I was at a Bastille Day party the other day and somehow, someone who was a Bordeaux or two over the line, asked me how many jobs I have had in my life. Before I could answer, my wife answered for me: "thirty-three!" I replied that that could not be - could it? So I am going to sit here and try to recall all of them and add the occasional pithy comment, if I can find a plot to pith in. Here goes:
1. Paperboy - Meadville Tribune. 8th grade. I was a lousy paperboy as mornings were not my best time of day. I was told that I was often the last boy to pick up his papers. I delivered the paper erratically six days a week and collected $.42 for my trouble and got to keep 7 cents of that. The really good customers gave me a fifty-cent piece and told me to keep the change, which more than doubled my profit for the week. But most folks were too poor, too mean or too disgusted to spare the 7 extra cents for a sluggard paper delivery boy.
2. Snow Shoveler - For years I shoveled dozens of sidewalks and driveways all around my 'hood back before anyone one knew what a 'hood was. Of course, it helped to live in the middle of America's snow belt with the Lake Erie express dumping on us morning, noon and night for the endless winter months.
3. Bakery Janitor - I lasted one day at the Cottage Bakery on Market Street. Not my best effort. In my defense, the owner was a harridan who had vastly higher standards for cleanliness than any seventh grade boy that I know. First I had to dust the floor; then sweep it; then move the furniture; then mop it; wait for it to dry and then sweep it again. With Nurse Ratched's eviler sister giving me the beady eye the whole time. Later on, when I swept the midway at Conneaut Lake Park, I found a much more forgiving standard that approximated my slovenly lifestyle.
4. Mud Mixer - To this day, I believe that my dad worked harder, harder, harder, than anyone that I have ever met. He worked second shift at the post office, and, to make ends meet, he would work nearly every morning, weekend and vacation day doing whatever odd job he could find. He put in concrete driveways, plastered and painted houses, did electrical work, fixed cars, you name it. The most amazing thing I ever saw him do was to paint the peak of the Legion building that was three floors up from its driveway. He bound a 20 foot extension ladder to the top of a 40 foot extension ladder with rope and then he extended both ladders from inside the bed of his pickup truck. He then climbed the 60 feet or so to the top while I watched from below, awe-struck and ready to pee my pants. Of course, bees love the smell of paint . . . . and one crawled up his leg inside his pants. There was nothing he could do but let it sting him. He was -and still is - one hell of a guy. Oh, and I was his occasional mud-mixer. If I was around in the summers, I would sometimes go with him an mix the cement for a brick or block job or the plaster for a plastering job. If I was strong enough, I would carry the buckets of mud to where he was working. Good for those tiny biceps. I couldn't believe that I had a job where I was praised for making mud instead of cleaning it up.
5. Flying Papers - this is the job of pulling the Meadville Tribune off the presses' conveyor belt and loading the papers in fifty count stacks onto a cart. The run in those days - early 1960's - was around 20,000 newspapers and I had to stack them all. The first time I did it, I discovered what back-breaking labor was all about. My back ached like hell after loading the first thousand, but there was no way to stop and stretch because the papers just kept coming, just like Lucy and the chocolates. After a while, my back loosened up and the pain went away and I was fine. I just did this a few times to fill in for my friend, Eugene.
6. Paper Inserter- back at the Tribune again. The newspaper had machines that were capable of printing two sections and folding them in together, but could not do three. So, on nights that the paper had three or more sections, they would call my house at about 2:00 a.m. and tell me to come down to insert the additional sections until about 5:30. About a dozen of us high school kids would do this two or three nights a week. You never knew for certain when you went to bed if you were going to get called or not. I hated to hear that phone ring, but I loved having a paycheck. Maybe that explains some of my less than stellar academic career. I also occasionally met some unsavory characters on my bike ride to work . . . .
