Summer Jobs are Important

Summer Jobs Are Important

In the early 1800’s Midwestern farmers on the American frontier shipped their grain to market by loading it on barges and floating it down the Mississippi River to the French Market in New Orleans. A summer job for many teenage boys in those days involved riding the family barge down the river and then walking back up the Natchez Trace and/or the Great River Road until they got home in time for school to start in the fall.

Abraham Lincoln was in New Orleans three times before he was 21. It is said that his views on slavery were shaped by scenes he witnessed in the slave markets there. I guess it must have made a pretty big impression on him.

A young lady who is an LSU student just completed a stint as a waitress at a local restaurant where she was not allowed to sit down during her 10-hour shift. She says the job served her well because it taught her how important it is for her to get her degree.

A similar experience changed my life when I was 13. My dad asked how I would like to earn $100 during the summer. Since $100 in 1956 was the equivalent of $1,000 in today’s money, I gladly agreed. I would do anything to earn such a huge sum.

So, I spent the summer painting the outside of a gigantic four-plex my father owned on Jefferson Davis Parkway around the corner from where we lived above my dad’s laundry and dry cleaning establishment on Tulane Ave. Of course there was no scaffolding and the paint came in five-gallon buckets that I could not lift and pour into the one gallon buckets I carried up the 24-foot wooden extension ladder that weighed at least 50 pounds more than me. Moving the ladder and adjusting its length were twin challenges I faced hourly every day for two coats of paint that took me more than two months to apply. When the house was finished and I collected my fee, my painting career was over forever.

Of course young people often find their way to a lifetime career via a summer job. In my own case, I had worked for a couple of newspapers before accepting a summer job in the Public Relations Department at LSU. My major was journalism and I dreamed of living the life of a crusading reporter who rids the world of evil. I saw myself as sort of a Cajun Clark Kent.

Along the line, however, I became discouraged by the reporters I met who had ten or twenty years of service to their credit. They all drank a lot and wore ten-year-old suits and drove twelve-year-old cars. I was in the market for a new life plan when I took a summer job in the P.R. Department at the university.

My job was to interview professors about their grants and write stories about all the great stuff going on at LSU. Writing and helping design brochures was great fun too. I stuffed packets for visiting professors and important alumni; attended press briefings; and discovered what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. While in graduate school, I served as graduate assistant in LSU’s P.R. department for a whopping $250 per month.

I know of a totally successful guy with a degree in accounting who began cutting grass for folks in his neighborhood when he was in junior high. The secret of his success is that he never quit cutting grass. Today when you pass a Piccadilly Cafeteria, an Exxon station or a big real estate office and they have all those beautiful flowers growing out to highlight a perfectly maintained lawn, it’s probably him. He has 50 employees and he and his wife and four kids spend two weeks in Hawaii almost every year. He is a total success still doing something he actually began doing when he was a pre-teen.

The point is that we need to encourage our kids and grandkids to get summer jobs. You just never know where it might lead. Truly happy people have usually tried on several careers before deciding what it is they really want to do. And the best way to find out if a certain career path is a fit is to get a summer job in the field while you’re still young enough to change your mind without any manor consequences.

Working on a summer job just might be the best thing a kid ever did. I mean, but for my dad I might have become a painter instead of a publisher.

What do you think? Did Lincoln ever walk down Bourbon Street?