“Get off that sofa and find a job!” my dad told me in June of 1959.
“What? I just graduated from high school, and it is the summer before college. It’s time for a break,” I thought but didn’t dare say. What’s the matter with daytime TV?
“I want you to go up the main street and ask every store owner to hire you,” he said. When that didn’t work, I went door to door trying to sell TVs. Next, he got me a one-day job somehow picking string beans with seasoned farm workers in California’s blazing hot San Ramon Valley. I made only $2.70 and spent $1.80 of that on sodas. He told me afterward, “You never have to do that again.”
I finally found work in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin District as a busboy, lodging at a fleabag hotel. I did get to see Willie Mays and the Giants play several times in their second season in San Francisco. However, the Tenderloin was no place even then for a 17-year-old boy, and my father should have forbidden it.
As one who hopped on freight trains during the Depression, he thought it was good for me. However, a drunk climbed off a fire escape into my fifth-floor window, thinking he was locked out of his own room. I screamed for help. He was lucky I didn’t push hm to his death. I was moved to a room without a window.
For a long time, I thought my father pressured me too hard to get a job until I had an encounter 50 years later with my 20-year-old daughter. She complained that her course load in community college was too heavy. “I would like to drop from 12 units to 9 to have more time for myself,” she told me. “Fine,” I said. “You can pay me $200 a month rent.” She quickly changed her mind. Later she thanked me.
OK, Dad. You were right after all!
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