7. Warehouse Stockboy- My first job after graduating from high school in 1965 was at Spaulding Wholesale. Spaulding was the primary wholesaler to all the mom and pop stores in north-west Pennsylvania. It was like a giant supermarket but was not open to the public. My job was to keep the pipe and chewing tobacco aisles stocked during the day so the girls with shopping baskets could come in during the evening and fill customer's orders to put on the delivery trucks. Although I was very religious in those days, and thought smoking to be a grievous sin, I loved the smell of the pipe tobacco. The company moved to much larger quarters that summer, and all of us summer guys helped with the move to Rogers Ferry Road. The owner, Ray Spaulding, built a landing strip for his private plane next to the new building. For a while, he opened an MG dealership on he premises; very cool.
8. Mr. Softee Driver - Alas, this was another one-day and out job. The fact is, I was just plain scared to drive that bulky truck around town. It had a standard transmission and I wasn't so hot with that. After stalling it a few times on hills, I realized that this was not for me. I was scared crapless that I was going to accidently roll backwards over some little soft-serve fan. Later, at the gas company, I would drive larger trucks and not have a problem with them. But, at this time, I was, indeed, a softee.
9. Grocery Store Stocker - This was my first job while in college at Baptist Bible Seminary in Johnson City, New York. Giant Supermarkets was a local chain where I got on as a shelf stocker. The Akel family owned the business; there was a George, a Ronnie and an older brother whose name I forget who was world-class on the cash register. My favorite memory here is a humble one: I went into the back room one day and two of my co-workers were playing catch -- with a frozen tomato! It looked like fun and they asked me to join in. Of course, I jumped at the chance and only too late! I realized that they swapped the frozen tomato to a freshly rotted one just for me. Very humorous . . . .
10. Truck Loader - Talk about back-breaking. One Christmas I filled in for a fellow Seminary student for a few days loading trucks at a UPS terminal. My back still aches from that one! Endless packages had to be placed just so in the rear of the cross-country 18-wheelers. Great money, but, I was happy this was a temporary gig!
11. Ditch Digger - I spent three summers during 1966 - 68 on the leak repair crew for the gas company in Meadville. They would hire a bunch of college guys and pick out the three dumbest looking ones and send them out with a "regular guy" and a truck full of jack hammers and a shovels and tell us to fix 'em. Our motto was, "The whole town's a floating bomb". I had many great times here and the hard work did me a world of good. One day though, as I was jack-hammering through blacktop and concrete on Park Avenue near Arch Street, I noticed a line at a pay phone across the street. Uh-oh. Yep, I had just drilled through two main trunk phone lines filled with thousands of twisted strands of wires. I put half the town out of phone service for a day. Fortunately for me, the phone company had told us where to dig and where not to dig. They were, however, tragically wrong. I might elaborate on this job later; it was a big part of my education.
12. Newspaper Stringer- Opps, chronologically this job belongs above in the high school era. I only did this a couple of times, so I nearly forgot. I took a journalism class in high school and was a big sports nut, so when the Tribune occasionally needed someone to cover the junior varsity football games, they would call on me. No one taught me anything about how to do it, so I made up my own system for keeping track of yardage, downs, points, etc. Mostly, I just made it up. But I got to see the games for free, and, on road trips, I got a free meal with the team.
13. McDonald's - I had to work in fast food sometime, right? This was another wham-bam, thank you mickey affair. I was living in Johnson City, New York and somehow got a job at the McDonald's in Endicott, which was about ten miles away. I had to hitchhike and take some public transportation, but the hours were killing me. And I resented that we had to work hard for no pay at the end of the night. We were paid for fifteen minutes to close but it always took at least half an hour and then if a bus rolled in, we opened up again - and did not get paid for the extra time. Half price meals did not make up for that.
