Published April 30, 2006 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
High school is a time of “firsts” for kids. First kiss. First pit party. First job. Only one of those things actually happened to me in high school. I’m a little embarrassed to say which, so I’ll just say that it earned me $5 an hour and usually left me feeling greasy.
One thing tends to unite blue and white collar workers: the eye-opening experience of a first job. But here in Minnesota, following a national trend, a smaller percentage of high school students are working. In fact statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, compiled recently in a Star Tribune story by H.J. Cummins and Allie Shah, show that the employment rate of 15- to 19-year-olds hasn’t been this low in 30 years.
The story claims that teen unemployment is largely voluntary. Young people now often choose school, extracurricular activities, church and family over work.
Most who know me would call me a workaholic. (I could quit right now if I needed to. I swear). Thus I find myself in the difficult position of seeming to argue against academic focus, spiritual growth and time with family. But, what the hay? My high school jobs taught me a lot that I wouldn’t have learned anywhere else.
In my first job, I delivered pizzas for a small bar restaurant on the Iron Range. I cooked my share of pizzas and lowered many a chicken appendage into the fryer in that summer; but I also gained a lot of stories. Delivering pizzas can tell you more about a town than any census. Walk around a mall or park and you’ll see part of a town. You have to knock on doors while carrying food to see the rest of the town.
One time, during my last two weeks as a delivery driver, I brought a pizza to the tiny upstairs apartment of triplex. The ceiling slanted with the roof and the door was just wide enough to fit the pizza box I was carrying. Living there was ironically tall black man with an Afro haircut (also just wide enough to fit through the door), his girlfriend and a few hundred baby birds. My concern for speedy deliveries had waned since giving my two-week notice, so I accepted his invitation to show me how he fed his birds with a tiny eye-dropper. From the sheer number of birds, I imagine that’s what he did all day long. I don’t know what happened to him, or his birds, nor do I know exactly what I learned from it. But it beat school and in the end probably has some kind of religious significance.
At my second job I was an overnight disk jockey at WEVE in Eveleth. Even with all the Michael Bolten and Paula Abdul, it was a pretty cool gig for a high school kid. But all entry level jobs have their eccentricities. I worked alone in the station at night. In the winter, my responsibilities included running through waist-deep snow outside the station to clear snow and ice out of a large dish to maintain a satellite feed. A stick hung above the studio wall for the express purpose of whacking the dish until the snow fell out. Posted next to the control board was a list of songs long enough to facilitate dish whacking (My favorite was “American Pie” at a comfortable 8:28).
I recognize that my experiences probably aren’t typical. Most working kids end up using sticks to whack deep fryers, lawnmowers or the knees of delinquent gamblers. Still I’d argue that jobs teach lessons that you won’t learn in college. There is no substitute for perspective.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.