Scott wrote a paper for his composition class this week about landing his first job. For him, his first job is the one he still has ... camera operator at KFYR-TV.
However, many years and many miles have gone by since my first job. When I went to college at the University of Montana, I lived about five blocks off campus on the top floor of an old and rather large home. One block away was Eddy's Bakery, which I walked by and smelled adoringly each day.
Somewhere along my junior year, I decided the time had come for me to quit walking and buy a car. The problem, however, is that I had no dinero. But wait, perhaps that good smelling bakery would give me a job. So one day I stopped and picked up an application. The next day I dropped it off.
Then some time passed. It was the weekend of Aber Day. For you non-UM people, a man named Aber must have been important because they named one of the tall residence halls after him. And, although he was a teetotaler himself, a wild Saturday of boozing and rock and roll was named in his honor.
So I was sitting home one Saturday in the spring when all of my friends were attending Aber Day when my phone rang. It was a person from Eddy's Bakery and they needed someone to start that night. My guess is that I wasn't the first person that they called, but I was home while the others were sitting on a hillside outside of Missoula drinking from a thousand kegs of beer and listening to Jimmy Buffet and other top notch entertainers.
My dream job soon turned out to be a bad place to work. For a while, I stood and placed bun pans on a conveyor belt. Then I switched to the other end of the conveyor belt where I had to shake the pans so the dough was correctly positioned in the depressions in the bun pans. I did this incorrectly one night (probably bored out of my gourd) and found out the next day that the local McDonalds drive-ins had rejected all our buns for their Big Macs. Anyway, I got a free bag of Big Mac buns -- as the rejected buns were left sitting on the back deck of the bakery.
After failing at making buns, they moved me to the oven -- which was an eight-hour nightmare of taking buns, loaves of bread and whatever else that was done baking and tipping the baked goods onto a conveyor belt to cool before wrapping. You had to be extremely fast at this because the goods were coming out of the oven at a rapid and continuous pace. You also had to like being burned because the pans were hot.
Anyway, I continued to work there until my junior year was up. I stayed in Missoula the summers of my freshmen and sophomore years to attend summer classes, but when I was a junior, I returned to Roundup. I worked that summer as well. My neighbor Dick Palagyi asked me to deliver milk for him. He was the Darigold man in Roundup. That job was much more pleasent than working at Eddy's. And by the time the summer was over, I had enough money to buy a used car -- a 1971 Pontiac Lemans, which I bought from the Lemon Orchard in Missoula.
So no longer did I have to walk by Eddy's Bakery. But I'm sure if I had, the smell would not have been so sweet as it was the year before.
Now, fellow bloggers, what are the memories of your first jobs?
Recipe - Aunt May's Famous Wheatcakes
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Now Playing - Forever Young by Alphaville RECIPE: MAY PARKER'S FAMOUS
WHEATCAKES Originally made by my pal Pete's Aunt May, these wheatcakes are
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10 years ago
5 comments:
I've already commented a couple times on my first job at the Mandan McDonalds. I was among the first group of employees when the Main Street location opened December of 1984. I've always said people should have to work in the food industry to really appreciate what a "good" job is. Several showers couldn't wash the smell of the cooking oil off.
Let's see, memories, there was the time I got a splinter from a wooden mop handle that got severely infected. Then there was the time I spilled 350-plus degree oil on my foot filtering the fryer vats. I've still got the scars from that. And I could never forget one cold winter's night carrying 2 5-gallon buckets of hamburger grease out to the oil barrels and then slipping on the ice in the parking lot. I was told the next day the parking lot looked like two grease trucks had a collision.
However, the most important piece of trivia is if you ever find yourself in a food fight behind the counter of a fast food place, always grab the tartar sauce gun. It has the longest range.
WOW, First job. That is taxing my memory. I am not going to list all of the farm jobs I had for the neighbors. We will start once I left home. I think it was working at Union Storage in Fargo. I spent the summer loading refridgerator cars with frozen meet for the Air Force. Spent the whole summer, no matter how hot it was, dressed in a parka. Pay was good, $1.75/hr. with a .25 raise after 6 weeks. I still remember the Seargent that would come and inspect us while we loaded a car. He would spot check the temperature of the meat and the car and if the car was too warm, or the meat not frozen enough, he would shut us down until it cooled off or the meat was more frozen. We were always teasing him about what a sack job he had. When school started I had to find a part time job and that was the worst one I think I ever had. Stock Boy at KMart. I will never forget the anouncements over the speakers, STOCKBOY TO ISLE 5, STOCKBOY TO ISLE 5, it was always some kid that had messed on the floor by breaking something or getting sick. Hated it hated it. Oh well it makes us apprectiate what came later.
Jim, Thanks for adding what your salary was for your first job. Eddy's Bakery paid me $4 an hour, which was huge. When I graduated from college a year later and got my first job as a reporter, I was making $5 an hour. My dad's first job after graduating from high school in 1938 was milking cows for Lind's Dairy outside of Roundup. His salary was $10 a month plus room and board. No wonder the Army looked so appetizing.
I find it noteworthy how much we have in common; I grew up in Missoula and worked most of my adult life at KFYR-TV!
My first job was working for my dad at the House of Color. We had an Apple computer in the office, which is why I got into Apple computers myself. I worked all summer for that Apple //c...
I worked for a private investigation company after my first year of college, then fell hind-backward into television. Aside from a couple years spent snowboarding (and getting paid for it) out at Big Sky, I remained in television until 2003. Now my phone doesn't ring whenever there's severe weather or other big news. I really miss directing newscasts, though.
I did a brief stint working part time in grocery stores in the 80s. I remember how we'd tell new kids to do fun things like "go get an aisle-stretcher, we need another row of peanut butter here" or "darn, all the salad dressings have settled, we need you to go shake the bottles." Fun times.
My first job was working at the Dairy Queen for the summer. We got to eat all the ice cream we wanted. We only created and served the ice cream. We had a cook that handled the greasy, messy part of food prep. When I was still in training, I was mixing a blizzard and accidentally lost control of the cup. We had blizzard everywhere! I also worked cleaning dog kennels and had a brief stint working at a big-box store as a cashier at Christmas time.
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