14. Circuit Board Assembler - Back in my Johnson City days, the elite jobs were at the IBM plant in Endicott. Many seminarians worked a part-time evening shift from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. The jobs paid well and the work was easy. Young guys were quick and energetic. Since so many of us worked there, it was always easy to bum a ride. IBM was soaring in those days and many employees owned company stock that would frequently split and then go up again. Many people got rich on paper; we were just happy to have a job. One of my co-workers was someone named Orzel, who claimed that he struck out Roberto Clemente once when he was invited to spring training. I doubt it. Another co-worker quit to move to San Francisco where, he claimed, The Diggers would feed and clothe you for nothing. He was the first hippy that I ever met.
15. Psychiatric Aid - South Tower Five; Wilson Memorial Hospital, Johnson City, NY. Two blocks away from the Seminary. I worked here during my third seminary year. Night shift, 11:00 p.m to 7:00 a.m. It was perfect; the patients were heavily sedated so they slept all night while I studied and did my homework. Then I went to breakfast, then to class and then to sleep around 4 or 5:00. That worked out fine until I got on the baseball team and practices were at 4:00. It didn't matter; I was young and could always sleep when I got old. Like the gas company, this place has a million stories that I might add to later. I did attend during some electro-shock therapy sessions that I will never forget. And heard many heartbreaking and many funny stories. And there was that one chick who was in for nymphomania . . . .
16. Upholsterer - In the fall of 1968, the Seminary had moved from Johnson City, New York, to Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania. My friend, The Geeper, found us a job at a company that manufactured weight-lifting equipment. My job was to upholster the benches for bench-press kits. They gave me a bunch of red vinyl, some metal piping, some foam rubber and a pneumatic staple gun. Bang! Bang! I could whip out a third-rate bench in nothing flat.
17. Preacher - I lost my religion at that Seminary, but that is a story for another day. Before I had it completely driven out of me by the inanity/insanity of BBS, I did actually preach one sermon for pay. It was at a little country church, somewhere outside of Guys Mills, PA. One Sunday, the pastor was out of town and someone suggested my name. I was thrilled; I remember spewing some right-wing, anti-gun control blather which I assumed would be popular in rural Pennsylvania where the first day of deer season is a school holiday. Actually, I did not expect to be paid, but, at the end of the services, the good people turned over the day's collection to me. To this day, I am touched by this. How these good, salt-of-the-earth farmers put up with a hectoring 19 year old is beyond me. The were kind and gracious and I was young. That explains a lot.
18. Ampad - Actually, Ampad is a company and not a job. I just don't know what the job was actually called. Ampad is a manufacturer of paper tablets of all sorts. My primary job was to run a machine that counted how many pieces of paper went into a given tablet. I would have a pallet of paper and I would feed the paper counter and it would flag every 50 or so pages, and I would stack this on a different pallet. It was piece work and I could never do it as fast as the woman on the day shift. This was in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where I moved to an apartment with my friend, the future musican JP Jones, after we left the seminary. We were the only native English speakers in a Puerto Rican apartment building above Becker's Army-Navy store. (I think it was an Army-Navy store, but I might be mis-remembering). That is where I had my 1960 Buick Electra that didn't have reverse gear. It was a bitch to park . . . .
19. Conneaut Lake Park - This was not a steady gig for me, but, at the end of the summer they always needed extra help and one of my co-workers at the gas company had an in there, so I often worked Labor Day weekends. I would start the day sweeping the park with other college students and we would discuss what life would be like after the revolution as we pushed broom. Things were bound to get a whole lot better after we were put in charge! Meanwhile, I ran the Dodge 'ems and the Wild Mouse. Not as easy as you might think. In addition to collecting tickets, I had to operate the machinery. That meant running into the middle of the Dodge 'em floor, dodgeing 'em the best I could, to help untangle stuck cars. I would have to hold onto the hot rail that ran to the ceiling and steer with my other hand. I felt like a cowboy. As for the Wild Mouse, it had no automatic braking system; so, as I was loading passengers into one car, I had to watch out for other cars streaking to the finish line. If I did not apply the air brakes, they would come shooting through and crushingly bang into the car that was loading, knocking people down and sending them screaming and terrified on their way. That only happened once that I can remember. I also had the revolving parachute ride revolving the wrong way, since some way too heavy guys unbalanced the damn thing. Many other adventures in my brief career. I hope it is not gone for good.
20. House Lister - In the summer of 1969, I was back in Meadville, out of Seminary, and headed for Allegheny College. I got a job with Allied Appraisal Company, which the county assessor's office had hired to do a reappraisal of properties throughout the county. This was a great job and it paid well for a summer job. I got to drive all over the county and measure houses using an 8' pole. I got to go through peoples houses and list their hardwood floors, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, etc. The trouble was, only a few people were home during the day so we were directed to guess about things if we couldn't find anyone at home. This must have led to some fairly preposterous postings. I had one funny incident. And old Italian woman who lived on water street happily invited me into her house and offered me some fresh baked bread an other treats. Yum! In her broken English way, she kept telling me how wonderful the house was, constantly exaggerating the quality of the woodwork, the stairways, the bathrooms, etc. Since I was enjoying her food so much, I kept trying to play these comments down; I wanted to lower her appraisal for assessment purposes, not raise it, but she was mightily persistent and she kept shoving the fresh bread and butter my way. Finally, as I was getting ready to leave, her adult son came home for his lunch and was stunned to find me there. When I told him who I was and why I was there, he started to tell me how run down the place was. I told him that his mother didn't think so; she told me it was practically a mansion. He turned to her and they had an agitated/animated conversation in Italian; then the woman looked at me with daggers! It turns out, she thought that I was the appraiser from the Office of Urban Renewal who was supposed to come to offer them money to tear down the house to make room for housing for the elderly! No wonder she was bragging about the place! I was lucky to escape with my bread and my life.
21. Crudder - I had a scholarship at Allegheny so I did not really have to work to pay tuition. My summer jobs got me my spending money, and I lived with mom and dad for room and board. I occasionally found work typing papers for friends, which I won't count here for job purposes. But I did work sometimes at a real job in the college dining hall. Often on Saturday evenings they needed help with clearing the plates at the end of the meal. That was the Crudder's job; tossing the leftovers into the trash and putting the dishes into a dishwasher tray. Saturday night was the best night to work since I got a free meal and Saturday was steak day. One night, I grabbed many of the leftover steak bones, many with lots of beef still attached, and set them aside. I took them home and filled up the freezer and parceled them out to my wonderdog, Brendel, who ate steak nearly every night for the next two years.
22. Camp Counselor - Camp Clearpool (aka Camp Cesspool) in Carmel, New York, was a place that was dedicated to providing a place for inner-city New York kids to get out of town for a week or two in the summer. Many Allegheny students worked there. This was the year of the worst infestation of tent caterpillers ever witnessed by humans. They were everywhere. You couldn't walk anywhere in camp without squashing some; you couldn't sit, you couldn't eat, breathe or pee without a tent caterpiller landing on you. The kids in the camp were 75% black; 20% Hispanic; 4.99% white. There were two Jewish kids in the camp and they were in my cabin; along with 2 blacks; 2 hispanics; one Italian and one Irishman. I had the only mult-ethnic cabin in the whole place. A great learning experience; I still remember those boys forty years later. Mostly I learned to run the little buggers all day until they collapsed; then tell them the most boring night-time story I could think of, so they dozed off in 3 microseconds, then escape into town for pizza and beer with my fellow counselors.
