I hope my former and current employers can’t get their money back if they read this, but none of the many jobs over my lifetime ever felt like work, even when there were two or three at a time. My decades of employment started at age 12. I mowed the yard for an elderly couple on a hot summer morning, and they paid me $3 in cold cash. That was a fortune to a kid in the 1950s. I picked up two more customers for the lawn service, and my income soared to $9 a week. The overhead costs were low. I had a manual, reel-type push mower, a sling blade and a file to sharpen them. So the $9 was all profit and more than I could spend. I bought comic books for a dime and Grapettes at Barrett’s Grocery and spent a quarter every Saturday for the western movies. Mowing yards was enjoyable. I liked the sun on my neck and the smell of fresh-cut grass. I have never missed a week without being paid to work since that first boyhood job. When I went out for football in junior high, Coach Baucum observed my physique and asked if I wanted to be a trainer. That let me hang around sports taping knees and ankles. It also provided opportunities for the future. Experience as a trainer got me a scholarship to college when there was no other way I could have gone. And the sports ties led to other jobs. Coach Buddy Bonnette put me through a grueling water safety instructor course and hired me at the recreation center to clean the pool, mop floors and help lifeguard. The editor of the Springhill Press paid me a dime an inch to cover sports, so she got detailed stories. That little job led to stringing work for daily papers and to some disc jockeying and a sports show at the local radio station. When I flunked math and stayed with my grandparents in Bogalusa to take the class in summer school, my uncle hired me to run his snowball stand. His profits fell, because girls got free snow cones. They paid me in college to work as a trainer and for the school paper. I kept covering sports for dailies and worked nights at the Coushatta Citizen doing rewrites. A rock with a Ku Klux Klan flyer wrapped around it crashed through the window one night. I called my editor Gordon Nelson who said he was watching a cross burn in his yard. I had summer jobs at the paper mill in Springhill. College kids got the creampuff work. Regular employees did the important stuff. After college, I got my dream job covering news and sports at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. There were five deadlines a night. We never missed one even when we slept on the floor to get the paper out during hurricanes. I liked our early afternoon until midnight schedule. Long dinner breaks let us watch Mardi Gras parades, wander the French Quarter, catch the trolley to Camellia Grill for pie and have raw oysters at the Pearl and shrimp po-boys at Mothers. On days off, my background as a trainer allowed me to travel the state selling athletic training supplies. I visited every school in Louisiana and met hundreds of great coaches and principals. When an offer came to go back home to Northwestern, I jumped at it and have cherished my half-century involvement in media relations, athletics and other realms of the university. Lovan Thomas bought The Natchitoches Times in the 1960s. I started writing for the paper then and still do. We did a lot of good journalistic things together when newspapers were in their heyday. Maybe at this late stage of life, I will never have to get a real job.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES