Sauer Summer Jobs!

Ah. yes!  The glories of your first jobs!  Transitioning from being a carefree teen, to one who slowly grasps the idea of beginning to pull his own economic weight.

I was a shy, introverted kid, one who was incapable of finding his own job, or as mother would say, going out and "pounding the pavement." Luckily my Dad,  school principal and community leader, was able to make the connections for me.  I started by my Junior year working at Dixie Tool & Dye, assisting with shipping.  I started at around 90 cents an hour and worked my way up to the glorious sum of $1.10 per hour.  I though I was doing fairly well, even if I was a tad slow, and that I was liked.  When I left for college, a neighbor friend two years younger than me took the job over, and he quickly doubled, than tripled the wage.  A titan of industry I was not.

After I returned from my Freshman year in college, my father was able to help me secure a job at the local pickle factory.  They made and packaged pickles, sweet relish, hot peppers and sauerkraut.  In fact, sauerkraut was so big in my hometown, we had an annual Sauerkraut Festival.  The central event at this celebration was the crowning of a Sauerkraut Queen.  It was a highly sought after honor.  One year, my sister, a grade younger than me, competed for the title.  She tried valiantly, but fell short.  What a colorful addition to her resume that would have been, to be able to proudly state that she was the 1973 Bridgeport Sauerkraut Queen!

I worked night shifts, long stretches that sometimes ran twelve hours.  I cleaned out the bottom of sweet relish vats, praying that the forklifts bringing in fresh pickles would remember that I was down there before they dumped their briny load on top of my head.  I cleaned out odd corners of the warehouse, where trust me - you haven't truly lived until you uncover a broken jar of pickles that have been laying there for months or years.  The hottest food my family ever used was black pepper, so I was unprepared for the night that it was my job to take the jars of hot peppers off the line whose lids did not seal right.  Even through gloves, my hands quickly stung with an inner heat I had never experienced before.  That next day the pain was so great, I had to sleep with both my hands soaking in warm water.  This created a different set of problems I'd rather not go into.

I started at the agricultural minimum wage of $1.30, but over a couple of summers, I was able to work my way up to the magnificent sum of $2.10 an hour.  I was well liked enough that I was offered a supervisory job if only I stayed on with them instead of completing my schooling.  I passed.  Besides not being my chosen career path, that factory, like many factories from the 70s, no longer exists.

As low as those wages were, I set aside the substantial portion of them to help with college.  And help I could, as combined tuition with room and board was only around $2,000.  My father was highly committed to education, so he and I did it together.  This was made easier by the fact that I did not own my own car until my Senior year of college, obtained largely through a summer job that paid closer to $8 an hour at a GM plant, helping to cover the staggering amount of the $3300 it took to buy a new Honda Civic.

And now my youngest son, Benjamin, is  approaching the age that he will work in the summers, and as is family tradition, that it will help earn towards college and not towards a car.  However, the frightening prospect is that even though wages may be as much four times higher now, college tuition with  room and board is easily ten to twelve times higher.  $2,000 may not even cover books. It's virtually impossible now for even the hardest working student to work his way through college.

And that is truly a sauer development.