23. Teaching Assistant - SUNY Binghamton. I hated that place. Made some nice friends, but was out of my element. I was not a good teaching assistant, and I had led too sheltered a social life in Meadville and the Seminary to adjust to the much more intense atmosphere at Binghamton, which was 99% NYC shits who would have been Yankee fans if they had the slightest interest in baseball. I lived in a motel across the highway from the campus, so I was the only one with cable tv an a pool and a freshly made bed every day. But I wasn't up to the job of teaching these sharks. I did correct one batch of term papers, which I managed to lose in the campus bar one night. The next, hungover, morning I wandered back to the bar where some good soul had found the papers and set them aside and saved my sorry butt. I met lots of fellow grad students there that I liked; and I liked the prof that I was supposed to help. But Binghamton was not for me. So I dropped out, moved back in with my parents, and soon began courting my best friend's slightly-ex girlfriend. Why she thought that I had a future of any sort is beyond me.
24. Gas Station Attendant - I worked pumping gas a couple times. During this time, I worked for my cousin Scott who managed a gas station on Baldwin Street. Our gas was expensive, the station was dumpy, and we had no mechanic, so we didn't do much business. I was still a budding intellectual, so I thought that the best use of my time was to sit behind the old desk in the Salvation Army swivel chair and read Kierkegaard and Tolstoy. Later, I was shown that I should have been sweeping the empty lot, washing the windows and cleaning the bathroom. I had other ideas, like getting married and moving to Montana and running amok under the Big Sky. I did learn one important lesson at that station: do not ever, EVER, EVER remove a customer's gas cap and lay it on any painted surface of his automobile.
25. Campground Clerk - Essentially, I checked people into a public campground near Pymatuning Lake. I only worked here a week because I had previously made plans to run off to Montana with my soon-to-be wife, Paula. This was only to earn enough gas money to get to Massachusetts to get married and then to cross the country. Since it poured rain the entire week, we had very few happy campers. There was one very happy family that arrived on a Saturday for a week, but went hope soaked and angry on Tuesday morning. It must have been while I was working here that I was inspired to purchase my first permanent shelter: a two-person tent. That was what we lived in until we finally did reach Montana and found an apartment.
26. Trash Bag Salesman - Ah, Montana! Big Sky Country! Real Cowboys! Real Mountains! I was looking around for a way to score a little cash when I found an intriguing want ad that offered a good paying job working for charity if I had my own transportation. It turned out that - supposedly at least - our posse of underachievers were working for the JayCees, selling plastic trash bags door-to-door. We picked up out stash of bags at a dubious motel and then fanned out all over Great Falls. We met up at the end of the night when we would be paid in cash from the receipts. Our leader, I believe, who looked like an albino Charles Manson, had some mighty fine weed that he also appeared to distribute, but I was not a part of that. I never saw anyone involved who looked remotely like a JayCee.
27. Big Bear Army/Navy Cowboy Store - I found "permanent" work later that summer of 1972 selling cowboy boots, hats and supplies along with down jackets and a mish-mash of army/navy surplus. I originally got hired because the Big Bear store was re-locating and needy sturdy bodies to carry the boxes. Big Bear paid minimum wage and we all worked a 48 hour week. Christmas eve was on a Sunday that year so I thought we would finally have two days off in a row, but the greedy bastards decided we had to work that one Sunday of the year. That was, I believe, the day after Franco Harris' Immaculate Reception. I got laid off as a result of my quiet whining about the long hours, low pay, lack of benefits, etc. There was a mutual parting of the ways.
28. Harris Poll Canvasser - After getting laid off by Big Bear the day after Christmas for being an agitator for such selfish modern concepts as a 5 day work week and a raise above minimum wage and for having a Christmas Eve Sunday off (we were the only store open downtown - things might be different today) (that must have really irked me if I can still remember what day of the week that Christmas landed on nearly 40 years ago. May the Bear family rot in their lousy money bin) Anyway, we were both out of work so we packed all our belongings in a microscopic U-Haul trailer and took off and landed in Springfield, Oregon. The only work that I could find here was temporary (like that was something unusual) and that was canvassing neighborhoods in Eugene for the Harris Poll. I remember that it covered the drinking habits of average Americans. I thought, as did some of my respondents, that some of the questions were vaguely insulting. But no one tossed me out, and, after the survey was finished, Harris and Co. moved on and I bought several drinks with my profits.
