When I was a Young Warthog: Mowing, Yard Work, and other Miscellaneous Jobs

This is Part V in a series. You can see the other parts here: Part 1, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

I think I was 14 when I went to the high school office to get a work permit. It was a piece of paper that (and I am guessing here) would allow an employer to legally pay me for work, and do so under the minimum wage. Today, the minimum wage only applies to employees 16 and over, and for argument’s sake, I’ll assume it was the same 27 years ago.

The first yard work job I had was for a woman who lived on the edge of Jackson. We knew her from church, and somehow John and I ended up doing work for her. After a while, John wasn’t coming with me, and I did the work alone. Dad would drop me off and pick me up since I was too young to drive. She had a large corner lot on Kibby Rd. and had lots of gardens, sidewalks, bird feeders, and landscaping. She’s the first person I knew who had a compost pile. She taught me how to do everything she needed done: how to weed, how to edge a sidewalk, how to mix compost into the soil, how to clean out gutters, how to paint a basement floor, I did a lot of jobs for her, and she was a good teacher. I cleaned the bird bath and hauled things away and went to the nursery with her to pick up annuals and planted them for her. She lived with her mother, who at the time was in her 90s, and I would come inside when I was done and talk to her for a little while before I left for home. If I was there for a whole day, she’d make me lunch and we’d talk while I ate. I remember her being quite at ease with me even though we were probably 50 years apart. The one thing I don’t think I ever did there was mow her lawn, which is odd considering all the time I spent mowing everyone else’s.

We were 15 years old when a friend of the family who owned some apartments outside Jackson hired us to mow the apartment lawns. We drove our station wagon, which was really more like a small UPS truck with a Buick nameplate, over to their house to get their two lawn mowers and gas cans, then drove to Parma to mow the apartments. When we first started doing it, there were also some apartments in Hanover that we mowed, but he sold them soon after that, so that was one less hour on the road.

Since we were teenagers, we didn’t worry about our hearing or having eye protection (other than sunglasses), and we probably didn’t care if we got sunburn or sore ankles.

Using the Buick to move the lawn mowers back and forth naturally created a problem for us when we wanted to use the car for a date – the whole thing was covered with dust and if the windows were down, it wasn’t unusual for grass to float around inside the car. The fact that part of the body of the car had rusted through in several places didn’t help – it created an extra wind tunnel to catch everything. (The holes in the back were about 20-25 feet behind the driver’s seat, but that didn’t stop the dust from flying.) We learned to take the OTHER car if we went on a date or were going to be seen in public. (Speaking of this car, the irony of this remote job was that the only time I ever got into what could be described as a car accident was backing out of the driveway on our way to mowing the apartments. I left the rear driver’s-side door open, and when I backed up, the door crunched into the house, bending the door and damaging the aluminum siding. The door was never fixed – it closed well enough, and stayed in that state until it was sold a few years later to someone who was going to use it in a demolition derby. True story.)

When we first started mowing the apartment lawns, we were paid a flat hourly rate, maybe $5 an hour. We realized quickly that we would be gone for over 2 hours mowing lawns, and we’d come back with $10 for the effort. We figured that a professional lawn company would probably charge $40-50 for that lawn, and we could make $10 for a half-hour of mowing at a few other houses we were taking care of. We asked Dad to renegotiate, and it was agreed that we would get a minimum of $15 per outing, which was better. Not swimming-pools-movie-stars better, but better.

A few times we went to the apartments to help fix some other things. I remember fixing some folding closet doors and using a spoon to scoop crud out of an old water heater. I also remember getting paid once in quarters collected from the on-site washer and dryer. The owner was proud of himself for thinking to pay me in quarters (“you can use them to play video games!”) but I think he just didn’t want to carry a bag of quarters to the bank. (Note to youngsters: We used to have to leave the house to play video games. They cost a quarter. Quarters are kind of like Chuck E. Cheese tokens.)

I joke about it, but he did give us some opportunities and job experience, and we even babysat for him on occasion. He was a consistent job-provider for us for several years, and helped us find another homeowner who hired me to mow her lawn. This woman didn’t have a lot of money, and several times tried to pay me with cookies. I felt bad saying I couldn’t accept the cookies as payment, but I needed the money. I’m pretty sure it was only $5.

