Still on my bucket list after 60-some years.
My first “job” (other than a two-year run at a paper route between ages 10 and 12) was working for Dodge City’s Boot Hill Museum, running the small concession stand outside of the museum’s cemetery building, cleaning the museum toilets, sweeping floors, selling hotdogs and sodas, maintaining the robot gunfighter, and getting shot off of a hillside by a drunk playing town marshal during the bi-daily gunfight. All for $0.60/hour. I was 13-about-to-turn-14. Toilet duty at the museum is still close to the grossest job I’ve ever had. Tourists are particularly gross and the women’s bathroom was a horror show of randomly discarded sanitary napkins and worse; much worse.
Getting shot wasn’t a picnic, either. The “marshal” was often a one-legged hobo who looked like he belonged in Old Dodge City, but who had a terrible time remembering the script. He was supposed to come out of the Longbranch Tavern, which used to be on the west end of the replica street, with a double-barrel shotgun and his pistols holstered. After a brief argument in the street with the “bad guys,” he was supposed to take several steps east, toward the bad guys, before being warned that another bad guy, me, was about to back shoot him. He would, then, turn and shoot me with one of the barrels of the shotgun. Sometimes, maybe not having recovered from the previous night’s celebrations, he’d come out of the saloon and fire off one or two barrels of the shotgun at me from a LOT closer than scripted and I’d get a blast of cardboard blank wad in the chest. Sometimes, the cardboard would be on fire as I rolled down the dry weed-covered hillside. I still have some weird looking scars on my chest from some of those fires.
Since then, I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs and a few really decent ones. Maybe starting out like that made an impression on me that there is no job so crappy that I shouldn’t expect to be the one doing it.
For a few brief moments in my early 20s, I imagined that I’d learn a trade and move to the Pacific Northwest to get good at it. Early in the “learn a trade” phase, Ms. Day decided that she wanted to be a mother and, as a byproduct, I would be a father. That sudden change in plans force me to dump the formal part of learning a trade and find a job that paid more than minimum wage. Since minimum wage in 1970 was $1.30/hour, you’d think that would have been easy, but you’d be wrong. The closest, surest thing I could find was an electronic scales technician position in Hereford, Texas at $3.20/hour.
Well over 90% of the equipment I installed and serviced was mounted on trucks and trailers. The drawing (at right) is a sterile illustration of the kind of equipment I worked on and the components (load cells) that most often needed servicing. But to really get a feel for what that job was like you’ll have to imagine that truck coated from stem-to-stern and top-to-bottom with cow and/or pig shit. The “clean” equipment I worked on were grain mill platform scales, which were still often coated in animal feces which held the grain and silage spillage in place (and in my face). In accordance with Murphy’s Law, the hardest to get-to parts always failed in the worst weather and at the most critical (according to customers) time. I “specialized” in that equipment for about 6 years, driving 100,000 miles/year every year I was in that business and working overtime so often it felt like regular time. After six years of that, I got my first manufacturing engineering position with an ag equipment manufacturer. The company had just invented a design to “fill the corners” on center pivot irrigation systems, but to do that required electronic systems that didn’t yet exist. The “clean part” of that job was design and fabrication work, which I loved and was pretty good at. However, once that was done someone needed to setup an electronics manufacturing facility and I got tagged for that job. In the 1970s, electronics manufacturing was a pretty awful job. I used to have a book of the EPA’s hazardous chemicals and all of the first dozen chemicals listed as “carcinogens” were chemicals I’ve used in electronics or mechanical manufacturing. There is a Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns gets a physical exam and learns that “all of your diseases are in perfect balance” and, as long as he doesn’t get any of them cured, he’ll be fine. That might be me and my chemical exposure.
In the early 2000s, a friend was starting up a live sound reinforcement business and he asked me to help with one of his first big shows. The headliner was a South African reggae artist named Lucky Dube. There were also two opening acts. The touring crew was a bunch of South African white guys who mostly stood around and tried to look important while we busted our asses to setup the stage and do a soundcheck. I wasn’t familiar with the FOH (Front of House) console, but it was pretty straight-forward and we managed to get everything sorted out for the two opening acts. When Lucky’s band came on for a soundcheck, the touring FOH goober took a look at the board, pissed and moaned a bit, and headed for the auditorium door saying, “I can’t work under these conditions.” Up to that moment in my life, I’d never heard anyone say anything like that out loud, although I know I’d seen essentially the same thing displayed, unspoken.
He stormed out and I finished the soundcheck for the headliner band. Soon afterwards, the auditorium doors opened for the audience and the show started. The opening act did a few songs and left, followed by the next band and their set. Lucky’s band came out and did an intro number that ended with Lucky, himself, coming out Motown-style, and they got into their set. About half-way through the 2nd number, the touring FOH goober showed up and elbowed me out of his way. I’d labeled the console and arranged it the way I usually setup a mix, but he was apparently thrown off by the organization and the labels were below his paygrade; or something. So, he spent the rest of the set fiddling with the sliders on several graphic EQs, which were all bypassed because I never use them and he hadn’t noticed that fact. Since that experience, I’ve wondered what it would be like to be so valuable that you could say, “I can’t work under these conditions” and walk out, expecting someone to fix it so the conditions were right for me to work under.
So far, it’s never happened.
Skip ahead to my post-retirement hobby, working backstage at Red Wing’s Sheldon Theater between 2015 and 2020. I sort of stumbled into that gig, mostly, because I know how to rap audio cables and use audio equipment. The dead last thing I wanted to be doing was working live shows, but I love doing the stage setup: selecting and positioning microphones, laying out a trip-free stage, getting the soundcheck sorted out, and I don’t mind the tear-down, either. I just don’t enjoy the usual excessive volume and typically awful sounding live show. The Production Manager liked me enough that he’d let me help with everything up to the soundcheck and, if I thought the show was going downhill from there, I could sneak out and either come back to help with the loadout or call it a night.
Sometime around 2016, Kathy Mattea and her band were our headliners at the Sheldon. The soundcheck was easy and fun and the band was totally professional. Kathy, as stars usually do, showed up for the last bit of the soundcheck to get her instrument, vocals, and monitors sorted out. There was some administrative crap that went on at the beginning of the show and it was still going on when the band arrived backstage to get started, on time weirdly enough. Someone, I think the City Mayor, was running on about some nonsense and everyone backstage was getting antsy. Kathy was kind of hopping from one foot to the other, joking with her band and marking time. After a bit, she said, “I can’t work under these conditions” and faked heading back to the dressing room, which got a solid laugh from the band and the rest of us backstage. Of course, she waited until the nonsense was done and did a great show (which I stayed for).
Obviously, I’m not the only one who would like to be important enough to throw a fit and stomp out when the “conditions” aren’t ideal.
