One day on facebook, a social networking website, my daughter-in-law, Rachel, asked this interesting question about what was the most awful summer job. I thought for a few minutes and then the job popped into my mind like a flash of light. I was taking summer classes right after my Freshman year in 1965 at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins. CSU is known for its veterinarian school. They had a farm and animals near-by that gave students an opportunity to learn things first hand. I answered an ad to work in a lab in the animal husbandry building. I didn’t pay much attention to what it was about at the time. The people were really nice and very smart. Most were working on PhDs or were trained micro-biologists testing out on various theories. My job was cleaning up the lab after they had worked all day. There were beakers and test tube to wash by hand and stack neatly back on the shelves for the next day’s experiences. I worked there for a while before they explained what they really were doing; resting bull sperm. So you can imagine my delight in learning that the test tubes, although rinsed out had carried samples of bull sperm. It sounds odd, but someone has to do the testing and at the time someone had to wash the test tubes. I’m sure now it is all automated. No more sinks full of tubes and beakers.
In the fall I changed jobs as my schedule changed. I worked in a steak house a block from the edge of campus. I would ride my bike during lunch over to the restaurant, serve up hamburgers and steak for a few hours and then back to classes. It worked out OK. I got good tips and they gave me lunch everyday.
My first job was working as a restaurant at Longs Peak Café in Greeley, I was probably between junior and senior high school. Longs Peak Café was the restaurant on the main street where my parents went to lunch right after church on Sundays. We mostly always had the same thing. Dad had Chicken Fried Steak. Mom probably had the same as did it. My brother Alan was such a pill when he ordered halibut. There was a children’s puppet type character on one of the shows I watch on TV. I think the puppet’s name was Haliburton (not the company). When Alan ordered his meal he always ordered Hailburton. I would have a big fit at the table, worried he would be eating my favorite childhood character. He loved to tease me that way. I’m sure my Mom wish he didn’t carry on so much.
Some Sundays’ at Longs Peak Café we meet our Grandparents there. They would sit in the back at the big booth where you have to scoot all the way around the table to crowd us all in. Grandpa would always order the chef’s steak. He was the only one who could order this as it was twenty cents more than anything else the rest of us ate. It seems meals were about $1.35 to $1.99 or so in the 1950s. Yummy thick creamy chicken soup chucked with vegetables were always included along with a salad with our families standard thousand island dressing, the meal with mashed potatoes and gravy, side of canned vegetables and dessert. My grandparents always went wild with a wine Sunday. Being tea tottlers that they were, this was not really wine, but some type of thick grape juice flavored topping on vanilla ice cream. I liked the cobbler which was a thick pie crust shaped cookie placed in the bottom of the dessert dish covered with blueberry or blackberry pie filling with a dollop of reddy whip squirted out of a can.
I begged and begged to work at Long Peak Café. My parents finally gave in. The place was owned by a Greek couple. Alex ran a tight ship. His wife taught me the rules. I learned plenty from the old time waitresses. Beatrice always had the good tables with the regulars including my grandparents. Vi was a skinny little thing who worked like a pistol and probably lived her life on the edge of poverty. Another gal, whose name escapes me, was from Evans. When she found out I had met her brother, she gave me a big lecture cautioning me about getting to know him any better. I guess I took her advise, but was surprised she would steer girls away from her brother. The other side of the table as a waitress was not the same as being served on Sundays as a customer.
My father must have had an interesting life in the early 1930’s before he married my Mom and became a farmer. Probably after high school he became a gold miner in Central City at the Gold Crown mine. My great Uncle Charlie, so it’s said, was a gold miner in Idaho who struck it rich when he found gold. I don’t think dad ever struck it rich with gold and they talked briefly about how some of the mines were salted. Owners were sprinkle some gold around the entrances of mines to make it appear that there was gold to build up the gold fever. In fact the mines didn’t have much gold or they were already clean out. It is just interesting to think that this straight-laced family would send their oldest son off to work in the mines and frolic in the salons after a hard days work. Maybe he didn’t do any frolicking for as long as I knew him he was a real family man earning a living and keeping us in food, clothes with a roof over our heads.