R. Lee Streby
President, Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, Annapolis
My most memorable summer job was my very first job. I was fourteen but looked ten. I was hired to serve ice cream in the snack bar and sell popcorn on the Dixie, an old paddle wheel boat that operated tours around a beautiful lake in my hometown of North Webster, Indiana.
The owner of the Dixie was a frightening former military man in his fifties, who talked—and smoked Camels—out of the corner of his mouth. He terrorized me constantly because he knew he could shake me up easily. I worked like a slave to make him happy, even though nothing worked.
The most memorable moment happened when my mom and other family members came to eat lunch one day on the boat when my boss started in on me. He turned to my mom and said with a big grin, “That boy is the dumbest kid I’ve ever met in my life. He’s so stupid!” Wrong thing to say. She turned around and said, “Wait a minute. You’re talking about my son. He’s not stupid. He might be young, but I never want to hear you say he’s stupid. If he doesn’t make you happy, fire him! But he makes straight A’s, and he’s not stupid.”
After that lunch, the boss’s attitude toward me turned 180 degrees. The rest of the summer, I was one of his favorite employees, and when the summer ended, both he and his wife gave me hugs and wished me luck, and I saw a couple of tears. To this day, it takes a pretty mean tiger to rattle my cage. If my own disarming skills fail, I know I can always call my mom!
Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher
Cartoonist, Baltimore
My most memorable summer job was a stint as a large yellow canary. I was a recent college graduate living in England, surviving on a meager income as a struggling cartoonist. At the time in Great Britain, the national telephone company was called British Telecom. BT had as its mascot a cartoon character named Buzby the bird. My job was to dress up as Buzby. In red tights, flipper feet, projectile beak, and a rotund yellow body, I was to walk around shopping malls, handing out balloons and promotional literature.
The job had its benefits: It was easy money. I had my picture taken countless times while remaining unrecognized. And girls liked to feel my feathers. Sadly, the job was short lived. After a few weeks, the employment agency alerted me that they were going to hire someone a little more qualified for the position. “More qualified? To be a canary?” I asked. There had been a complaint, I was told.
A mother had alleged that I was responsible for upsetting her six-year-old boy. Apparently after handing the little chap a balloon, I wished him well. The lad detected my accent, then burst into tears. “Mommy! Buzby’s a Yank!”
Carol Clarke
Seamstress, Royal Oak, Md.
In 1963, when I was seventeen years old in Jacksonville, Fla., I was a nurse’s aid. The most memorable thing about that summer job was the changes in medicine from then until now, just forty-five years later. We didn’t have disposable equipment. Syringes were glass with a screw-on needle, and we had to take them apart, clean the syringes, and put them in a sterilizer. The needles had to be filed to make them sharp again. And nurses didn’t use stethoscopes; only doctors were allowed to use them.
One night, a head nurse found a patient who wasn’t breathing and in cardiac arrest. She jumped on the bed and pounded on his chest and tried this new thing called CPR to resuscitate him. CPR wasn’t even talked about then. Later on, she was chastised for taking measures beyond the nurses’ scope of knowledge, even though she saved him. That’s how the hierarchy was back then. To today’s nurses, this sounds like ancient history. For a teenager wanting to go into nursing, this was exciting stuff.
Darrin Lowery
Archaeologist/teacher, University of Delaware and Washington College, Easton, Md.
Eons ago, between 1986 and 1990 when I was first at the University of Delaware, I worked on a clam boat in the Bay. I was intrigued by what you learn about people by what they throw overboard. On the Wye River, we used to dredge up a load of false teeth. Dentures! We got tons of them. The only thing I can conclude about this river, as opposed to the other rivers that we clammed, such as the Choptank or the Chester, is that a lot of sailboaters go up the Wye River and anchor out, get completely drunk, and then throw up overboard, losing their dentures—along with everything else. When we clammed on the Chester River and Kent Island, we never caught any dentures.
Laura Oliver
University of Maryland creative writing instructor and writing coach, Annapolis
They didn’t want me. Craigville Inn on Cape Cod wanted to hire my mother for a summer job in administration while she was in graduate school, and I was in college. She insisted we were a package deal and that I would “do anything.”
The job I was assigned was “pots girl,” which meant that eight hours a day, I scrubbed all the dirty pots in the kitchen in a uniform and rubber gloves. Between scrubbing baking sheets and mixing bowls, I learned that you can cut a Boston cream pie into eight pieces and dig out a big chunk of the center unnoticed. I learned you can indeed gain twenty pounds in three months. I learned ten ways to disguise a hairnet. I learned that hot water over long periods of time in rubber gloves can give you a rash that will reappear the rest of your life. I learned I liked boys with Southern accents and that summer loves last until Thanksgiving.
John Volponi
General manager, Inn at Perry Cabin, St. Michaels, Md.
One of my first summer jobs was when I was seventeen and working for Foster Farms, a chicken company in central California. They had a new product at the time called chicken franks—hotdogs made out of chicken. I’d spend the summer going from one county fair to the next handing out chicken franks. I’d cook them and hand out samples and espouse the health benefits of hot dogs made from chicken, which have no preservatives. What made the job so memorable were all the characters I’d meet, guys who went from one county fair to the next and lived out of their trucks and campers. They drank hard at night and ran the rides and carnival stands the next day. It was a different world.
