Summer Jobs

[Enhance]

 

Never had a summer job growing up. My first job was when I was 16 and started working at a pharmacy.

 

Wimp

Man, I grew up in Omaha. Anything outside the city proper or the few square miles around Memorial Stadium is basically irrelevant.

 

[huKSer]

First REAL job - washing dishes at a restaurant in Lincoln.

 

Dad owned a small print/ mailing business (yes he sent out junk mail for the most part), so if it got real busy the fam would go help

[B.B. Hemingway]

I bucked hay with my grandpa for as long as I can remember. Started cleaning out chicken houses ( the ones as long as a football field, they're everywhere in Missouri) at 12 years old. Did that every summer until I was 19. Now, my summer job is what pays the bills (I run a lawn/landscaping company).

[Fru]

Detasseling as well. The pivots being turned on each day was a real joy.

[knapplc]

Detasseling as well. The pivots being turned on each day was a real joy.

Riding the irrigation was fun, especially on those really really hot days when you could barely breathe it was so thick & humid. One of those things turned on once and we all went pell mell through the rest of that row, got to the end and ran en masse to the irrigation. 30 kids hanging all over that thing on two or three different wheel sections, and we cheered like we'd won a big game when it moved. That was probably the most fun I had doing that kind of work. I remember there was one Straw Boss who didn't want to go with us, but the other Bosses made her shut up about it so nobody got in trouble.

 

One other game we'd play when roguing beans was to strip about 18 inches of the corn stalk of leaves, hold your shovel in your left hand so the blade was pointing at your face and the handle was sticking off into space, holding the corn stalk in your right hand, then hitting the blade ping!ping!ping!ping! with the stalk really fast. It would cut off discs of the corn stalk that would shoot out at whoever you were aiming at. And of course you'd pick up the corn roots out of the ground so there was plenty of dirt with them, use the stalk like a handle and chuck the whole thing like a grenade at your friends.

 

Good times.

[NM11046]

We never got tools and shovels to rogue - you must have been big league.

[JJ Husker]

We never got tools and shovels to rogue - you must have been big league.

I can't envision roguing corn without "the hook". It was about a 2.5 to 3 foot long pole with a hook end sharp on the inside of the curve and also with a 2 inch or so straight sharp spot on the heel of the hook. If you rogued corn without one of those....holy schnikeys.

 

One time the farmer whose crop we were in was crop dusting the field we were in. It's not like he couldn't see us cuz the corn was maybe waist high at most. I think he was pissed at our company or something cuz he flew about 15 feet over our heads and sprayed us with whatever chemical. We were all throwing our hooks up trying to hit his plane. Dick. Actually I remember his name, it was Butch and it was in the David City area south of Columbus.

 

We also played this game while detassling. We called it "jungle bunny"...I know, I know...but anyway it amounted to blindsiding people and laying them out. I'm talking full force blind side tackles. If you did it right you could disappear across the rows and the unlucky person wouldn't even know who hit them.

[NM11046]

Yeah we just stomped the rogues at the base. But I do remember the tackles in the fields, not that name though :-)

[Nebfanatic]

Tough times