[today’s run: rest day]<\/p>\n
I thought I would talk a bit about the jobs I have had.<\/p>\n
My first job was at an old fashioned meat market on east 30th street in Des Moines, across the street from the Iowa State Fairgrounds, a block\u00a0 south of Grand Ave.\u00a0 There is a big Econo Lodge building there now.\u00a0 I think it was called East End Locker.<\/p>\n
I started there when I was 15 and I think I worked for about 9 months or so.\u00a0 I don’t think I was there a whole year.\u00a0 A family at school would give me a ride over to my work after school.<\/p>\n
The place was owned by Don and Shirley Norem who went to my church.\u00a0 They were nice people (still are!).\u00a0 Their daughter Cathy also worked there, and maybe one other person.<\/p>\n
I got the job when Rick Carey moved along to something else.\u00a0 I don’t remember exactly how that happened.\u00a0 I do recall that he tried to get me to memorize a 3×5 meat order card and I kind of blew it off.\u00a0 That was a mistake.\u00a0 Don would have been impressed if I had, I think.<\/p>\n
But my job was mainly to clean up at the end of the work day.\u00a0 I also got to do some hamburger processing\/packaging.\u00a0 Some days I worked in the coolers too.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We had rental lockers, just like in a bus station but in the freezer room.\u00a0 People would buy meat and rent a locker to put it in.\u00a0 That way they didn’t have to have a freezer at home.\u00a0 Working in the freezer rooms was peaceful and really not uncomfortable because the air didn’t move around.<\/p>\n
I passed the job along to my cousin Gary who was a year younger.<\/p>\n
The following summer I got on with the Iowa State Fairgrounds summer maintenance crew.\u00a0 My older brother had been doing that for a number of years.\u00a0 Teachers from my school were the managers there and a lot of my classmates worked there.\u00a0 I did that for all four years of high school and after my first year of college, 5 summers total.<\/p>\n
The last summer there I was a manager of a cleaning crew.\u00a0 That was an interesting experience and my only true managerial job.\u00a0 At the first they really hated my guts.\u00a0 But eventually we worked things out and from then on it was much better.<\/p>\n
I think there were usually 3 or 4 crews, each of 5-6 guys.\u00a0 We worked all summer long.\u00a0 In the mornings we would meet at the maintenance building.\u00a0 And then we would be hauled out to our assigned place for the day.\u00a0 Most of the work was cleaning toilets, sweeping and wet-vacuuming concrete floors.\u00a0 There were a lot of buildings and it took all summer.\u00a0 The buildings were almost all deserted, empty and dusty.<\/p>\n
Then the fair time would come and the place would be invaded by lots of people who thought they owned it.\u00a0 Of course, we knew that _we_ owned it because we were there all summer and not just for 10 days.\u00a0 During the fair the job was substantially different.\u00a0 We moved things around and cleaned out the barns between the multi-day shifts of brown cows \/ black cows \/ dairy cows, etc. etc.\u00a0 At various times I got to drive a skid loader and a dump truck.\u00a0 One year my job during the fair was to drive a dump truck around, through the throngs of fair-goers down Grand Ave, around, up through the camp ground, everywhere.\u00a0 It was surreal.\u00a0 (no, I didn’t kill anybody)<\/p>\n
When I started, the old Women’s and Children’s building was still there.\u00a0 It’s been long gone now.\u00a0 It was an interesting old place\u00a0 with a big wrap-around porch.\u00a0 The top floor was sealed off and it had a bunch of old furniture up there.\u00a0 The whole fairgrounds was an interesting old place.<\/p>\n
The fairgrounds thing lasted during summer break; people would start disappearing to go back to school in August, while the fair was still on.<\/p>\n
Somewhere along in my high school days I also did a bit of work for Whiting’s Music moving pianos.\u00a0 I was not a very good piano mover.\u00a0 And I remember one time the boss asked me to change a light bulb in a ceiling fixture in the store.\u00a0 This store was in Merle Hay Mall.\u00a0 I went and got a “man lift” and got up to the ceiling.\u00a0 The bulb broke off and I used some pliers to try to get it out.\u00a0 I’m sure I ended up ruining that light socket!\u00a0 When it was time for me to go the light was still out and it probably cost somebody\u00a0 some $$ to replace the socket.\u00a0 Sorry about that Mr. Whiting!<\/p>\n
But I learned a lot during my school-days jobs.\u00a0 I learned that I enjoyed work and that especially enjoyed being on my own or in charge.<\/p>\n
Next up: more jobs during college days.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[today’s run: rest day] I thought I would talk a bit about the jobs I have had. My first job was at an old fashioned meat market on east 30th street in Des Moines, across the street from the Iowa State Fairgrounds, a block\u00a0 south of Grand Ave.\u00a0 There is a big Econo Lodge building […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4250"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4255,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4250\/revisions\/4255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}