigation pipes that I had to move (and move and move). The tractor-towed potato digger machine was an exciting game of "Watch Your Fingers" that I looked forward to when the crops came in .
The dj job was sweet, loads of fun there.
Later after school, a summer job on a railway. Had to board up at 3am for the 2 or 3 hr ride to the section house. Crew rode on those little open crew cars on the tracks out to anywhere where we dug holes by hand and put in telecom poles. When a train was due (schedule), we would lift the car off the track with long poles and sit and wait (and wait..) until the train flew by, then back on the tracks to the next job site. Lotsa bugs lol. We stayed in small town resorts mostly for the 4x10s. Good food, many a drink. Overslept and missed the crew leaving one day, started walking the track but a diff crew in a pickup was nice enough to drive me the dozen or so miles. Did I mention the bugs ? (northern ontario forests)
That seasonal telecom experience helped score me the full-time telecom career about 5 yrs later in a different city, built the pension and here I am.

Larry Weingarten said:

Hi @Mad Dog_2 , I'm seeing a book here! However, it looks like the title "Horsing Around" has been well used. You'll want to come up with a different title

Yours, Larry

One cannot copyright a title, so, if Matt wants to, he can freely use "Horsing Around." On the other hand, he could employ a variation like "Around Horses." That approach has been used before, as when John Dean played on Barry Goldwater's book.

Mad Dog_2 said:

Hey Lamb..I hope you got alot of free ice cream. I wooda...  mad dog 

Not a bite. Every item had to be accounted for. Anything I ate I had to pay retail for.

Long time ago - I'll be 66 this year.

In high school - user at a drive-in movie place in St. Charles, Missouri - we called it The Dump. The mafia supposedly owned it, but the manager would chase everyone away from the ticket booth and was rumored to then sell the same ticket over and over to late arrivals.....

College - the Army Corps, doing and surveys. Many of the crews were drunks. They had money for tires, but not alignments, so the tires on the Suburbans would develop substantial ridges and then be replaced. We stayed in some awful motels in Missouri and some surrounding states. One restaurant had the best blueberry pancakes I've ever had, even to this day.

College - American Digital Systems - installing equipment to monitor water levels in sewers, to find inflow and infiltration problems. The equipment was octal (base 8), and I became good at octal math that summer.

The hay bale stories.. ugh.. only did square bale jobs a handful of times, but I remember some frustrations.
String so tight, cant get your glove in.. or string too slack and the bale explodes out the side on ya.
Stack a triangle on the sled and when you dump it onto the field it falls over.
Itchy everywhere and sweating badly.
Fun stuff.

Mad Dog_2 said:

horses can't vomit...

Well I never knew. Seems so unfair.

The one post about rotting fish entrails reminded me of 1983. Me and the Football Team were hitting Jones Beach for the day and I needed big, new cooler we had in the garage for our "Wheat sodas"   and Go-Go Juice (Orange 🍊 juice and a little bit of everything from your father's bar so he wouldn't notice) .  Ok.  There's the cooler...I go to grab it and it's HEAVY...HMM 😒 I take it on the driveway and pry the top open...
Like The descriptions of Dante's Inferno...THE MOST HORRENDOUS smell 😫 ever...I've smelled the worst (badly decomposing human bodies,  Dental Cuspidor drains, water fountain drains, un maintained grease traps)  this takes the cake !!!!+  Several dozen rotting, maggot squirming Bunker (menhaden) my Older Brother Bart forgot to empty.  He did that with my Shotgun, leaving it in the case after a nasty, rainy day of Duck Hunting Cold Spring Harbor.  I go to check it when returns and its a RUST MESS...THAT COST HIM. After violent 🤢 vomiting I dumped the fish and spent and hour scrubbing it with bleach hit water pine sol....NO GOOD $200BUCKS down the drain  mad Dog 

We just used our bare hands...the first night they'd be raw.. but after a few days you're hands toughened up.  As the stacks got higher, you had to throw higher and higher. No one tougher than country farm boys....Mad Dog 

That reminds me of a Martha Stewart encounter we had in Mount Desert Island Maine.  She is NOT a nice person 😕.   Especially to sweet 10 yr old girls that just wanted to shake her hand and say she admired her. We were mosying around a small antique jewelry story and were 12" away from her at the counter.  Anyway, she's full of herself.  So were are at a Customer Boat builder 20 minutes later and the owner tells us that she ordered a boat and wanted to go ahead of 77 people ahead of her.  She would pay extra  she wanted her boat NEXT WEEK!!! They smiled and she left.   She comes in a week later  Where's my boat??  Whats your name ma'am (they knew) Martha Stewart...ok whats your #?
But do u know who I am????? Yes ma'am you're #78!   Wait your turn.  She stormed out  mad dog

If I had to do it over, I would have said more. My daughter was deeply hurt and in shock.  She threw out everything Martha Stewart in her room.   Mad Dog