Odd Jobs & Accidents

I spent most of my life working at one job, teaching—mostly in high school, but a little in junior college when I tried to bring in a bit more income with a night class or two or in summer school teaching high school remedial dummies, a little in college on an assistantship when I made my abortive trip to Boulder, Colorado, spending two wasted years pursuing a Ph.D. in English. But I, like nearly everyone else, had a series of unusual jobs before I ever settled into a life career.

The very first job I had that paid any money was when I was about ten. My parents arranged for it, at the Mobridge Tribune, for a nickel an hour. Wow. I don’t think I lasted very long at that job. The only thing I remember very vividly was the smell. It was the smell associated with the stuff we had to put on our fingers to make them sticky enough to separate one page of paper from another—glycerin, I think. My job was collating pages of pamphlets that had been jobbed out to the Tribune—a page from this pile, on top of a page from that pile, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as the King of Siam used to say. Even at ten I knew a boring job when I smelled one. I just don’t know why my parents would have farmed me out to a job like that. To give me a sense of responsibility, I guess. What it really taught me, though, was that I would never, never take a boring job.

My next job was with my father, helping out at the Frontier Market, located on the west side of Main Street, one door from the corner occupied by Swartz’s Drugstore. I and Gordon Ritter, son of our head butcher, Tony Ritter, swept the floors, stocked the shelves, made ourselves useful at whatever we were needed for. I’m not sure what Gordon was always doing, but I hid out as much as possible. I would go to the bathroom in the basement and spend an inordinate amount of time there. I would walk up and down the back hallway, trying to look busy. At one time or another I remember shucking ears of sweet corn, candling eggs, stacking cases of soups and vegetables that slid in from the back alley down the metal chute to the basement where I would take them and put them one on top of another in rows of case goods. That basement was one scary place. It had a concrete floor for about a hundred feet, running from the back alley toward the front. But from there all the way to the front it was strictly dirt walls and floor . . . and occupied by thousands of man-eating rats. It was an ongoing battle between my father and the rats. He would go to farms around the area to pick up the meanest, toughest barn cats he could find, then turn them loose in the basement. The screams at night were incredible, screams from both rats and cats. I don’t know who ever won the war. I think we moved from that location before any treaty was signed. We warred with more than rats, though. There were also the cockroaches. Once a building is taken over by these creatures, they’re next to impossible to unseat. I can remember times when my father hired people to come in to spray for them. It was always after closing time. They would spray the entire store, and the cockroaches would come out from every nook and cranny in the store. It looked like the walls and floors were out of focus, alive with cockroachy motion. It was enough to make a young boy spit up on his shoes.

The Frontier Market was a unique school for a young boy. My father ran it on credit, keeping books for nearly everyone within a hundred miles of Mobridge. Lots of families would have starved to death during the last years of the Depression if not for my father’s generous allowance of credit. I know he had many losses on uncollected bills, but he also had many friends and allies who would have done anything for him. During the forties, when the country was booming during and just after World War II, my father’s locker plant also boomed. His was the only freezer in the area, and he not only butchered stock for people in the area, he also wrapped and froze it and kept it in rental freezer lockers for them. Oh my, was that place ever cold. I remember the smell of frigid air whenever I had to go in there to retrieve packages of meat for renters. I remember how fast I did my job and got the hell out of there. The other profitable side of the freezer business was the pheasant kill during those years. One of the biggest names to visit our area was Robert Taylor, the famous movie star, who came to hunt the beautiful birds west of the river. In those days there were so many pheasants even Robert Taylor could get his daily quota, as well as the quotas of a few of his associates. The birds would run along the heavily foliaged gullies, driven by the walking hunters toward the hunters waiting ahead, then rise up in a cloud to be slaughtered by the ten- and twelve-gauge shotguns wielded by the hunters in back and front of them. The birds would be brought to my father’s store to be processed for shipping—skinned, gutted, steamed, wrapped in heavy wax-paper, frozen, then dry-iced and packed and shipped. It was a most profitable endeavor, and my father prospered during those years. He became one of Mobridge’s most successful businessmen, and he bought quite a few pieces of property during the boom years. I was almost too young to appreciate fully what was going on. But I do know that when I was thirteen, in 1946, my parents bought the prestigious Tolkein house on the park, for the then outlandish price of $10,000. It was a beautiful house with a beautiful living room with fireplace, front foyer leading to a generous staircase to three upstairs bedrooms, spacious dining room with chandelier, kitchen with a sunny breakfast room opening onto the backyard. And a finished basement with actual rooms—laundry room, storage room, bathroom, and large bedroom that would be mine for my junior and senior years in high school and for my first abortive year in college and the three years after. Life was good.

After graduating from high school, Bill Sherman, Ken Clapsaddle, and I hitchhiked to the Black Hills, to Rapid City, to find employment before we went wherever we were going after high school. In those days, young men could safely hitchhike all over the country, and people in cars could safely pick young men up, especially if they were wearing high school letter jackets. We spent one night in Wall, South Dakota, at the famous Wall Drug Store, drinking cheap wine and flirting with one of the owner’s daughters. We spent the next night sleeping on a hillside under the bellies of the dinosaurs in the Rapid City Park. We spent the entire time in Rapid City with Bill Sherman’s sister Jean. We finally acquired a job with the Montana-Dakota gas company, digging ditches. These were the days before there was such a thing as a backhoe, and all the ditches were dug by hand. What an educational month or two that was. It taught me that I would never engage in a lifetime of hard labor.