John and I had other jobs besides mowing. We worked for a retired couple, mowing their lawn as well as doing some other jobs. (They paid us $10 to mow, and it was the smallest of the lawns we did. We argued over who got to do the mowing each week.) They wanted to install a shower in the basement, and needed to chisel through the concrete floor to get down to the drain pipes. I remember hacking away at it, taking turns with John. At one point, we had to stick our heads in the hole, laying on our backs, to chisel out some of it. I got claustrophobic upside down with my head in a hole, so John had to take over for a while. They had an indoor pool for the woman, who had some arthritis problems, and I had never known anyone with an indoor pool before that (I still don’t.) They wanted to put some lights up, so we ran Romex wire throughout the large pool room, and John climbed up into the rafters with a box of wire nuts to attach all the wires together. Somehow, he knew what he was doing with the wiring, even though I don’t think he had done it before (that won’t surprise those of you who know him.) Another time we put some steel cables and turnbuckles in the rafters above his garage because he was afraid his garage floor was cracking and shifting, and he wanted to make sure it didn’t take the framing of the garage and house with it. I’m not sure if that was an effective measure to take, but it sounded good to me at the time. I’m sure there are other things we did for them, and they always paid us well, so we were eager to help.

Occasionally, I delivered papers for my friend, Craig, when he was on vacation. I would bike over to his house and do the route. The route was quite spread out if I recall correctly, and it seems like it took a long time. A few times when I had to deliver the Sunday paper, Dad would go out with me and drive so we could get it done quickly. I remember him complaining about why I was required to get the papers to houses so early when OUR paper delivery person took his time on Sundays. I don’t remember what I was paid per day of delivering papers, probably very little, but it made me feel productive. I liked walking around with the papers and I appreciated the fact that I didn’t have to go to everyone’s house collecting money. (Note to youngsters: Back then, paper carriers went door-to-door to collect the money for the papers, they didn’t have online payment and automatic credit card charges. Sometimes they used quarters.)

Being a semi-talented musician when I was younger, there were some opportunities to make a few bucks. I played cello in several pit orchestras, for which I was probably not paid much, and sometimes not at all. I was in a few pretty good pits – we were young but we knew what we were doing. Having a professional church musician in the family, I occasionally played for free or almost free for various churches and temples. (No mosques, but only because there weren’t any in Jackson.) I also played for various school functions, and it was taken for granted that because I was a student at the high school, I was automatically available to play for free for any other school-related event. Nuts to that! I started getting wise to that and gracefully declined those “opportunities” One grumble-worthy episode in my brief life as “Free Help” was a large downtown Jackson church whose services are attended by many hundreds and were broadcast on the radio. There was a big deal of a musical event that I took part in, which involved several practices. I had to play a very difficult solo in the middle of it - it’s a scary and lonely feeling playing a solo in that place– it’s huge, and everyone’s watching you. But I nailed it at both services, because when you hire me for free, you get more than your money’s worth. This was grumble-worthy because the people who put this whole thing together never thanked me, in person, or in a postcard, or any other way. That was the last time I volunteered to play music unless it was something I wanted to do, and for someone I knew would appreciate it.

When I was a little older I played for a wedding and made some money, maybe $100? Mom, my sister, and I played a few songs from “The Lion King” that Mom arranged and maybe one other. There wasn’t a lot of room in the sanctuary (Temple Beth Israel in Jackson), so I was around the side of the seats. About two feet behind me was the video camera that taped the whole service. After the glass had been stepped on and everyone was happy and married, we were playing the bride and groom out when the man operating the camera swung it around and pointed it right at me. I was, naturally, in the middle of the part that I had the most trouble playing, and I think my heart stopped for a few seconds, but my years of training and playing in front of people offset the instant panic, and I persevered, much as the chosen people persevered in the desert for forty years (Completely inappropriate and disproportionate Torah reference. Possibly blasphemous.)

I lost money on this deal, though, because the cost of replacing my old cello strings was about the same amount I was paid. I would have complained to the union but I didn’t belong.

I did some other odd jobs for money before I sold myself out to Corporate America, but it’s hard to remember all of them. The summer after graduating from college (AKA the summer before I got a job) I remember helping my future in-laws move some things from their house in Jackson to Okemos, taking down one of their neighbors’ mailboxes in the process. I bought shoes with the money they gave me – I was broke. That summer I also taught beginning cello lessons to a girl who lived across the street from my parents. I initially felt guilty for charging them money since I had never taught lessons before, but I think I did a pretty good job. I went to Parkside school to talk to the band/orchestra teacher, who handed me a pile of beginner books to use, with the understanding that he’d get them back someday. I don’t know if the girl continued playing cello or not – if she was smart she didn’t, because those things are a pain to haul back and forth to school on the bus.

This wraps up all the paying jobs I’ve had. Actually, there is one more, but the government’s faithful servants at the Witness Protection Program have asked me not to discuss anything that happened on or around Christmas Day, 1987.