Summer Jobs

originally published May 14, 2008

Passing City Hall the other morning I noticed a kid wheeling a hand-truck stacked with file-storage boxes, and I thought, "summer job." I immediately began cataloging the work that occupied my own vacations between those halcyon summers of doing nothing and the workaday world that strictly rations vacations - unless you had the good sense to become a teacher.

In more or less chronological order, let's see: grave digging, though to tell the truth that could have been part of my Saturday job at the family store/ funeral home - "Everything from the cradle to the grave." Word. Then came cutting pulpwood with my hardworking friends Bobby and Sam Roper, laboring for their father, the affable Allen Roper, under the watchful eye of his professional crew led by William West, who taught me how to stay cool working in the hot Georgia woods by wearing more clothes rather than fewer. The Roper brothers and I had heard a rumor that fire ants were coming to Georgia, and we were terrified that they would be hiding under every log we picked up. We were a decade or so ahead of our time, but now fire ants own Georgia.

Next, I graduated to hauling pulpwood, which included loading the truck by throwing the four-foot pine logs up onto the truck to a height well above our heads. My older cousin Deeda McCommons, a rural mail carrier, moonlighted as a pulpwood hauler, and he and I had many adventures with his old trucks - including the time a front wheel came off while I was driving a loaded truck. Deeda had the good sense to be riding behind me in a car.

I spent another summer in the woods with the irrepressible E.H. Armor, who lived as free a life as anybody I have known, never getting tied down by a regular job or by marriage, heading for the river whenever the urge struck, that is, frequently. E.H. hired me to help him clean the scrub growth off some land. He helped himself to the big lunches my Mama packed for me, and we knocked off early every afternoon to go down to the Oconee to check E.H.'s fish baskets and any others he could spot.

The next summer, I had a state job, arranged by Hunter Bell, the local state highway engineer. Cutting brush again and helping survey rural roads, I worked alongside my friend and football teammate Lewis Brown, under the direction of Horace Harwell and Hamp McWhorter, who made work fun with their hijinks.

I finally made it out of the woods to work as a camp counselor for a couple of summers at Camp Glisson in the north Georgia mountains, with work in a statewide political campaign thrown in at the end of one of those camp seasons. And then came a couple of summers during college working in the personnel department of the Lakewood Chevrolet assembly plant in Atlanta. Talk about making work fun with humor - a pair named Cliff and Johnny were unending in their high-spirited joking, and the office - the whole plant, really - was run in a perpetual state of chaos that belied the prevailing image of General Motors as the model of corporate efficiency.

I had a summer teaching political science at the university, arranged by my mentor George Parthemos and another doing background research on city-county government consolidation in Augusta and Richmond County for UGA's Institute of Government. I spent my last summer hauling furniture in and out of apartments in Greenwich Village and shoveling sand on Far Rockaway Beach, and then I was more or less ready for full-time, year-'round jobs that might allow a couple of weeks in the summer just to remind you what it would be like if you didn't have to punch a clock the other 50 weeks.

I doubt if summer jobs are as plentiful now, but I'm here to tell you that they can be mighty valuable educationally, regardless of how much they pay. Thanks to my summer work, I wasn't the least bit surprised by the arrival of the fire ants.

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com