Early Years 3

Odd SummerJobs

The first place I worked was a long skinny mom&pop diner in our small-town on main street.  It was sort of like the diners you see in movies, with a counter and bar stools all the way to the back on one side, and a row of booths all down the other.  Washrooms in the back.  Short order cook behind the counter.  Dark, dingy, greasy.  With regular patrons who came in every day for coffee and the ’special’.  It was a summer job, I was just barely sixteen and I hated it with a passion.  I gagged when I had to clean ash trays and be polite to skanky old men.   I quit after a couple of weeks to go and work with a friend at the “Blue Water Tea Room” right on the beach.  Now, in comparrison, the tea room was heaven.  But as classy as it may sound, it was just a shack with a patio.  We sold a lot of french fries in paper cups, and foot long hot dogs and pop (no tea that I remember) and we were constantly sweeping up sand tracked in by our clientele wearing bathing suits and not much else.  So now there were skanky old men with beer bellies <sigh> but they invariably had teenage sons somewhere in the picture.  Our ‘boss’ was a grumpy old guy who sat in the back peeling potatoes.  Where I lived, meeting a lot of tourist-type guys in the summer was a very high priority, and this proved to be a great place to do that.  At our highschool, even if you were going out with someone during the school year you usually agreed on at least a temporary break up in the summer.  It was a tourist resort – the population easily trippled when people from the big cities arrived to take up cottage life.  My week-long romantic flings with interesting city boys began here.   Unfortunately, the grumpy potato peeler sold his business at the end of that season, and it eventually was made into a rather classy place that catered to the yacht owners.  But by the time that happened, I had moved back uptown. 

The remaining summers through high school I was employed at McK’s Dairy (name shortened to protect the guilty) on main street.  As the name suggests, we sold locally made dairy products, as well as fast food.  I loved it there.  Twelve girls were employed,  two teams of six working opposite rotating shifts.  Each of us worked at different ’stations’ for two days at a time, going from kitchen (dishes and do-nut making), to grill, to first “U” (u-shaped counter – again with the bar stools) to second “U” to  ice cream to ‘floater’, meaning you could help wherever you were needed.  Which usually meant back to back sessions on ice cream where we scooped cones for hours.  There was a window open to the sidewalk as well as an indoor counter and people in the summer were insatiable when it came to ice cream.  It took me years to get over hating the milky smell that ice cream develops when you’re exposed to it for hours at a time.  We also developed the right arm muscles of weight lifters.  The best part of the job was the hours – we worked from 3 pm to 11 pm one day, and 7 am to 3 pm the next.  Then from that 3 p.m. to the start of your next shift at 3 pm 24 hours later, you had hours to spend at the beach with the guys you picked up serving them ice cream.  We all opted for pony tails in lieu of hair nets (how gross would that have been) and we all wore short little white uniforms and gingham aprons.  Truly gaggy, but strangely effective in the dairy bar business I guess.  The boss here was an incarnation of my first boss, middle aged, cranky and obsessed with turning a profit.  At one point he decided we were being way too generous with the ice cream scoops and gave us a scale to weigh the cones on.  Chintzy old bugger.   All that did was make us way  more generous, stuffing ice cream down into the cones so they weighed twice as much as they were supposed to.  I became a fairly accomplished short order cook working there.  Very limited menu of course,  but there’s a certain pride involved in turning out the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.  And I was not a bad waitress. Again, uncomplicated menu helped to make us very efficient.  We had to make our own milkshakes and floats and sundaes and banana splits.  We had to be good at adding up chits and giving the right change.  We pooled our tips.  The kitchen was an alternate steam bath from the dishwasher to grease fest running the do-nut maker.  Couldn’t eat a do-nut for a long time after working there either.  And this is how incredibly old I am – I can remember when we all got a raise and were making a dollar an hour, and feeling like we had hit the big time.  I don’t remember it being primarily about the money though.  Mine got spent mostly on clothes.  It was more about not being bored to death all summer long and meeting people and getting out and doing stuff.  There were some unspoken rules about picking up guys – or letting them think they had picked you up.  You never went off with any guy on your own.  We always ‘dated’ at least in pairs – he had to have a friend who ended up with your friend.  There was a dance hall at the beach with local bands and we went there in groups.  And we ALWAYS drove ourselves home.  I suppose in a way it was wild, but it was a controlled kind of wild, and mostly just a lot of flirting and fun.

I had a couple more food-industry related jobs in my life, one putting in time working the summer before I got married at a bakery that also served soup and sandwich type fare and the second a long time later as an administrative assistant to one of the owners of a family restaurant chain.  These jobs made me realize that this was not even close to what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.  Which was……………..I still don’t know.  

What I do know is that it is a little sad for me to go back to my home town where none of these places exist anymore.  Even our highschool is no longer, although the building has been made into some kind of a shopping complex and the ‘field’ is a parking lot.   The restaurant where we used to take off to and spend our caffeteria money on chips and gravy and smoke our brains out has been completely done over and looks nothing at all like it once did.  Even the beach is no longer familiar.  Its been improved beyond recognition.  There are still strange little diners on main street – I guess the tourists find them quaint. 

Stay tuned for part two, where I get real jobs (where persuing the opposite sex is not the main objective.)  And don’t really like them.  And quit and try something else.  Its not an employment history I’m necessarily proud of and looks pretty flighty on a resume,  but I’m one of those people who prove that the days are gone when you picked one career and stuck with it until you retired.  Plus, I’m the female half of a marriage from the generation where even if you did have a career it would take second place to your husband’s job opportunities where moving was involved.  That has actually suited me well, being the wishy washy type who lets people steer me in different directions.  I love learning new things and new skills.  Hopefully that will never stop.