Labor Day, Labour Day

Cris Coursey of our local rag, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, inspired this blog. He is the best writer in the paper and of course he is leaving his job within the month of September.

Labor Day is a holiday that is celebrated only in the United States. The rest of the world celebrates May Day. I will let my readers uncover the paranoid history of why this is so.

This blog is a personal recollection of my work history, beginning at the age of nine in the newspaper business. The Yeadon Times was sent to practically every household in the borough of Yeadon. Nevertheless, the owner, editor, publisher gave me a job of going door to door to collect the subscription fee: $1.00 per year. If a "subscriber" said "no", I was to cross out the name from a list. Door after door people would say, " I thought the paper was free." "Nobody ever collected money before." For each dollar I collected, I received a commission of 10%. (Ten cents for the math challenged among you.)

As a child my parents handed their children no money- no money at all. "Mom, I need..." Her reply from Spring to Fall was: Get out the lawn mower" - a funky push mower. In winter, "Shovel snow." So it went. Between the ages of nine and thirteen I spent my weekends and summer pursuing the often fruitless occupation of knocking on doors, where nobody answered or gave a curt "No!" to my query. One summer I did get a job of cleaning Mrs. Pohl's garden. One day a week she would give me a dollar for about six hours of garden work. The other alternative was pushing a cart of groceries home at the mercy of the generosity of the shopper. A quarter was the usual tip. A dollar was never seen. There were a group of particularly feeble old ladies who tipped a nickel- once identified - to be avoided at all costs.

My first real (summer) job, at thirteen, was really two jobs. In the morning (7 AM) I would walk to the Yeadon Swim Club and clean toilets, locker room floors and general clean up of the pool area. It lasted from 7 AM to 11 AM. I had a break until 4 PM when I started at Don's Restaurant as dishwasher. I will always remember sexy Shelly, teasing the pre-pubescent boy that I was. Shelly had a Ford convertible, a boy friend and went to San Francisco for vacation. All of these things idealized her in my boy eyes. Despite her heavy make up, she glowed with life. She loved me- or so she would say, when she pinch my cheeks. This little boy smelled of the meat fat and cooking oil when he left at 9:45 PM to continue his other job. It took exactly 15 minutes to run from Don's Restaurant to the Yeadon Swim Club. That was evening clean-up time. Pick up trash, sweep the decks, move chairs back, etc. The next summer I secured a position at the swim club, sweeping the miniature golf course. It still paid the same, $1.00 per hour but the distance from the toilets made it feel like a promotion.

There is a run down red brick building at 63rd (Cobbs Creek Parkway) and Walnut in Philadelphia. In the 1920's it was the most fashionable hotel in the city. When I arrived it catered to the senior citizen. It retained much of the snobbery of its earlier days. The occupants were not patients, but guests. The restaurant where I worked maintained the venire of a real restaurant- a menu, even specials of the day. I was a bus-boy. I received my education in cheating at pinochle there. I was only one of two white waiters and the other was a thief. The remaining bus-boys came from that west Philadelphia neighborhood. One of my "aha" moments was when one of the bus-boys asked how I got to work all the way from Yeadon. I said that I hitch-hiked. They chuckled. "We could never do that."

My Junior year in high school I sorted mail at the US Post Office, Thirtieth Street, Philadelphia. We would arrive at 7 PM and stay for a minimum of four hours and sometimes all night depending on the amount of work to be done. The work was deadly dull: sorting one box of mail after another into little cubbies, according to zip code. Working the commercial mail was the best because I could peek into the magazines- especially the Playboys. The pay was good - perhaps $3.75 an hour.

To be continued...