Looking back, I worked extremely hard as a kid, but I didn't realize it at the time. My dad was a masonry/concrete contractor, and I have 5 brothers, 4 of them older than me, and 3 of those are 11+ years older than me. One good thing, none of my friends and guys my age could hurt me. That helped a lot in sports.
My uncle has owned a landscaping company for 50+ years and if I wasn't in school, I was taken to "the village" (Amberly Village) to work. My earliest memory from it was everyone was sitting around eating lunch under a shade tree, and someone asked me if I could use a push mower. I was still short enough that I couldn't push it at the top, and had to push on the middle bar! I was maybe 7 or 8 at that point? I was really good at catching frogs and snakes by then Now, I wasn't 'working' at that point, but by the time I was 10, I was putting in 40-50 hours a week during the summer on a John Deere F930 or a Toro 345 when we were mowing, and I could wheel a Jackson M6 full of mulch like nobody's business! If we weren't in the village, we were at the farm building barns, or cattle pens, or fencing, or bush hogging. I'm no farmer or operator by any means, but there isn't a piece of machinery that I can't operate pretty efficiently. My sons (12) is a little behind in that regard, but anytime his stuff breaks, I make him bust out the wrenches. He's also started picking up mowing jobs in the hood and I just had him on a mini excavator yesterday for the first time when we were tying in some downspout lines.
Every night after school and every weekend. 2 jobs every summer- morning at the hardware store, nights at the auto parts store or vice versa, then nights at the air freighter. When you wreck cars and rack up tickets insurance gets expensive... The boy got his first job this summer- a good friend hustles shipping containers, lets Hank work in between rounds when he can.
I think I was 8 or 9 when I had my first paper route back in the early 70's. I have three older brothers, and one of them had a huge route that they carved off around 35 customers to make things a little easier for them. I had no choice in the matter - I came back from summer camp and I had a paper route. I delivered the evening paper Monday thru Saturday, then had to get up early Sunday to deliver the morning paper. I had to collect subscription money every month, going door to door, as well as pay for the papers. I had progressively larger routes until I was about 15, finishing up with around 200 subscriptions. We learned how to bundle up for winter. Once I was old enough to have a "real" job bagging groceries, bussing tables or pumping gas, I jumped all over it.
My whole HS life I bailed hay for the local farmers in NW Ohio. Now that was hard work in the 80’s. Whether on the ground, on the trailer stacking, or back at the barn unloading and stacking, it was tremendously hard work. USMC bootcamp didn’t seem so hard (at least the physical side of it) after all the time working the fields.
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promis'd joy”
You know what I was doin' when I was 13 years old? I would inflate, an inflatable pool and fill it up with sherm and get butt naked and oil myself! WELCOME TO MY LIFE! You know what I owned when I was 12? A fortune 500 company and I was whoopin' my own ass!
I worked but not nearly as hard as some of you guys. Folks that grew up around equipment, operating, driving and working on junk have a set of skills/understanding that we take for granted. Most have little understanding of what we have gained.
You didn't wear out the front of the right thigh on your jeans when you were bucking bales onto the trailer, did you?
I had it pretty soft. I worked a bunch of different jobs at the same time but I didn't work for my dad (heavy landscaping) or on a farm punching cows or harvesting wild boars from the swamps of PA. I also had a lot of freedom to go race or play some stupid sport or just disappear. "Hey, where's Dave?" "Shit if I know."
i definitely didnt work as hard as some of you crusty old f@cks, but, my dad would always explain that if i was going to do something, it was worth doing right. so, my chores... no half assing them. when i got old enough for a summer job, i did it right, i did it hard, so the boss person ( luckily my grandfather) would be proud of me. his boss, the owner once told him if we had 2 more of your grandson we could get a lot of shit done around here. when my grandfather told me that, he had a very proud look on his face and gave me a hug. im working on that with my kids. if its worth doing, its worth doing right. no shortcuts to success, no shortcuts to glory. hard work, good work, smart work. do it right and do it once. you cant learn it all on the first time and thats ok but you have to learn, and, you should learn from whoever is going to teach you. ive got my older son started doing attic work (sometimes thats backfired on me) but being in an attic pulling linesets is not easy work but there is a skill to be learned.
I didn’t work as hard as many of you guys that worked on a farm. I did mow lawns, delivered newspapers and did some chores starting around 10. At 14-15 I got a work permit and started at the local fast food place, then pizza place, and then a pharmacy all through junior college. I have worked ever since, with no more than 2-3 weeks off for a vacation. I was lucky that I never went hungry and my parents taught me to work hard. However, I was babied in that my mom usually cooked most my meals. I never washed my clothes until I moved out at 20. Heck my mom would wake me up for school and have breakfast ready. While I was showering she even laid out my clothes on my bed for me, so I could get dressed and walk to the school bus. So I’m pretty soft, compared to what some of you had to do.
Admittedly, my work wasn't as hard as what some of you guys did (may hat's off to you, btw), but I did work non stop from about 12 or 13 to present day. I was a babysitter until I got my first "real" job (at an actual store) at 15; at Baskin Robbins. Since my buddy's family owned it, he hired us underage kids and paid us cash. Once I turned 16 and was legal to work anywhere (on the books) I started working at local sporting goods stores, mostly in the hunting and fishing departments. Once I went to college, I worked summers at a local chemical plant in the Engineering Dept, and was able to parlay this into a formal internship. I continued working there even while undergoing chemo and radiation for my lymphoma. Once I graduated (a 'good number' of years later), I've continued to work full time ever since.
I did the paper route thing too. 365 days on, no days off. From 13 years old through 18. By motorcycle (canvas saddlebags) for the first three years. Started out with around 100 customers, was well over 400 by the end of it with a couple of neighborhoods worth of development happening. Was a valuable introduction when it came to learning about money management and debt obligation, as well as assessing the character of people.
Mom bought me a mower when I was 12, rule was that our yard was free but the mower was mine to use. Every yard in our neighborhood was at least an acre, got $15 per yard. My step mom was the morning manager for a Holiday Inn and got me a job as the weekend morning dishwasher when I was a freshman. I had the 5am to 1pm shift every Saturday and Sunday, meaning I never got to sleep in during the school year. In the summers I was Mon-Fri so I at least got to sleep on weekends for 3 months. I had this job until I graduated. To this day everybody wonders why I wake up so early
I got my first paper route when I was 11. One week into it and JFK got shot. They delayed the paper until late at night. I got my stack of 110 papers to deliver at 11pm. Since I didn't really know my route that well it took me until 3am the next morning to get it completed. Who would let their 11 year old kid out on a Friday night until 3am? Times were different, had a job to do. The one thing that I remember was this sweet old black lady that was one of my customers. She didn't have 2 dimes to rub together but she gave me a 5 dollar tip that week on collection day. Stupid me didn't know any better, I should have refused it and just made some excuse about just do'in my job. It's one of those silly little things that I still regret to this day.
Grew up on a dairy farm, if I wasn't in school I was working, all the usual farm stuff. Milked the night milking with my dad, did get to skip a few days of school in the spring to plow / disc when we were trying to get corn in. Tens of thousands of small square bales handled over the years, I hate baling hay.
