When I was 14 going on 10, summer vacation lapped at my bare feet like a green lake of unmowed lawns. There were bikes to ride, dirt-clod battles to fight, Spiderman comic books to read and model battleships to build with painstaking care so they could be blown to plastic smithereens with BB guns and firecrackers.
Maybe it was all those airplane-glue fumes. Maybe it was the way I stayed up until midnight watching Shock Theater. Maybe it was the way I said "Good morning" at lunch one sunny June day. But for some reason, my mother, a pioneer on the single-parent frontier, decided it was time to for me to grow up.
She gave me the message from that 1950s song, with thunder and lightning where the "sha-na-na" chorus should be: "Get a job."
It must have made an impression, because I combed my hair, put on my best T-shirt, cutoffs and sneakers and peddled my Schwinn Stingray to the nearest shopping center, where I asked every manager I could corner to give me a job.
"Come back when you're 16," they said. "Haven't you heard of child labor laws?"
"Yes," I'd reply. "But no state or federal statute supersedes Mom's Law."
A&P Supermarket said no. So did the dry cleaners with the ice-cold Coke machine. The drug store and D&C dime store said "Sorry." A banker in a suit contemplated the idea of a kid getting grass stains on all that crisp currency and replied with two words: "Yougotta bekidding."
I had been told at least a hundred times that work would not kill me. But I was not too dense to catch my mother's hint that not working just might. So I kept looking.
Finally, under a 30-foot-tall ice cream cone with peeling paint that made the double dip look like fungus ripple over mocha corrosion, the owner of a Baskin-Robbins store offered me $1 an hour to serve 31 flavors if I would pretend to be 16.
He agreed to hire underage, and I agreed to work underpaid, a quarter below the $1.25 minimum wage.
My friends thought I had the coolest job in town. It was not so cool, just cold. Showing up for work on a summer day felt like climbing into an ice-cream carton.
But I learned a lot.
I learned how to repaint that giant ice cream cone, using a ladder so old it had boiling-oil stains from the Dark Ages.
I learned that a job pays real money and something that lasts longer: respect.
I learned that tubs of blueberry cheesecake turn into eight-gallon milk shakes if you forget to close the blinds and let the afternoon sun toast them.
And I learned that it takes a job to get a job. From super scooper I moved up, down and sideways to bus boy, pizza maker, car-parker, clothes salesman, shipping clerk, gas station attendant, construction laborer, tree-planter, ditchdigger, snow-plow driver and, with the aid of a very expensive piece of paper, editir. (Or is that edatur?)
It's an old lesson: You can't get a job without experience, and you can't get experience without a job. The toughest work is being unemployed.
That seems to get lost in the minimum-wage debate: You can't climb the ladder until you get a grip on that first rung, and jacking up the entry fee can yank it out of reach.
My first boss had to break the law to hire me. Back in ancient history when Baskin-Robbins had only three flavors, even $1.25 an hour was too much.
Today, they're talking about raising it from $4.25 to $5.15 or $5.25.
Part of me says nobody over 40 should be allowed to comment on hair length, loud music or minimum wages. Unless you are 16 or 17, scrounging money for gas, dates or school clothes, you are "overqualified," as they say in the personnel office.
But another part of me says that having all those crummy jobs should be worth something, that there's no point in creeping up on Geezerhood if you can't share all that annoying experience.
So the way I figure it:
An hour's work at minimum wage bought four gallons of gas when I started working, and it would buy nearly as much today if President Clinton had not sponged an extra dollar from every tankful with his gas tax.
As anyone who has received a first paycheck knows, raising the minimum wage is another government Daylight Savings Time scam: They add a little at one end, take it back at the other end, and brag about how generous they are to the working stiffs.
In the Sunday want-ads there are jobs I never heard of: "Outbound teleservices representative." "Programmer analyst - COBOL, IMS, CICS." There are some I can only guess at: "Floating secretary." (Must be willing to work in a pool?) "Promotional Tour Driver with experience in retail meat sales and - or agriculture." (Wienermobile experience required?)
But the point is, there are jobs - 28 pages of them. And the ones anyone can do offer $7-$10 an hour, with benefits: janitor, laborer, house cleaner, pizza driver.
The problem is not low minimum wages - it's high minimum taxes that soak up our gas money and sponge a third of our paychecks.
I learned that from my first paycheck. If the politicians don't get it, they should take my Mom's advice: GET A REAL JOB!!!
Here's one they could qualify for, from the Help Wanted section: "Tree climber - start immediately."
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
