Labor Day was this past Monday, which meant a lot of folks took the opportunity to hit the road for a brief vacation or just relax at home for a change.
Despite the holiday’s name, you’re supposed to do anything but “labor” on the first Monday of September.
Given that the holiday is meant to celebrate the American spirit of pulling oneself up by your bootstraps to earn an honest living, that got the Times office reminiscing about first jobs.
We decided to bring various members of the community in on the fun, asking everyone from the mayor to the local fire chief about how they earned their first paycheck. Some were paid for manual labor on neighboring farms, some stood behind the counter at ice cream shops, and others took on what is perhaps the most famous first job on the planet: delivering the newspaper to their neighbors.
It’s a fun read and you can find it on page 1B of this very issue.
As for me, I certainly didn’t get my start typing away on a keyboard. Instead, I used to wear a blue apron and serve as a courtesy clerk at a Safeway in Globe, Ariz.
If I had to guess, this particular Safeway is about as old as the state it resides in. If you’ve never been to Globe, much of the town looks like it basically grew out of the ground. The community wasn’t planned; it just sort of expanded outward naturally like vines made out of brick, mortar and some well-worn asphalt.
My Safeway was located just behind the Holy Angels Church in downtown. I know for a fact that particular church has been around since about 1916 so, again, there’s a lot of history there.
Unlike the local Safeway, the Globe store is relatively small. The staff was equally small, which meant my job description was pretty fluid. I’d spend an hour bagging groceries, another rounding up carts, another organizing the shelves, another discarding expired produce, another sweeping the floors and then another organizing storage or helping unload trucks.
My favorite part of the job, though, was cleaning the meat department. I know that sounds morbid, but it was ice cold in that room and I was working at Safeway in the summer. Cleaning the meat department also meant nobody would bother me for a couple hours, which was an appreciated change of pace.
Also, not going to lie, it was kind of cool to get to walk into a room clad in rubber and douse everything with a high-powered hose. It was a lot like washing a car; only the car was the room I was standing in.
From Safeway I went on to farmhand at a small ranch. I took care of half a dozen horses and various other forms of livestock in the mornings and filled the rest of the day with everything from standard landscaping to installing sprinkler systems, mending fences and the like. It was lonely work, and the Arizona sunshine didn’t exactly make it easy, but I still have fond memories of those days when I used to wear cowboy boots and always had a pair of leather gloves tucked in my back pocket.