After that first awful year (more on this later) at the University in Vermillion, South Dakota, I came home to disgrace and a summer of waiting to enlist in the army. And a job at the Mobridge Wholesale House. My father used his influence to get me that job, and I hated it from the start. I first worked in the wholesale house itself, loading cases of canned goods, boxes of bananas, cigarettes, fruits, vegetables, all the items of orders sent out to area grocery stores within a hundred and fifty miles of Mobridge. I was making the minimum wage at the time, 75 cents an hour. I was not a good employee. I hated going to work. I hated going to bed. Instead I would party as I had learned to party at USD, drinking and staying up into the wee hours. My mother would get up and literally drag me from my bed in the basement to go to work. After a month of this they made me a truck driver. I never understood why. My driving record was always suspect in pickups. So why make me a truck driver? I now know my father pulled more strings to get me that job. He must have been convinced that all I needed was a challenge. I was more than challenged. I changed the face of truck driving forever, at least in the Mobridge area.

My first encounter with disaster was when I was driving one of the ancient trucks to Aberdeen to pick up a load of groceries from our supplier. Just as I was making the corner at Selby, the one that swings around from south to east, the hood came unlatched and flew up in my face like a shroud. It was an ancient truck and the hood was the kind that latched at both sides and could be folded up to the middle. Flew up as much like bat wings as a shroud. I managed to get the truck stopped without incident, but I was shook up, and the signs were all wrong. I got the hood back in place, continued on to Aberdeen, got my load, and came back.

Some time later, like a few weeks, I was making a local delivery to several Mobridge retailers. I stopped at the Nibble Nook, Wenzel Leff’s new burger and shakes drive-in on west 4th and Main. It was a small, square, concrete-block building, with an overhanging roof. I pulled up to deliver my goods. I delivered my goods. I got back in my truck. I threw it in forward and gave it the gas, not remembering that I’d pulled up with my truck box not quite clear of the roof. I took that roof and I spun it about twenty degrees. There wasn’t a dish or glass that remained intact after I got done with it. I’m not sure how I ever explained it to Wenzel Leff or the owners of the wholesale house. The insurance covered it, and I guess they bought my explanation. Could happen to anyone, right? I wasn’t demoted, although I should have been. And the weird coincidence is that Rosalie, my wife-to-be, was then a carhop there. Years later she told me how she came to work that morning and found the place a shambles, that her coworkers said that Travis boy had been there and done his thing. About a week later, after they’d removed me from the local run, they put me on the road to Lemon, South Dakota, and beyond, a run of just over a hundred miles north and west of Mobridge. I was on my last stop, south of Lemon, on a country road. It was late, the sun was going down, I was impatient. One last stop out in the boonies. I came up behind a slow-moving farmer and decided I would go around him. I pulled to the left, I honked, I went around him. And just as I was right next to him, I looked down to my left and there was a country culvert, a concrete chute beneath the road for ditch runoff, with nice little concrete indentations on each side of the road. I realized I was going to drop a wheel into the indentation and then it happened. It threw me to the left and into the ditch, where I somehow kept the truck upright, up the left embankment, through a barbed wire fence leading into a field, and into the field in a cloud of dust. The truck was still upright but several cows gave me a wary glance as though I were some invading alien from another planet. I got out to examine my load. It was a mess, canned goods and bananas all over the place. So I decided not to go on to that last delivery, would instead turn around and go home. I drove through the field until I got to the farmhouse, stopped to tell the farmer what had happened and that the Mobridge Wholesale House would take care of any damages. Then back onto the road toward Lemon. I hadn’t gone very far before I realized what had happened when my left front wheel went over the concrete—a broken brake line and I’d lost all the fluid. Now, the sun is down, it’s well after 7:00 west river time, nothing much between there and Mobridge is going to be open. So I decide to drive the hundred and twenty miles back to Mobridge without any brakes. Just take it nice and slow shifting down on downgrades, staying slow enough not to need any brakes. The hundred miles west of Mobridge is not what we normally think of as flat South Dakota. It’s a hundred miles of long rises and falls, of buttes and hollows leading down to the Missouri River valley. It took me nearly five hours of white-knuckle driving to get back to Mobridge. Just after midnight, I parked the truck across the street from my house, climbed wearily down from the cab, went in and went to bed. I can’t remember how I explained it the next morning, I don’t know what my father said, or what the owner of the wholesale house. It’s all a blur. I know I didn’t go back to work there. I know that soon, probably not soon enough for my father, I was on my way to Chicago to join the infantry, September 21, 1952. From Chicago to Fort Breckenridge, Ky., for my basic training. I was eighteen years old and still as ignorant as a newborn.

I don’t consider my tour of duty in Korea as a job, more an important time for me to grow up, mature, find out who I was and what I wanted to be. But not a job. I’ll talk about Korea another time.

When I was twenty, just out of the army, I spent the summer working for my father in his new store out on the highway, between First and Second Avenue West. My father had a series of heart attacks just before and after I returned from Korea, and he was no longer an active participant in the store, now a Piggly Wiggly. My brothers Bob and Dick were the new co-managers, and Bob tried to teach me how to be a meat-cutter. I never really intended to be a meat cutter for the rest of my life, but my father and brother thought it would be a good skill for me to fall back on in case other plans didn’t work out. They already knew I would never be in transportation. I learned how to cut up hind and front quarters of beef, how to cut up and package chickens, how to slice liver, how to trim steaks, how to sharpen a butcher knife, how to scrape a meat block. I learned all these things but I never learned to care about any of them. I simply knew I was never going to make my living working behind a meat counter. That was my third decision regarding my vocational future: nothing boring, no hard labor, no meat cutting.

I worked for my brothers from August to December of 1954, at which time I took myself and my Korean savings and flew to New York to join Chuck Cavallero, a recently discharged army buddy.