My high school life was unlike most people. Our family were fairly strict Catholics. My dad went into a Catholic seminary just when most young men were enlisting for World War II. His brother became a priest. Both were in the seminary together at St. Joseph's in Princeton, New Jersey. My mom was quietly but profoundly religious. She had two sisters who were in the convent. When I was maybe 11 years old I said that I was considering being a priest. It started me on the road at age 13 years in a seminary, away from home until my last year of college at age 22. You can see my photo below at age 13 on the seminary grounds at Princeton. I bring this up in this context, only to say that as part of my training we worked maybe 10 to 15 hours a week in various capacities: cleaning toilets and bathrooms, classrooms, out doors, supervisory positions, driving, editing our school newspaper, or year book and so on. The jobs were really too numerous to list at this point. But summers until my sophomore year of college were always at home. And at home I would always find a summer job.
After graduating from high school I was hired at J.B. Van Scivers, moving furniture. Van Scivers, on City Line Avenue was the premier Furniture store on the Philadelphia Main Line. It was the same year that my father had a heart attack. He was in his mid-forties. (He is still alive and in full position of his faculties but a little weak at the age of 87.) It was good hard work with lots of heavy lifting and paid well. We (my partner Bob and I- both students) were fairly well paid for 40 hours a week and time and a half for overtime. At the time I made roughly $200 per week and negotiated with my mom to keep $10 of that with the rest going to the family.
The following summer the seminary decided to move our class, just twelve of us into the major seminary at Northampton Pennsylvania to paint classrooms. It was a fairly thankless and certainly lacked monetary compensation. I alternated between feeling used and deserted and enjoying the isolation, the space and the free time.
When September rolled around, our class began its one year novitiate at the old major seminary and now priests' retirement home at St. Vincent's in Philadelphia. The year itself was without formal classes and included many kinds of work. But the work might take up 12 to 20 hours on the average in any week. I would wash old men at St. Joseph's Home, teach guitar to girls at Saint Joseph Gonzaga Home, visit sick people, general clean up, wait on tables, keep the grounds tidy.
The following year our "mother house" moved the college seminary out of Princeton into a residence in Niagara Falls, New York. We attended Niagara University. And the following summer myself and one of my classmates were sent to Emmitsburg. Maryland to run a summer youth program. We organized picnics, barbecues, baseball games, field trips, workshops, game days, etc.; anything that would keep the youth (ages 6 to 17) occupied and out of trouble for two and a half months. We enjoyed some great perks too. I remember a helicopter tour around the Gettysburg battlefield. I remember wonderful sunny afternoons sipping beers with assistants and friends around a pool. Most of them were lovely young women, but that is a story for another blog.
The following summer I graduated from Niagara University, now having left the seminary and my mother dying in the same weeks. I had been accepted to West Virginia University Graduate Program in Sociology, had met a wonderful young woman, Beverly, while volunteering at a local crisis call center. I spent the lazy beautiful summer continuing to volunteer and then making almost no money drawing pictures of Niagara Falls for tourists.
The first year in Morgantown I worked with two other graduate assistants for an educational sociologist. She taught introductory sociology to three classes of 400 students each. We led small groups and monitored them and did general trouble shooting in the vast logistics that comes in classes of that size. We also helped compile and grade massive 200 question multiple choice exams. I was the SPSS geek also and daily went to the computer center to tweak then turn in the data that some of the professors were playing with. I received $200 per month for my labors (or $2000 for the entire school year). Also I attended graduate school tuition free. It seemed like a lot of money at that time. I paid my rent of $50 per month for a lovely house with my two friends. I spent about $100 per month on food and other expenses and managed to save about $50 per month from it all. With that saved money ($1200) I financed the following summer in Europe. It was 1972. I was 23 years old. The trip was a life changing experience. (another blog)
The next year I garnered an ideal graduate assistantship working for two anthropologists. I shared a room with Dr. Paterson and she provided me with a personal corner and wall where I stuck my "Nixon Count-down Calendar", 1461 little squares that would eventually block out the entire face of Richard M. Nixon. I cannot actually say what I did for these two professors but I remember it as an easier and more relaxed work than my previous year. As I saw my money drying up because of the end of the school year, a friend told me about a job at the Regional Research Institute. During the same year I started singing and performing with a friend in a band and soon there were three of us. We called ourselves "Full Circle" and we played and sang a variety of folk and pop songs. Our band actually found an agent willing to book us in the Washington, D.C. area. I left my job of two weeks at the Regional Research Institute to pursue fame and fortune in Washington, D.C.- more specifically Fairfax, Virginia. My friend responsible for getting me hired at the RRI asked her boss what he thought about her new hire leaving so soon. He said, "That's what you get for hiring a second year graduate student."
With my 1300 punch cards (I hoped that it was my future thesis.) we left with the band to the Washington, D.C. area. At this logical turing point, I must end part 2. This monster blog only started as a regular entry. I promise to try to wrap it up in part three.
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