Summer jobs

Few of us have forgotten the feeling of that last day of school in June.  Dashing out the school door, welcoming the world of seemingly endless summer.  Day after day of doing whatever we wanted, interrupted only occasionally, perhaps, by the need to mow the lawn or weed the flowers.

This annual three-month paradise continued through high school.  True, we occasionally talked ourselves into working in the strawberry fields for a few days, bringing in the harvest for a laughably small amount of compensation.  And one year, I worked in the circulation department of the local newspaper, bundling papers as they came off the press.  That job lasted all summer, but for only two hours a day.

It wasn't until after high school that the nightmare of adult employment dropped on my head.  I found my carefree summers replaced by a life of servitude.  I became an employee, a slave to the corporate world and -- less abstractly -- to the whims of a sarcastic foreman.  Before I realized what was happening, I had joined the laboring classes.

The first summer wasn't so bad, working as an assistant in a laboratory.  But the salary was low and the job non-union.  By the following summer, I needed to bring home more money for my college tuition.  My mother worked in the office of the local paper mill, which -- in those days -- almost guaranteed her son a job that paid union scale (albeit, at the bottom of the scale).  I forget the job "title" -- something like wood handler and clean-up.

Ever visited a large paper mill?  After a lifetime of bucolic summers, the mill struck me as a nightmare, a real-life actualization of Blake's "dark Satanic mills."  I remember looking about me one day and wondering if the builders had been instructed to make the facility as ugly as possible, in an effort to stamp out all higher aspirations in its workers.

My first day, I was taken out to the wood yard.  The mill purchased wood in cut pieces, each -- I would now guess -- about 30 pounds in weight.  They were piled haphazardly in enormous hills.  I was taken to a place at the base of a hill.  A metal wheeled carrier awaited me.  I was to stack pieces of wood neatly in the carrier.  When the carrier was full, it would be taken inside and the wood run through a grinder, on its way to becoming pulp.  I was to do that, carrier after carrier, for eight hours, with a twenty-minute break for lunch.

You who have not stacked wood have no idea how long eight hours can last.  I worked alone.  I wore gloves that wore out quickly, and before they wore out they were pierced by splinters.  I had a target number of carriers to fill, although I wasn't expected to hit that target the first day.  I had only one thought in mind that carried me through those first eight hours -- that this was a huge mistake, that I was an intellectual, that I was not meant for such work, and that I would submit my resignation at the end of the shift.

I explained this to my father later that evening.  He laughed mirthlessly. I worked all summer, changing shifts every seven work days -- "day shift," "swing," "graveyard."  Like the tolling of a bell, those names rang in my mind.

If there had ever been a thought in my head that I didn't need a college education -- actually, there never was, ever -- that summer would have wiped it clean.  The mill was filled with men whose entire lives revolved around those three words -- days, swing, graveyard.  Their faces seemed as gray as the mill in which we worked.

The older men were, in general, friendly to me as a "wet behind the ears" college kid.  Sometimes, perhaps, less friendly than others.  After some goof I'd committed, I do remember a foreman telling me that "well, son, you may be smart in school, but you sure don't have much common sense, do you?"  My face flushed, flushed all the more for my having secretly agreed with him. I'm told that this is a frequent comment made to college kids, any one of whom might one day be the foreman's supervisor.

The following summer, I had a wondrous reprieve.  I was enrolled in a six-month overseas study program in Florence, Italy.  Quite a contrast between Florence and a paper mill.  But the summer after that, I was back at the mill.  That second summer of millwork, however, I worked in what was called the "dry end" -- where the rolls of paper emerged from the papermaking process.  The work was done indoors.  It was lighter work.  I worked with dry paper, not damp splintery wood.  And, maybe most importantly, I worked alongside and together with other workers my age -- both summer help and permanent employees.  It was still a long summer, but not as nightmarish as that first summer had been.

In this week's Economist, the columnist "Lexington" laments the disappearing summer job in America.  He notes that the jobs simply aren't there anymore, for employees of any age.  He also notes that today's teenagers (supported by their parents) prefer to do more career-relevant work as interns or as volunteers in foreign countries.  He laments the loss of opportunity for college students to get their hands dirty and their muscles exhausted.

An elite education counts for little without self-discipline and resilience.  Drudgery can teach humility; when hauling boxes, a brain full of algebra matters less than a teen's muscles.  At best, it can breach the social barriers that harm democracy.  Summer jobs are called all-American for a reason.

After that first day of stacking wood, I would have found myself totally unreceptive to such a high-minded lecture.

From a distance of decades, however, I agree with "Lexington."  Looking back, two summers of millwork made me a better person, in the long run.  Besides, I secretly tell myself, casting narrowed eyes at today's millennials, I had to spend two summers as a young man suffering daily in a paper mill.  Why shouldn't they?