Those Old Summer Jobs
When we were young, our days weren’t filled with strict schedules and helicopter parents hovering over us. We got out of school toward the end of May and started back on Tuesday after Labor Day. That meant being somewhat free during the months of June, July and August.
In our house, that meant working to make extra money. I once made the mistake of using the word “bored” and my dad overheard it. That was the last time I EVER used that word after sweating buckets in the garden to overcome my boredom (in Dad’s words). That red clay stain is STILL on my ankles after 6 decades.
A few went to summer school but that was only the ones who had flunked, not the ones trying to get ahead. Of course, summers meant different jobs, depending upon our age and grade.
When you are raised in a small Southern town, your summers were spent primarily in three different areas: jobs, baseball and just hanging with friends. Most of us had jobs, starting in elementary school.
Our first jobs were usually cutting grass. For me, it was sacking groceries at Felton Supply and helping, Mrs. Jean, Faye Crosswhite and George Chamblee with anything needed. My highest pay was $3 for 4 hours. In Leighton, the two major “grass-cutters” were Sammy Ford and my brother, Bob. Often, they would pull their mower behind their bike with the gas can strapped to the mower. The going rate was $2 for an average size yard. You were paid an extra .50 to trim. These were the days before weed eaters or gas trimmers. The “trimmers” were hand-held snips that acted like horizontal scissors. Getting on your hands and knees to trim around the house, shrubs and sidewalk was rough on your knees.
But fifty cents was a lot of money back then. For example, that would pay for 2 hamburgers and a Coke at Leon’s Hamburgers downtown.
For the girls, summer jobs ranged from babysitting to teaching cheerleading and twirling. My sister, Susan, was a feature twirler at CCHS for 7 years. She taught many of the young Leighton girls to twirl a baton. Some of the older cheerleaders taught these same young girls cheerleading skills.
Lillie Riner hired some girls to help serve nanner splits at the Dixie Dip while a few others worked at the Flower Box, Vera’s Beauty Shop or with Aileen Lowerey’s Beauty Shop.
The “go-to” job for teenagers was hauling hay for one of the local farmers. You don’t know heat and humidity until you are either stacking hay on the wagon or one of the “groundmen” throwing bales up on the wagon or truck. Often, youngsters as young as 5 would drive the truck in “Grandmaw” gear. Since their feet couldn’t reach the clutch or brake pedal, the truck kept moving until the end of the hayfield when Granddaddy would jump in and turn it around, before it hit the kudzu vines.
You would think it would be cooler when you finally got to the barn. Way wrong. Stacking hay in a hay loft will test your work ethic and physical limits. You will also question whether that $5 a day pay was worth it. The “older heads” had to show you how to stack the bales to leave room for a little air movement. Without it, many hay barns caught on fire through spontaneous combustion when stacked too tight.
Since our dad had a huge garden, Bob and I would fill the trunk and backseat of Dad’s Edsel with watermelons for him to drop us off in the vacant lot between Fannings and Tater’s Funny Book Shop. We checked the melon prices at Felton’s, Whitlock’s. Howard’s and Fanning’s. We knew nothing about marketing but did know that charging .75 for a watermelon when others were selling them for a dollar or more seemed to work. Bob and I sometime sold cantaloupes, purple hull peas and Silver Queen corn.
Since Leighton had about 6 gas stations in the sixties, that meant jobs pumping gas and washing cars. A few learned how to change tires and do oil changes.
Summer for farm kids didn’t mean a vacation. It meant working the fields, driving tractors, and hauling livestock to market. Ask any kid who grew up on a farm about summer, and most will say: “I couldn’t wait for school to start back.”
This is not to say all we did was work during the summer because that would be a lie. Summer in small Southern towns meant our favorite sport: baseball. We were never in a formal league growing up. Every community had a baseball team of some kind. Many of the age limits were stretched when you saw so-called Little Leaguers from Spring Valley, get out of the driver’s seat of their ’57 Chevy and put out their cigarette. They were awfully big 12-year-olds.
In addition to Spring Valley, we played White Oak, Hatton, New Bethel. Littleville, Oakland, Cherokee, Littleville, LaGrange, Brick, Town Creek, Midway, Belgreen, Allsboro and Central. Overtown cities like Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, Tuscumbia and Florence were big time with their leagues, uniforms and “real” umpires. Our umpires was any sucker who was sitting in the stands. At Belgreen, the home plate umpire was the pitcher’s father, and the base umpire was his older brother. Talking about a “home field advantage.” Most of our uniforms consisted of white t-shirts with drawn-on numbers, jeans and tennis shoes with any kind of cap that the feed store was giving away.
But those summers of work and baseball are deposited deep in our memory banks.
It’s funny that each time we open that memory bank, those old eye allergies start acting up.
And it’s not caused by the bales of hay.