Tag: summer jobs

How Did You Meet Your Spouse

November 12, 2022

That was the question at a celebration of a friend’s sixtieth wedding anniversary. We were looking at pictures of the couple’s past activities going back decades when someone popped the question. After the wife related how a “blind date” experience in Montreal led to an amazing sixty years of marriage, somebody spoke up and wanted to know how others, present at the celebration, met. I had no chance to relate my story; the conversation turned to how long it took from meeting your spouse to the wedding.

So here is my story. It started with my first car: a Peugeot 403 that I bought in Vancouver, in the early 1960s. I drove my car to North Carolina to attend graduate school in January 1965.

During the summer of 1965, I, along with two other graduate students studying city planning at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, had summer jobs in Washington, DC.

Ray rented a cheap apartment painted all black; it was unbearably hot with no AC. Another classmate, Alvaro, and I rented a room at Hartnett House off Dupont Circle. It was a bit of a flophouse. Our room had a window facing inwards onto a courtyard, with no air-conditioning and no fans.

If you know Washington’s weather during the summer, you know how steamy and hot it can be. Going to the beach one weekend was a wonderful idea, and since I was the only one with a car, I drove all of us to the beach in my Peugeot.

Alvaro invited Kathy to come with us to the beach. Kathy was a graduate student as well, studying economics and political science at UNC.

As soon as we arrived at the beach, Ray and Alvaro went to play the slot machines in the arcade. Kathy and I started talking about school life and hit it off immediately; we discovered we were both newcomers to North America and shared details of our growing up here. In those days we called stealing your friend’s date “birddogging”.

During the summer, Kathy and I got to know each other while discovering Rock Creek Park, going to nightclubs with blaring music, and eating at fish bistros along the Potomac. Our relationship hit a high point when her mother invited me for dinner. She was an experienced cook; the chicken meat just fell off the bones. I enjoyed the dinner and told her so. That pleased her. I was in.

I asked her to marry me three weeks after meeting her and bought her a skinny ring that I could afford from my meagre earnings that summer. But promised that I would replace the ring with a much larger ring as soon as I could buy one; I did so later when my job took me to the Yukon, where I bought her a wide gold ring.

The summer ended, and we had to go back to university. I suddenly got worried that if I spend so much time with Kathy, my studies will suffer. But as soon as we were back at school, we saw each other every day, starting with breakfast at Lenoir Hall, the student cafeteria.

We planned the church wedding for June 7, 1966, right after graduation, in Chapel Hill. But I had a suggestion; let us get married in a civil ceremony before the church wedding. We hustled off to South Carolina so that no one would know of our marriage and got married in the courthouse by a Justice of the Peace. I did not think the props in the courthouse measured up to the significance of the event; a couple of flowerpots did not provide the right background for taking a vow for life. But it was a marriage, and we had the certificate to prove it.

Our courthouse marriage burned an unforgettable memory in my mind; two grad students in a small South Carolina town, far from family, getting married, with nobody around who knew us, casually dressed, and making a contract for life. I thought it was surrealistic but deeply emotional and tremendously exciting.

This unique experience overwhelmed us, and nothing could break our spirits, not even when my faithful old car, the Peugeot 403, broke down on the drive back to Chapel Hill and we had to hitchhike back home. We just left the car on the highway; I took the license plates off it so people could not trace the car back to me. Disposal of the car was the last thing on my mind right after our union.

I cannot describe in words how excited and happy I felt being married, nobody knowing about it, not even my family, and going back to my dorm and Kathy going back to her dorm where she was a student councilor (her dorm students would have been flabbergasted to know what their advisor/councilor just did. This was in the sixties!).

The preparations for the church wedding took some other interesting turns; the pastor at the  Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church who was to perform the wedding ceremony asked if religion would cause a problem for us. Kathy is Episcopal and I am Catholic. I assured the pastor that religion would not be an issue; I was a non-practicing Catholic and could not see myself launching into heavy arguments over religious doctrines.

Kathy’s brother Huw, whom I just met the day before the wedding, and my friend Ray, took me out for a few drinks; explaining that it was a custom to do so. On the day of the wedding, I got up a bit groggy and searched around for my formal clothing only to find I did not have a tie. I walked down the dorm corridor hall knocking on doors until I found a classmate happy to lend me one. I was ready to marry the second time.

My entire city planning class showed up for the wedding and had a great laugh when I tried to drive off in Kathy’s car. They put rocks in front and back of the tires, and I could not drive off until I got out of the car and cleared the rocks to the laughter of all. And when I drove off, a terrible racket came from the hubcaps; my friends put rocks into them as well. I drove off and stopped a block away to take the hubcaps off to get rid of the stones before driving off to our honeymoon.

Although I did not have the opportunity at the celebration to relate my story, I reflected on a marriage that lasted over sixty years. What I found more significant is that only one percent of couples in the U.S. can celebrate 60 years of marriage. I could not find similar statistics for Canada. I also found that an average marriage lasts fifteen years in Canada. So, a sixty-year marriage is an incredible achievement. Congratulations.

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?