Summer Job Ideas

Ah, high school summers. How well I recall. Gas was $0.30 per gallon and the livin' was easy . . . until I needed to buy some gas, get new tennis shoes, or go out on a date. So, being the brilliant strategist that I am, I figured out that I needed a summer job. Jobs weren't as hard to come by back in the mid-'60s, certainly not as hard as it is today. I just sat down and made a list of semi-influential people I knew and checked out the local temp agency ("Manpower" was its name; I wonder if it's called "Personpower" these days).

Anyway, my high school summer jobs consisted of being a busboy at the local Holiday Inn, where I learned a lot about what happens to restaurant food while it's being prepared. Trust me; it's better not to know. I also lugged heavy boxes of Cold Power laundry detergent samples door-to-door in a six-county region of my state. My job was to take one of the small sample boxes of Cold Power, put it into its plastic bag along with the advertising leaflet, hang the bag on the front-door handle and ring the doorbell. These heavy boxes of samples weighed about 35 pounds when full and those of us in the distribution crew carried them with a strap that went around our necks. Maybe that's why I can't look to my right.