The Onion Cutter

MPR has a story today about how summer jobs shape your future. I wanted to share how MY summer job history has impacted my life, as I believe a wide variety of summer jobs are necessary to discover what you DON'T want to do the rest of your life.

My first job was Dairy Queen, at 15 years old and 85 cents/hr, slightly higher than the 50 cents/hr that babysitting paid. They let us eat free, anything we wanted, and to this day I can't eat that stuff. I learned Customer Service there, apparently a lost art now, and that busloads of Little Leaguers wanting root beer floats are bad. They take a long time to make, because you have to wait for the foam to subside. I served pro wrestlers Mad Dog Vachon and Vern Gagne. Mad Dog had a normal, even high voice. And I learned for the first time about pain, when I walked out of the back room with my arms piled high with hamburger buns. Someone had just changed the french fry oil and left the vat sitting in the middle of the floor, where I knocked it over. It splashed  my (pantyhose-clad) legs. While waiting for the ambulance, I tried to pull up my wrinkled pantyhose, but it was my skin that was puddled around my ankles. The pantyhose was fused to it. So I got to learn about burn units, the daily bath where they debride the dead stuff, morphine, and grafting. To this day, I have the lowest pain tolerance of anyone I know.

Once healed, I answered an ad to "Prepare Produce" for Burger King. Heck, I can do that, I thought! Turned out I chopped onions for 8 hours a day. Paid $2.50/hour, a fortune! Occasionally we got lettuce to do, some of which was sort of liquidy, but mostly onions. And I didn't really chop the onions, I cored and peeled them and threw them in the chopper. Speed was imperative  After the first two hours, I've never cried again when cutting onions. It required two shampoos to get the smell out of my hair and skin, despite the protective garments. Once I had a photo shoot after work for the Miss Robbinsdale Pageant. As there wouldn't be time for two showers after work, I wore rollers all day, swathed with saran wrap and a turban. It didn't work, the photographer's eyes were streaming. I learned that summer about Trucker Humor (truckers in and out all day loading deliveries for Burger Kings) and about good music. We had the radio on LOUD, and to this day whenever I hear "Lay Lady Lay", I smell onions. But I don't eat at Burger King: memories of that liquidy lettuce...

My next job came courtesy of my Dad. He managed Kinney Shoes in Robbinsdale, and said I could work on commission. Selling shoes taught me to listen to what the customers want, and then sell them something they didn't know they wanted. It paid LOTS better than Dairy Queen, even more than Burger King, and I developed a love for shoes that's ridiculous, per my husband. At 16 years old, I was finally permitted to wear something besides saddle shoes, thus my salary went mostly for shoes. (Still does!) And I would return to work at Kinney's whenever I needed to, all through high school.

Jim Frame

But in an attempt to cut the apron strings and get a job sans nepotism, I then worked at JC Penny's Brookdale as a Float, any department that was short-handed. My favorite was Fabric, where I got to sew all day. I assembled a lot of bicycles during the holidays. I hated Infants Wear, but loved Hardware, lots of men there! I also liked Gift Wrap, and quite often they used me in Shoes, said I was a natural...

While I was in nursing school, I worked as a nurse's aide at Crystal Lake Nursing Home. I loved those gentle old souls. THE major job focus was preventing bedsores: turning, padding, activity, movement. Most of the job was drudgery involving excreta, but there were highlights. Staff wheelchair races, where I broke my ankle during a crash. The bat in the dining room, and me with a trash bag on my head swinging a tennis racket. One Thanksgiving, I watched one sad woman all dressed up in the lobby waiting for her daughter who never showed up. She only lived there because she was incontinent, she didn't even have dementia. I took her home with me to Mom's for Thanksgiving dinner, where she described the Pearl Harbor attack in vivid detail (she was a nurse there), then peed on the dining room chair. I developed a monumental enduring love for the elderly: what they've seen and experienced, what they know. And learned how to raise children so they'll want to come get you on Thanksgiving.


My dad's quotes are a firm part of my family lore. There's no forgetting the Romantic Restaurant Indictment "It's so dark in here you can't tell if you're eating rats or roaches." The Over Eater's Creed "Waste Not, Want Not", or the one that taught me to choose my battles: "What's it gonna matter in a hundred years?" But the JOB one has had the most impact:

"Your life work should be the one career that makes you feel LUCKY to get to do that all day the rest of your life."

No, I never found that career, but have maybe ingrained that nugget in my son, who's close to finishing his Master's in digging-up-really-old-but-cool-stuff. How lucky is that!