Career Builders

I finished high school at seventeen with good grades and a keen interest in math, history, art, English, and Latin. Perhaps because of our small town, blue-collar image, college was going to have to wait. I inherited a good work ethic that played out from the time I was eleven with paper routes, hauling hay, delivering milk, and working the local harness racehorse farms. After graduation, it seemed that real professions stemmed from a city job. Working at a bakery was better than mucking stalls so I signed on for seventy-five cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. Starting at six in the morning was easy for a farmhand. The bakers started at four! The owner was too attentive in monitoring my three-quarter leverage of the custard and cream filler for sweet rolls. His concern over excess left me prone to fill each roll to the max in his absence. The highlight of my day was driving the sweet cargo in the delivery truck to his other store. On Wednesday and Friday, I was left awestruck with donut deliveries to the local Girl Scout Camp. This was every teenager’s fantasy. My final hour of the day was to scrape the sugary deposits off the wooden floor on my hands and knees. This is when the boss’s daughter would find time to stand over me in consolation. After two months into this routine, the boss called me aside and explained that with due diligence – I too could find success and become a baker. By this time, I wanted to say I was looking forward to towering above his daughter but left to say I would think about it. The thought of starting at four in the morning caused me to flee. I never went back for my last paycheck and he never pursued to pay me. Following my sticky pastry situation, I decided to follow my buddy Rich and join the Navy. From an initial interview, I learned of a ‘kiddy cruise’ which meant I could join before I was eighteen and get out the day before I was twenty-one. For maximum benefit with minimal effort, I decided to hold off till the day before I was eighteen and standby at home for a few more months.
Our recent migrant worker situation brought all of this to mind. I needed to buy some time and work out a form of survival until it was time to go Navy. Nearby Imlay City has peat and black dirt deposit that yields great vegetables and harvest time brought migrant workers to the fields. At dawn, I assembled with the Mexicans at the Farm Bureau. The muck farmers would drive up in their pickups, point with discrimination to the chosen day-workers, and we would climb into the bed of their truck. Vintage Mexican workers carried their own machete for harvest, a razor-sharp sword to sever roots from lettuce or cabbage, and a barb on the end that plucked a potato or other root veggies from the ground. On our second day, my two friends and I were selected again by the same potato harvester and told we could get ten cents above the normal dollar an hour by just coming directly to his farm. Our task was to load the sixty-pound crates of potatoes on to the wagon in the field then stack them in the barn. It became very obvious our youthful exhilaration was outwitted by the macho gaucho barbing the spuds in the field. They resided in shanty-towns unseen from the main road where wives and children emerged to lend a hand. They never broke a sweat in the ninety-degree heatwave, whereas, the dust bonded to every portion of my body. I will never forget the pride on the face of the old Dutchman when he exclaimed the barn was full from such a bountiful harvest but with a little effort, we could add two more levels to the top of our heap. This meant holding the sixty-pound crate close to your chest with four feet of clearance, tracking over the upper level of crates, in a barn 120 feet deep by 40 feet wide, and if it was ninety outside it was one hundred and ten inside.