First Job

Today is a happy and proud Dad day. Emma starts her first ever job. She begins training for her job as a worker at Dorney Park /Wildwater Kingdom. For four hours today she will be learning the ways of the amusement park.  She will also be learning what it means to be earning her own money. She will be exclusively in Wildwater Kingdom and gets four more hours of training next Sunday.

Takes me back, of course, to my first job. I was a newspaper carrier for the weekly Grit newspaper. The Grit was a Pennsylvania newspaper that didn’t really have any news. It was more a collection of features and comics and puzzles. It had a rural, folksy feel to it. I still see it today, once in a while, but in a magazine format in stores.

My route was about thirty deliveries throughout uptown Slatington. Slatington was divided into uptown and downtown. Uptown went to Lincoln Elementary. Downtown went to Roosevelt Elementary.  This is not to be confused with going “outtown” which meant to the 500 block of Main Street where the stores were.

I inherited my paper route from my cousins, Lee and Larry Andreas. It took a few weeks to get the route down, but once I did it was pretty easy and took about an hour to complete. I got to know the shortcuts and the dogs to avoid. I got to know the best time to leave my house to get a chance to see  my sixth grade crush. I got to know how to keep the papers dry on a rainy Saturday morning.

Of course, the most annoying part of the route was collecting. I usually did this once a month and most people were pretty nice and diligent. However, I had one particular customer who was very difficult to get money from. She was my elementary school principal, Mrs. Rex!  I remember how mad my mom was when Mrs. Rex cancelled her prescription right before Christmas, the time of big tips.

I enjoyed my first job and don’t even remember how it ended. If I am driving in Slatington I can still recognize some of my stops. I hope Emma has memories of her first job when she is sixty five. I have a good feeling that she will.