Dad was a hard-working man, and he taught me and my siblings about the value of hard work.
Not through words so much, but through example. His diligent and progressively more responsible work over his teenage years and adult career earned him and my mother a comfortable retirement. We were not well-off by monetary standards, but we certainly never went without anything we needed. Because of his background, his childhood’s proximity to the Great Depression, and the examples of his parents and grandparents, he knew this truth: “if you don’t work, you don’t eat”. And he worked.
He was faithful in his work, too: in 29 years of working for The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (later part of the Bell System, or AT&T), he didn’t have a single sick day. Not one, which is amazing. What’s more amazing is that he worked 29 years for the same company – folks would think there’s something wrong with us if we did that now. I’m pretty sure that he was sick on at least a couple of those days, but he didn’t let it stand in the way of his responsibility to work to provide for his family.
He came from a family that knew hard work. He wrote of his father’s work on the railroad:
Richmond and Potomac Railroad Bridge marker by marfdrat via Flickr
My Father was a railroad man almost all of his life. he worked for the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac (RF&P) Railroad for twelve years and then for the Seaboard Coastline Railroad for another thirty-one years.
Sometimes he worked at Brown Street Station down in Shockoe Valley and sometimes hew worked at the Hermitage Yards, not far from where the Diamond Ball Park is today.
He always used public transportation, the streetcar or later the bus.
Dad worked for one dollar a day during the Depression. During that time Mom and Dad lived in Fredericksburg,
Image via Wikipedia
VA, not far from where Mary Washington College is today. His job was to help build a Rappahannock River bridge.
Railroad was in his blood and I think he liked the Steam Engine era best. When heart attacks finally made him retire, he was a Car Inspector. He kept daily logs of where he worked and how much pay he should receive that day. His logs recorded any money that was paid out.
And he described, with great respect, his mother’s work in (and briefly outside) their home:
Mom came from a family which knew hard work. Her dad died when she was a child and Grandma Foster raised Lewis, Leroy, Elwood, John, Ruth, Irma and Alma without any kind of help or aid. They scratched a living out of Louisa county soil, rocky soil. Mom and Aunt Alma used to tell of the hard work from sun up till dark picking up rocks and tending the animals, the feed crops, making hay with hand tools, and working the all-important garden [author's note: I think this was the seed of Dad's perpetual garden-keeping, which I will write about later. He kept a garden of some sort from 1967 until his death.], and preserving and canning everything they would have to eat all year. Milking cows, killing hogs and doing everything without modern conveniences was hard, hard, work.
Moving to Richmond and raising five nuckle-headed boys was not much easier, but now she did at least have electricity, indoor plumbing, and an ringer-washer machine. They did not have wash and wear, so I remember Mom spending many hours on an ironing board ironing everything we wore. She worked so hard, but she and Dad were highly respected in the neighborhood and they would do anything possible to help a neighbor in need [another trait for which Dad was widely known].
A few years before she died, Mom took a Christmas job at Thalheimers, in Downtown Richmond. Her job was to take price tags off existing merchandise, put new, higher tags back on and then with a pen mark through the new price and write in a sale price which was higher than the original price. Mom was mortified. She could not believe that a company would lie to customers like that. Welcome to Retail Sales. My Mom quit the first week.
Mom did not work in public very long, but boy did she work. I feel like she knew more about work than most anybody today.
Over the years, he told his children about the jobs he did as a youngster and a teenager. He didn’t get to participate in many of the extracurricular activities that we enjoyed as children and teenagers, because he filled his spare time with work. As I think back to my own childhood and youth, we did have some chores to do, but I don’t remember them being excessive or particularly burdensome.
The one chore I remember pretty vividly was the dirt wagon.
When Dad got promoted to line foreman at the phone company, he -and we- were transferred to Bedford, VA. Mom and Dad bought their first house in the little hamlet of Thaxton (about 5 miles west of Bedford) for around $9,000. It was a three-bedroom ranch with one bathroom – before we left Thaxton, we had seven people living with that one bathroom. That’s hard for most of us to imagine these days, but none of us seemed to be psychologically damaged from the experience. That little house had a basement of sorts: a half-door, leading down a ramp, to a room carved out of the red clay soil. It was more like a root cellar, gradually expanded to house a work bench and the lawnmower.
