The hot grease splattered far, wide, and high as the ball-shaped beef roast hit the ground, falling from a hot oven from eight feet high. It seemed nearly impossible to balance a large fork in one hand and an aluminum platter in the other while on a ladder to reach the highest commercial oven in the stack. But I had seen it done. So I attempted it without success.
The roast tumbled off the platter and then rolled like a ball, circling the cooking racks in the center of the kitchen, the floor of which was pitched toward the center so that it could be easily cleaned with blasting hot water from a hose. We did it nightly, so I knew. But watching the roast take the same course was painful, especially watching it from such heights.
When it finally settled atop the center drain, there was the question of what to do next. Alone in the kitchen, I made the rational choice. I washed it off and put it on the tray to be served shortly among another two dozen roasts carved for a guest list of 500, people who were hungry and waiting just through the swinging doors of the catering hall where my new employer had set up shop.
Yes, I was too young and too inexperienced for the job, 16 years old, but it was a scrappy company, and they took the risk that I could be their man. With no training but sporting the credential of a “food handlers’ license”—which I obtained by having watched a film about how a guy who popped a pimple in the bathroom poisoned an entire dining room of people—I was suddenly a chef to multitudes.
The owner of the catering company knew the secret to success. It was not the food. It came down to one word: beer. The goal was to serve plenty of it long before the food arrived. The food was my responsibility. By the time it was served, no one much cared if it was good or bad.
In those days, there was a fashion for exotic meat, and people would pay plenty. An event was on the calendar. Up rolled a truck carrying frozen carcasses of elephants, lions, snakes, and giraffes, and I dutifully put them in the freezer. The owner, the manager, my boss, said to take them out for thawing because the dinner was tomorrow night. So I did. Then he called me to put them in the ovens with some of the “usual seasonings,” by which I assumed he meant salt and pepper, and I did so.
The time came, and out I and a few others went with the extraordinary delicacies that I was not paid enough to sample. But the crowd of hundreds of men (and only men), now already three or four beers deep, went nuts. Every man swore it was the best meal he had ever tasted. The resulting mess was beyond belief and included tin pans stacked nearly to the ceiling and towers of plates smeared with wild animal fat. Cleaning that, which I did alone, took the whole of Sunday. I felt like a hero.
Those are two events of countless stories I can tell from my jobs over 10 years between the ages of 12 and 22, among which included roof repair, organ tuning, piano moving, fence building, water-well digging, bussing tables, waxing floors, crushing boxes at a department store, manning the returns desk at a sports shop, measuring custom clothing, selling furniture, and laundry service and delivery. The memories are deeply etched on my brain.
Fewer young people work real jobs now than in the past, from nearly 60 percent in 1976 to 36 percent today. The barriers to entry are higher than ever—among them is the minimum wage—and work ethic seems to have suffered a serious decline in the age of TikTok and the dream of quick influencer status.
This is a serious loss, with a lifetime of consequences. Most people can recall the details of their early work experiences with more clarity than they recall biology or algebra class. That is for a reason. All young people need more life–work balance: a little more work please—dutiful and even tedious work—which, after all, is part of life, a huge and essential part of a good life.
For example, how well do I recall the creaky wooden floors of the organ loft! They were carpeted with the bones of long-decayed pigeons who had lived there for probably 100 years, so it was impossible to step without cracking through them. The point in being up there was to pull and clean the pipes, a job that took several days and involved listening carefully to the note being played, hunting down the pipe and cleaning it of dust, and fixing the value and replacing it.
On the highest pitches, held for a sustained period, one cannot help but unconsciously tighten one’s throat to reach the note, even if the voice was not making an audible sound. The result each day was a tired and sore throat. No matter how much I tried to relax my throat during the job—I was warned to please do so—I could not. It was an involuntary muscle.
You might wonder why I, completely untrained at this, was given such a job. The reason was that I was 12 years old and small and could therefore crawl in and out of the chambers in a way that an adult could not. Sure, you can call it child exploitation if you want, but, for me, it was the most thrilling thing I had ever done. I didn’t know then, but many more exciting adventures awaited me in the world of work.
The stories I could tell from the furniture business! I actually despised that industry and quickly decided there was little to no difference in quality between high- and low-priced goods, which offended me greatly. It was not a good mental place in which to find oneself while attempting to sell the stuff.
It was a high-pressure job—this store was forever “going out of business”—and I was terrible at it. At this point, I didn’t care anything about furniture. My numbers were so awful that I knew that I had to step it up or get fired. There was a lady who was looking at a coffee table, so I deployed the high-pressure tactics that had been part of my training. It was intense, but she finally pulled out the credit card and wept with regret as she signed the receipt.
That was the turning point for me: I simply could not do it, so I quit that very day.
Why are our early work memories so vivid? My theory is that work is completely unlike home and school, where tasks and authority structures are entirely known and predictable. In the commercial marketplace, we have a new thing called a boss, who was the owner or the manager, and we had co-workers with whom we needed to cooperate, and we had new tasks, meaningful ones.
The tasks require creativity and volition. We are held responsible for the results. At the end, we are paid, and that is astounding. It dawns on us that the money we are paid is a share of what people pay for the good or service, which invites us to consider the entire system that makes it all possible. Precisely to unravel this mystery is why I studied economics in school.
Just for example: Once while working in men’s clothing, the boss passed by me and a co-worker and said, “Please straighten these ties,” and moved on. My co-worker muttered something like, “I’m not straightening ties for $5 an hour.” That struck me immediately, and I realized that he would not advance in this store.
The whole point of being paid is to put more in than you take out, otherwise you would not be there. Sure enough, he did not last long. That lesson, among many, stuck with me. I would always strive to put more in than I took out.
The experiences of early jobs are tactile, fresh, real world, thrilling, and completely unforgettable, which is why people in their dotage so often tell the same stories of their early work years, in great detail, and tell them as if it all happened yesterday.
I recall, for example, how much I revered the fry cooks for their skill and the danger they encountered daily. I was a busboy and dishwasher and never advanced to the position of fry cook. I sat back and watched them with amazement from the distance of the back sinks that were my own domain. They inhabited palaces, so far as I was concerned, while I was in the toolshed. I wasn’t envious, but it did make me ambitious.
These jobs shape us. They are real. They keep the world fed and running. They are dignified jobs, and the people who do them are worthy of appreciation and celebration. They are essential, and no government should ever again toy with the idea that they can be turned off for a time while other national priorities prevail.
A powerful and lasting feeling such jobs give you is a deep respect for all workers and the jobs they do. They are never the other. When The New York Times published consistently for the better part of two years that their readers should stay home and have their groceries delivered, I simply could not imagine the mentality of the people who could write such a thing. It was prose that presumed that no delivery person is a reader and therefore not deserving of the safety from the bad virus out there.
It’s a reasonable guess that the people who thought that way never had a wage job as a kid. They went from school to school and straight to a laptop position, meaning that they have limited consciousness of how two-thirds of the public actually lives and pays the bills.
All parents strive to give their kids the best life, but too often, they think that means keeping them at desks rather than at takeout windows or construction sites. This is a huge mistake. There are many ways to learn, but nothing more tactile, meaningful, memorable, and ultimately fun, than engaging in remunerative toil in one’s teen years.
