As I was checking out at Aldi on Labor Day, it occurred to me how many people have to work on a holiday that celebrates labor. The young man at the register told me he rarely had holidays off in his young career. Early in my career, I could relate.
We are supposed to work. The Bible makes that clear for Christians. Not only are we supposed to work, we are supposed to do it well, not just show up. No work, no eat. My father made that abundantly clear the summer I was 15.
We had a neighborhood pool close to our house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was a gathering spot for those of us in our early teens. We rotated romances regularly and had a carefree life. That changed when my dad said I needed to get a job. What he meant was, “You’re going to come to work with me and I’ll show you what work is.” Oh boy.
My dad was always an entrepreneur. I don’t mean the Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos type. No, he owned some small businesses along the way. When I was 15, we owned two party stores. A party store back then was part convenience store and part liquor store. We did not sell gas. I worked behind the counter and kept the place clean.
This was my first real exposure to customer service and the importance of cleanliness in a public business. At only 15 I learned how to greet customers, look them in the eye and converse in chit chat. I’m pretty sure I was the only 15-year-old in Grand Rapids that knew every kind of liquor and what sizes they came in. When you are the owner’s kid you can sell liquor over the counter from birth on.
The summer after my freshman year at Michigan State, I needed a job. My dad had sold the party stores, for which my mother was grateful. I went to Man Power, a job placement company, to see what they had. They had openings at the Amway factory. Amway started in Ada, which is pretty much a suburb of Grand Rapids. My older sister had worked there and kind of warned me about a factory job. Being very mature, I said I could handle anything. I was put to work on the “soap line.” I came home smelling like perfume with powdered soap in my tennis shoes, hair etc.
My third job was being a summer camp counselor at a YMCA boys’ camp. MUCH better than Amway. We had boys from 8 to 12 and stayed in cabins. Each counselor had 10 to 12 kids in their charge. I think they hired me because I could play the guitar and play tennis. I became the song leader after every meal. You get 100 young boys singing songs while banging on tables and you’ve got some noise. I was also the tennis instructor. Pay was low, but I had a ball.
Next came another factory job, this time was at Kelvinator making refrigerator compressors on an assembly line. I worked the second shift, 4 p.m. to midnight. This job was eye opening to me. First of all, I had to join the union. Second, I learned how seniority worked. Third, I saw men (and a few women) who had worked on the line 30 or more years. My pay of $3.94 an hour, before taxes and union dues, was very good in 1975. The job highly motivated me to graduate from college.
I was an accounting major as I entered my junior year at Michigan State. There was, however, a problem; I hated accounting and my grades in those classes reflected such. I couldn’t tell a debit from a credit. Starting my sophomore year, I worked in my dorm’s cafeteria. My dorm, Wonders Hall, had 1,200 residents so it was a busy place. I bussed tables and washed pots and pans, which paid 10 cents more per hour. One day the cafeteria assistant manager asked me if I wanted to be a student supervisor. That meant wearing a shirt and tie and asking/telling other student employees what to do. To this day, I don’t know why he picked me. To his credit, he unlocked the door to my future career.
The dorm did not serve dinner on Sunday nights. Most of us ordered pizza or went to the greasy grill in the basement of the dorm. I don’t know where it came from, but I got the idea to ask the cafeteria management if I could open up a pizza business on Sunday nights and use the cafeteria as our base. Students would call in, we would make their pizza and they would come pick it up and take it back to their rooms. It would not be my business. The dorm would receive all the money. The kicker was that my buddies and I got paid premium wages and ate a lot of free pizza. We started on just Sunday nights, which quickly became Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. By my senior year, we were open seven nights a week averaging about 200 pizzas on a busy night. We called “our” business the Wonders Hall Pizza Factory.
I enjoyed foodservice and changed my major to HRIM (hotel, restaurant and institutional management) my junior year. Companies came on campus the spring of my senior year to interview us for potential positions. I sat in the tiny interview room with a company I really wanted to work for. The female interviewer said, “Tell me about this Wonders Hall Pizza Factory.” I worked for that company for eight years, rising to the level of vice president.
I guess God knew I was not going to be an accountant.
P.S. For any teens reading this, keep your head on a swivel and your eyes open. You may already be participating in your future career.
