My first real job

My first real job was at 14 when I went to work for Curtis (Gus) Phillips’ market garden and green house facility. He had a green- house on Corning Road in Norwich and I would walk the back way through the woods from Mulberry Street past Skunk Pond and Joe Bill’s Cave to his house. In the spring the job consisted of transplanting seedlings from flat to flat depending on the size of the plant. A flat was a box about 12x18x2 that we filled with a mixture of dirt, peat moss and other nutrients. We used a board that had a series of pegs set so that when we pressed it into the flat we knew exactly where to put the transplant. Some of the plants we repotted were tomatoes, lettuce and peppers. In the Spring I would put in 2 -4 hours a day after school and 4-5 hours on Saturdays.

When school let out in the summer we went to his farm in Preston where he had about 15 acres of land he worked. We would meet at the Corning road place, climb into the back of the truck, and ride to the farm. (That’s right no seat belts) There was a building in the middle of the acreage where Gus stored hoes and other tools and the Ford tractor. As I remember it the blade on Gus’s hoe was about 1 ½” deep and the ones we had were nearly 3” deep. Many years of sharpening had worn his blade to that height.

I can remember crawling on my knees thinning carrots and beets to about an inch apart. I used to complete with Louie Phillips who was about 6 or 8 years older than I and much bigger. It was hard but I could mostly keep up with him. We also hoed any thing else that needed weeding. At first one of the Phillips boys would QA our weeding and we soon learned the correct way or were quickly corrected. This was honest hard work and I quickly learned how to do a good job. Peer pressure then was to work hard. Some boys came for a few days but soon left. Our pay was fifty cents an hour and I made $20 for a full weeks work. That was a lot of money in that time frame. I could buy a coke for $0.05

In the early summer we would start our tans slowly keeping our shirts on most of the day to avoid burning. As we became more immune to the sun’s rays we could leave the shirt off longer. After a few weeks nobody wore a shirt at all. We were nicely tanned. When I went into the Navy 3 years later I still had a tan line on my back from working outside with out my shirt. No one was worried about skin cancer or used anything that was associated with the letters SPF.

Because of staggered plantings there was something to harvest most of the time. Gus would fill up boxes on his truck and take them to Norwich and New London to sell to the stores. We were left with Louie in charge. He was a tough boss but we had learned how to work and there was no thought of goofing off. Still today when it comes to physical labor I only know only one way to work and that is to get at it and get the job done. My family yells at me to take it easy when raking or the like. I just do not know how to do that.

At tomato harvest time I would come home with green stains up my arms to the bicep. We picked all kinds of things except things that required cutting such as celery and lettuce. Gus and his boys did that. We mostly did the weeding. The toughest job was harvesting carrots because it generally done after the first frost in the fall, so it was cold, wet and muddy work. I was glad that it only lasted a few days. Gus would plow a furrow beside the row of carrots and then return with the tractor pulling a wagon and we would pull the carrots by hand and then throw them up onto the trailer. It was miserable cold wet work and the least enjoyable part of the job.

One day while we were taking our usual 15 minute morning break someone broke a bottle of coke on the barrel used for trash. When we came back in at noon for lunch we could see where that Coke had eaten away the rust on the side of the barrel. It was nice and shiny. I have since wondered what that Coca-Cola does to your insides.

The biggest thing I learned was the value of hard work and what it cost to support my self. I lived at home and ate there but all my other needs were supplied thru my own labors. Allowance was not a word ever used in my home. If I wanted it I had to earn the means to buy it.