Ben Wise
Manager and shooting instructor, Pintail Point, Chestertown, Md.
When I was around sixteen and in high school, I had just gotten my driving license and had to pay for some gas. So I got a job with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. I worked on nature trails and built habitat boxes for wood ducks. We built these trails with nothing more than the help of a chainsaw. The worst thing about the job was that it was hard, but the main thing was that we knew we were doing something that was going to be used for a long time.
And when I was around twelve, I trained hunting dogs for quail hunting and raised English setter pups. I made about $50 for a month, which was pretty good money in 1970. The best part of these jobs was the gratification of doing something to help the environment.
Julie Winters
Senior policy advisor, EPA, Annapolis
While working on my bachelor of science for resource management at Kansas State University, I was awarded a summer internship with the parks and the recreation department in Kansas City. I worked in the ape house at the Kansas City Zoo and got to be friends with the orangutans and gorillas. I cleaned out the habitats, prepared their food, and fed them. I was very fond of one gorilla named Katie. She would see me come in with my McDonald’s Coca-Cola and take the cup right out of my hand and sip the soda from my straw. My other assignment was to figure out how to keep the otter contained in his habitat—he was very crafty. We wanted his home to be natural—no cages or walls—but he always figured a way out and would go down to the river during the day and come back each night for dinner. It was hilarious.
Bridget Dickson
Outdoorswoman, St. Michaels, Md.
When I was right out of high school in 1973, I was asked to help with what’s called “walking out” foxhound puppies. I thought, This can’t be true—I’ll work with puppies all day? But it was harder than you’d think.
I worked for Thomas G. Wyman, a gentleman who owned a private pack of English foxhounds. My job meant that at eight weeks old I took the puppies from their mothers so they could be weaned. I was everything to them.
I’d teach them “Foxhound 101,” first grade for puppies. Since they’d never had a collar on or used a leash, they’d immediately go ballistic when I put one on. Each one was so cute and funny that, at times, they’d reduce me to tears and make me laugh in the same minute. Days were full of that Walt Disney warm and fuzzy feeling.
One of the hounds was named Keeper. He didn’t think he was a foxhound; he preferred to chase butterflies. He really wanted to be somebody’s pet, so when you came home, he’d be on the couch waiting for you. He flunked our program. When a hound fails miserably, he’s either put down or sold to another pack. So I found him a spot with another hunt in Virginia.
Camilla Schwarz
Owner of Balanced Healing Acupuncture and Wellness, Severna Park, Md.
I had many memorable summer jobs, memorable because they were all universally awful. The best memory I have is from when I was a dish-washer at the officer’s club in Stuttgart, Germany. It was fun because we would hide in the walk-in refrigerators and eat cocktail shrimp when things got crazy. We’d also throw dinner rolls into the exhaust fan, and it would rain out crumbs all over the kitchen.
Beth Rubin
Freelance writer, Annapolis
In the early sixties, between my sophomore and junior year of college, I worked in a law office in New York’s financial district. When not typing briefs and letters, I ran errands and fetched coffee for the attorneys. I ran through so many bottles of Wite-Out that I’m surprised the firm didn’t go belly up. The excitement of working in the city and having a lunch hour made the commute from New Jersey and wearing pantyhose worth the effort. And I learned an important lesson: I didn’t want to be an attorney. I earned $50 a week, which is about what I’m making forty-five years later as a freelance writer.
Tom Horton
Author, Mardella Springs, Md.
During my youth in the sixties, I was part of a crew that picked up 25,000 to 35,000 chickens a night in poultry houses across the Eastern Shore. We’d work at night as much as we could ‘cause the chickens were calmer in the dark. Special moments were moonlit summer nights—that’s when the chickens went wild. It was hot, backbreaking work—pretty good money.
I believe we were paid by the coop, each coop containing fourteen chickens. We’d pick up seven at a time, by the legs. They made lots of noise, raised lots of dust, pecked and scratched and pooped. Mom made me leave my clothes on the back porch when I came home. When I’d go back to school in the fall, despite nightly hot baths, it would be a week or two before kids would stop saying,"What’s that smell?” Got into your skin, hair, nails. Lessons learned? Go to college. I suspect I’m one of the few graduates of the Johns Hopkins University with proficiency in chicken catching.
Jennifer Marsh
Advertising director, Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore
Ever wonder how paint colors get their names? They hire bored college kids with overactive imaginations. One summer, I was in charge of naming the fall/winter palate of new colors for a large paint company. My father happened to be the vice president, so I could do no wrong, except when I had to name forty different shades of white in one afternoon. I drank about ten Diet Cokes and set about my task. OK, so they all looked, well, white to me. I started thinking about what would speak to people that would paint their walls white. Nature was too obvious and had been done before. Seventies television shows was the first thing that popped to mind, so in lowercase letters, I proceeded down the list of what I knew. “love boat,” “fantasy island,” “three’s company,” and “happy days” were the whitish-greys.
