Summertime, and the living ain’t easy

In December 1960, at the age of eleven, I moved from Long Island to Phelps, in the northern Finger Lakes. There were a number of things that were radically different from Long Island, but one stood out. All my classmates were eager to get their green work permit to earn money as soon as they turned twelve.

I followed suit and after my birthday dutifully applied for my working papers. I heard you could earn hundreds of dollars picking strawberries at Barney Salisbury’s “Sunnyside Farm.” It sounded too good to be true; and alas, it was.

I dutifully showed up early the first morning and was given a flat of empty punnets and figured I’d fill them in no time. At 10 cents a quart I’d be making big bucks.

Sweating under the relentless summer sun, bent over like the hunchback of Notre Dame, fingers stained red, I rummaged through leaves for ripe strawberries. Most frequently they were either under ripe, overripe, or too delicious to resist.

  My tenure at Barney Salisbury’s was short-lived. I picked nine quarts the first morning, went home for lunch ‒ and never returned. I decided there were better ways to make a living.

Thirty-seven years later I saw Barney at a funeral. We had a very friendly conversation, but I felt it wasn’t the appropriate time to remind him that he owed me ninety cents.

Where I had a very short career

Later that summer I tried job number two. I learned more about physical work but not about negotiating pay. An old guy (he was probably 30) down the road named Jim had a flat-bed trailer truck. Somehow, word got to me and my friend Leslie White that he was looking for some help. We let Jim know that we were the guys he wanted. Before you knew it, we loaded up his 50-foot trailer with 400 bales of hay (the rectangular kind, not the round bales you see today.) We rode with Jim to some distant part of the state and unloaded them, drove to another farm, picked up another load, and took it to yet another part of the state and unloaded it. We repeated that for the entire weekend. No tractor to load and unload the bales – just two scrawny twelve-year olds and Jim. That weekend we covered a lot of miles and moved a lot of hay.

I don’t know what made me think loading forty-pound bales of hay was easier than picking strawberries, but I did. I learned a hard lesson at the end of the weekend, though. Jim dropped me off at my home. He offered me $12 for the weekend’s work and asked, “Is that enough?” I said, “Sure.” Like the idiot I was, I knew I was being taken advantage of, but I didn’t have the gumption to do anything about it. I walked into the house, not much richer, but a whole lot wiser. When a few weeks later Jim asked if I wanted to do it again, I politely declined. I didn’t need more work, I needed more money.

I had numerous other odd jobs throughout the high school years but one of the most rewarding was where payment was in the form of lunch and dinner. It was during haying time at Lee DeRuyter’s dad’s farm. Some of us baled the hay, put it on the wagon, and took it to the barn. Lee and I were up in the top of the barn in the stifling heat where bales of hay clunked up the conveyor. One of us grabbed and stacked the bales in itchy, sweat-soaked silence, broken only by the occasional joke that kept our spirits up. It wasn’t fun—but there was a sense of satisfaction from working hard and knowing you’d helped your friend and his family. It was made even better at mealtimes. Lee’s mom served a luncheon and dinner that could have fed an army but instead was devoured by a half-dozen teenagers.

I think it was the first time that I worked really hard and felt good about it. It certainly provided me with a life-long respect for the farmer’s life.

I had a variety of other jobs during my high school years but none I have memories of, fond or otherwise. During the college years things got more interesting.

As a recreation major I jumped at the opportunity to work for Jeanne King, the director of the Town of Phelps Summer Recreation Program. For a village of under 2,000 people we had a great summer program. We had a women’s softball league, daily arts and crafts program for kids, and evening open men’s basketball. I did a little of everything, from teaching arts and crafts to refereeing the pick-up basketball games. It’s funny how refereeing young men’s summer basketball is like officiating a WWE match—every call is life or death, and everyone’s an expert ‒ especially the guy who hasn’t dribbled since middle school (except down his chin.) To survive you needed the reflexes of a ninja, the patience of a saint, and the hearing loss of a rock drummer. A loud whistle didn’t hurt either.

The job was a great experience but was only four hours a day and didn’t pay well. My brother mentioned they were hiring at Garlock’s in Palmyra. It was a union job paying $1.50 an hour with a 15 cents an hour bonus for working the night shift. I asked myself what kind of job would pay that type of exorbitant wage? Unfortunately, I found out.

I operated a series of four-level hydraulic presses, each with a die to produce gaskets. They operated at 360 degrees. How these machines worked is irrelevant...Suffice to say that I made rubber gaskets in a miserably hot environment.

The room was about 115 degrees… and that was during the cool evening of the graveyard shift. Operating the hot machinery was like wrangling a fire-breathing dragon while the devil with a clipboard looked over your shoulder—one wrong move and you're either a barbecue or behind on production quotas. It was hot, boring work, and impossible for me not to burn my forearms reaching in to pull out the dies.

There must have been a tremendous demand for these gaskets because there was an incentive to produce as many as possible. In hindsight I bet the Vietnam war had something to do with it.

They tracked production and if you produced more than the minimum number of gaskets, they gave you bonus pay. The old-timers made lots of gaskets and made good money. But I didn’t because I never even reached the minimum.

I was glad they got rewarded for producing more than the minimum. But I was even gladder, that I didn’t get penalized for never producing the minimum.