𝗧𝗥𝗬𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢 𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗡 𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗘𝗬 𝗔𝗧 𝟭𝟯-𝟭𝟲

'47 Dodge Coupe

Well, Ana just came in from her 12 hour night shift at the hospital and while I'm waiting on a story submission from Rene Torres, I got to thinking about some of the dangers posed in my first jobs.

At 13 I worked nights scrubbing floors for George Pringle, a diagnosed manic-depressive, but brilliant, who scanned the radio dial of his '47 Dodge for boogie-woogie music as we drove to the jobs while I sat on an overturned mop bucket on the passenger side. 

George's business cards read ABC Maintenance, "Always Be Clean" and George impressed customers by telling them we used "universal solvent" (water) as a cleaning agent.

Pringle had designed his own floor scrubber, a crudely made machine with a washing machine motor bolted to a thick steel plate cut out with a welding torch, then geared down with two pulleys and an auto fan belt.

The "buffer" posed several dangers as it ran unevenly and too fast, making it very difficult to control.  

Also, there was no electrical switch, just a plug for an extension cord, so you had to plug it in while holding the machine firmly so it didn't go crazy.

George could not control his own machine, especially navigating the narrow aisles between the glass cases extending to the floor of Shaw Brothers Drugs in Renton, Washington, so that job fell to me from my very first night on the job.

George loaned me his rubber gloves to protect from electrical shock while running the floor scrubber in  the watery suds.

I worked for George for two years, spending the night of the JFK assassination cleaning a radio station on the Benson Highway between Kent and Renton while reading worldwide reports and condolences coming across the station's teletype machine.

Former Russian President Nikita Khruschev

I was somewhat shocked to see a note of sympathy from Russian President Nikita Khruschev come across the teletype.

At 15-1/2 I was old enough to join the Retail Clerks Union to work at Johnny Somer's IGA in Covington, Washington.

Starting pay  for a "box boy" back then was actually pretty good, $5.50 per hour, more than triple Brownsville wages from that era.

The job entailed putting customers groceries in boxes, then lifting up the four sides of the box and securing it with twine so the boxes could hold more.

We then had to run, not walk, the customers groceries to their cars using a cart, then run back in for the next order.

In between "boxing" orders, we worked backstock from under the shelves and "faced" the merchandise for good appearance.

On the day I was hired, Store Manager Ken Davick asked me to spell the word "mayonnaise," and, when I spelled the word correctly, gave me what he described as "a very important job," a task I quickly learned to dread.

Once a week I had to go outside to the store's reader board, a huge sign fifteen feet in the air and put up the week's grocery specials.

I toted a gunny sack with the black letters, red numbers, dollar, cents, slash and period symbols, etc. up a ladder to a dangerous, slippery two-board walkway.(Since it rained most days in the Pacific Northwest, that walkway was almost always wet.)

Once you finished the ads on one side, you had to dangerously slide yourself around from one side of the reader board to the other.

Soon, after starting work at Johnny's IGA, Mr. Somers put in a service station out front and I got a few hours a week running it. (Just this week, some 60 years later, Washington State finally approved self-service gas pumping, one of the last states in the U.S. to do so.)

But, back in those days, we offered "full service," meaning we had to carefully check the oil, tire air pressure and add water to the radiator.  

You learned to open a radiator slowly, letting a bit of the boiling steam escape before fully opening.  Otherwise, you'd get a blast of scalding 212 degree water in your face.

After a year at the IGA Store, a neighbor said she'd personally recommended me for a job at Cascade Lanes Bowling Alley in Renton where she ran a restaurant inside the facility.

"I told them you were a very responsible young man and that you were at least 21," the neighbor told me.

Actually, I was just 16, but I quickly took the job as it paid $420 per month, more than I could make anywhere else back then.

Since I was still going to high school, I split the job with classmate Joe Mallory, each of us pocketing $210 per month for two hours of work before school each day, from 4 AM till around 6 AM.

Joe ran the oiling machine for the lanes, emptied all the ash trays, while I cleaned the upstairs including the rest rooms, office and restaurant.  As required, we wore bowling shoes, so as not to scuff the lanes.

That was also the year I left home, buying an old 40's trailer from trucker Earl Maxwell and moving it to the Lager Brothers Dairy Farm.  The Lager brothers were three white bearded old men, adherents of a religious sect once predicting the "end of the world."

Gunner was the oldest and possibly the kindest, always worried Joe and I weren't eating enough, putting a large stack of flapjacks in front of us along with cowboy coffee boiled on the stove top.

They sold what was possibly pasteurized milk in glass bottles with a couple inches of cream at the top.  My maternal grandparents and several uncles and aunts were regular customers, but the milk was too rich for my tastes. 

By then I'd finished making payments on my '59 green VW and Joe bought himself a yellow '57 with mechanical turn signals.  We took separate VW's to work each morning, then to school.