Pleased with myself, and now into the task, I then proceeded onto other things I obsessed about, like the Kennedys. “jackie o,” “JFK,” “assassination,” “pillbox hat,” “Chappaquiddick,” “bay of pigs” were some of the whitish-yellows. I was on a roll and onto my serial-killer fascination for the whitish-blues until my supervisor peeped over my shoulder. Needless to say, my names never made it to the public, and I was reassigned to the mail room.
Denise Nielsen
Manager, The Spa at Harbour Inn, St. Michaels, Md.
In 1981, during my first summer out of high school, I worked in a deli on Long Island. I had very early morning hours; I started at 6 a.m. My days were spent cooking large amounts of potatoes and macaroni for the salads, or my hands would be buried in vats of coleslaw, or I’d be washing lots of dishes. It was extremely hot working in the kitchen, so I would go sit in the ice box to eat my lunch; it was the only relief I got. I still have scars from all my burns. I earned about $200 a week if I was lucky. I worked with a lot of fun, crazy people, and I got to eat like a pig, but it was not something I’d want to do again.
Lee Boot
Filmmaker of documentary “Euphoria,” Baltimore
My most memorable summer job was my first one. It taught me what it means to occupy the place in the working world where your value is making some nastiness disappear. I was a pool boy at a two-star hotel in upstate New York. Canadian women, having escaped the cold of their Montreal suburbs, came to bask in the sun of a place that surely only symbolized something warmer. My main job was to clean up after them, primarily using a plastic scrub brush to remove layers of suntan oil and dirt that glazed the slack vinyl webbing of a hundred chaise lounges. They slathered themselves to the hairline every morning, and, because of the dust, the greasy chairs browned as fast as the bodies that lay on them, ensuring my unending labor; hell is hell because it has no end.
My only break would come when a bather would lose a diamond ring in the pool. I would hold my breath underwater, methodically scanning the bottom like the responsible servant I seemed to be. At last I would find the lost treasure and remain as long as I could, aching for air while turning a diamond-studded band over in the blue.
Elijah E. Cummings
U.S. Congressman, Baltimore
When I was sixteen years old, I was a pot washer at the Baltimore Country Club. It was a summer job but I continued to work there on and off for maybe two or three years.
[Eventually], I got promoted from pot washer to dishwasher to porter. The interesting thing is, that job exposed me to how rich people live. I didn’t know people lived like that; I thought it was just on television. I grew up very poor and I was determined not to struggle all my life.
I worked with older men who reminded me how important school was for me and said, “If you don’t get your education you’ll be washing pots and toting tables for the rest of your life.” It certainly gave me positive reinforcement.
Back then, of course, you saw no black people there except the help. They didn’t allow black members. Some thirty years later, when I returned, it was maybe during my first year in Congress. I’ll never forget that day, going into one of the bathrooms and saying, “Thank you, God, for allowing me to come as a guest and not as a worker.” It was so very significant. I went from pot washer to U.S. Congressman.
Mary Lynne Schultz
Owner, Starboard Financial, Annapolis
My favorite summer job was during the summer of 1987 when I was in college. I taught sailing at Severn Sailing Association in Eastport. The kids were no younger than ten and as old as seventeen. Since I was an instructor, I drove around in a Boston Whaler. I’d set courses for them and implemented different strategies. My job was pretty intense—five days a week—but I made lifelong friends from it.
One of the things I remember most took place at the clubhouse where there was an old Army cook named Burt. He was so mean to the kids—really, really mean. He would shoot them with a water gun if they were still eating when he wanted to clean up. He was a jerk. One of my friends, another instructor, had a battle with Burt. To get back at him, my friend took all the picnic benches and tables and threw them in the Bay. Fortunately, they were wood so they floated.
The place has special memories. I met my husband when we were both children attending the sailing school. We now own a sailboat, and racing is a big part of our lives.
Lori Livingston
Co-owner, Pine Away, Annapolis
One summer, during my high school days, when they were building the South River Bridge, I worked at a ski rental and parasail business near what’s now Yellow Fin restaurant. I’d parasail up the river to advertise parasailing or ski lessons. It was so boring to just sit up in the air that I would take a book. I would be in the air for thirty or forty minutes, maybe an hour before or after lunch. If it got too windy, we’d just come down. Since the bridge was under construction and full of construction workers, the guys would give me all these cat calls. They wouldn’t let up. It became a fun thing. Parasailing is only fun going up and going down; the rest of the time is boring, so reading and waving to the workers made the time go by faster. I made hardly any money, but it kept me out of trouble.
Vicki Lathom
Writer, Annapolis
Between my freshman and sophomore year at college in the late Sixties, I worked as a waitress at the Hot Shoppe restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Because I was only working there for the summer, the full-time waitresses made sure I knew I was on the bottom of the totem pole. They gave me lousy stations and lousy shifts. It’s a hazing, a boot camp, to make you feel humble. Now I treat everyone like they might become my boss, even if I am the boss.