The Dirt Wagon
When Dad wasn’t working, and had some “spare” time, he’d work on expanding the basement. He’d use a pickaxe to carve out some of that tough red clay, and then shovel it into a little red wagon. (I wanted to write something clever here about the cruel juxtaposition of play and work, as manifested in the wagon, but I couldn’t come up with anything) My brother John and I would alternate trips with the loaded red wagon: up the ramp, bend over to fit through the half-door, turn right and head down the gently sloping hill to the big ditch that lay between our garden and the RF&P railroad tracks that ran about 60 yards behind our house. Dump the wagon, turn around, back up the hill, left turn, bend over to get through the half-door, down the ramp, and it’s John’s turn to make a trip. This would go on for what seemed like hours. In reality, it was probably an hour at most. John and I learned to do your part, and make a contribution that would be of value. Dad would make a game of it by timing us, to see who could make the fastest trip.
From the dirt wagon, and other experiences, like tending the garden, we acquired the work habit. My brother and I did have some grass-cutting jobs in our early teens, and we welcomed the arranged leaf-raking job. When we were old enough to get a “real” job, we did. In high school, when I wasn’t playing sports or participating in the marching band (an odd combo, I know – John and I both did it – not at halftime, though), I worked as a busboy at Shoney’s, an “ice-humper” (our appellation for the guys who hand-filled and delivered ice) for the Crystal Ice Company, a lumber jockey and utility guy for Ashland Lumber Company, and a gas-station attendant for Carle’s Amoco at the corner of Parham and Three Chopt. I never made a tremendous amount of money at any of these jobs; I didn’t need to because my parents provided everything we needed. So working afforded some pocket money to goof off with.
Dad’s experience was different
My first job, other than cutting grass and pulling weeds for neighbors, was helping Ray with his paper route. The going rate for helpers was one dollar a week. My first job, which was my total responsibility was carrying newspapers. I carried several routes in Highland Park and East Highland Park but, the route I carried the longest was Third Avenue, from Brookland Park Boulevard to Milton Street and Dill Avenue and Jerry was my helper and I paid him one dollar a week. If you carried about 100 papers, you could make about six or seven dollars a week, if the people would pay you. Sometimes a customer would be behind fifteen or twenty weeks and the paper boy was not allowed to stop the paper and he still was responsible to pay his bill on time every week. I would sometimes wait for hours to catch a customer at home and collect for the paper.
When I was 15 and a sophomore in high school, I got a job after school and on Saturdays, at the Spotless Hardware Store on Williamsburg Road. Mr. Peck was my boss and I made 50 cents an hour. My first assignment was assembling toys for Christmas (Bicycles, wagons, scooters, and the hardest to put together were those little steel pedal cars). When a customer bought a car from Mr. Peck, it was always assembled and ready to go. One time a customer came in ans asked Mr. Peck for something that he would Guarantee to kill potato beetles. Old Mr. peck went straight to the tool section and took down a hammer and reached under counter and added a wooden block. He then handed them to the man and the guy bought the hammer and went out. This job kept me from playing sports, because they practiced after school…it messed up lots of extra curricular activities but it did allow me to save 400 dollars for a 51 Chevrolet, and 100 dollars for the first year’s insurance. This is the only way Dad would let us buy a car. My Senior year was a great year with that car. It kept me broke but, it sure enhanced my dating possibilities with Rhoda Lush. My part time work with Spotless Stores continued for 10 years.
Dad was proud of his work.
As a teenager -when I first became cognizant of such things- I can’t remember being interested or impressed by Dad’s work. I heard the occasional detail from his assignments over the years, but it didn’t make a particular impression. Later, after he retired (at age 53, by the way – that’s not going to happen for me), I began to appreciate what he accomplished as a man whose traditional schooling ended after one year in college.
After a year at The Virginia Polytechnic Institute, at The Richmond Professional Institute, Cooperating with the College of William and Mary, I dropped out and went to work at Souther States Cooperative, on Main Street, in
C&P of VA logo
Downtown Richmond. I left them and went to work for Virginia Power, downtown on Franklin Street. Finally, I got a jog as a Warehouseman for Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (A Bell System Company). In twenty-nine years, I was a Warehouseman, Frameman, Lineman, Cable Splicer, Line Foreman, Splicing Foreman, Contract Foreman, Maintenance Foreman, Safety Staff Support Associate, Quality Staff Associate, Cable Maintenance Staff Support Associate, Computer Training Assistant Manager, and Auto Cad Supervisor in the Major Customer Technical Support Group
Dad worked. He taught me to work, and to appreciate work.