29. Gas Station Attendant - Hey, I failed at this once before; surely I could do it again? I worked for a few days subbing for someone at the Mobil station in Westborough, MA. I fit in like a square peg in a round hole. These guys were greaseheads; I was still hoping to be an intellectual. I did nearly get into a fight with a customer who refused to believe that we were closed. That's about the only thing I remember other than a certain ineptness with the oil spout. There was a trick to it that I never learned, so a few people drove a way with oil all over their engines. I should have stuck to academics.
30. Sportswriter - If I had found a good job in Oregon, we would have likely stayed on the west coast since Oregon was like a little piece of heaven. But we knew no one and had no special skills, so we took our tax return and headed east and moved in with Paula's parents in Holden, Massachusetts, while I hunted for a job. The first interesting one that I was able to land was as a sports reporter for The News Recorder, a twice-weekly local. My job mostly consisted of interviewing members of high school sports team and quoting as many of the players as possible so their parents would buy our paper. My editor, Dave Maril, was a great guy and really wanted to put together a good sports section. The owner was, naturally, mainly interested in selling papers. I had to write two or three articles twice a week and that was harder than it sounds. But, the biggest drawback was that I had to work nearly every Friday night, Saturday and many Sundays because that's when the schoolboy games were played. That really cut into our social life. My strongest memory from this job was of the only full staff meeting called by the publisher. He went all around the room, asking everyone about their current stories and how it was going. Then he got to the reporter who covered Millbury. The reporter had done a real hatchet job on the guidance department at the Millbury High School for the previous edition. He had lots of quotes from students. What he did not have was a quote from the guidance department itself. If he had bothered with that, he would have found that the guidance counslor was, indeed, the publisher's wife. Oops. Jouralism's darkest hour. Well, after too many weekends spent with high school atheletes, Paula led me to believe that there might be better career opportunities out there.
31. Engineering Clerk - I worked for New England Bell Telephone where I kept records of where all the telephone cables ran throughout Worcester County. I was the first man hired for this job; across the divide from we clerks were the engineers, who were, of course, all men. I had to take field notes from the engineers and installers and transcribe them onto large mylar plats that went over hill and dale throughout the county. The office was just a few blocks from the public library, which I would sometimes visit on my lunch hour. One day, while I was picking out a book, I overheard a couple of old men talking about books and how much they liked coming to the libary. That is when I got my inspiration for becoming a librarian. I hadn't the slightest idea that there was such a thing as a "professional librarian", but I looked at some career books and saw some opportunites in the field. I made an appointment with the Library Director at the Worcester library to get some career counseling. His name was Joe Hopkins, and after a long and cordial discussion, it came out that Joe's first library job was as director of the Meadville Public Library! He was the director there when I was in High School! Small world!
32. Library Aide - I was accepted to the University of Rhode Island and Simmons College. For the price of tuition at Simmons, I could pay room, board and tuition and live on the ocean to boot at URI. Mr. Hopkins told me it didn't matter where I went for my MLS so that decision was a no-brainer, something I was uniquely qualified for. I had a great time at URI; made many good friends and learned a few things. While there, I worked in the Rodman Reserves library which was housed in the old gym. I still fondly remember working there with Linda, who was my immediate supervisor, and I remember and Indian beauty named Rachel who I adored. For a while I lived in the attic of an old mansion in Jamestown, on Conanicut Island, and hitch-hiked to classes ten miles away (Paula needed the car to drive to work in Cranston). Later on, we moved to a little cottage where we could easily walk a few blocks in any direction and bump into salt water. Itnurtured a love for saltwater that has never abated.
33. Library Director - My first "career" position was Director of the Westborough, Massachusetts, Public Library. My primary accomplishment there was to design and build a library addition that would triple the floor space of the building and bring it up to speed for a booming community. I was 26 years old, and, outside of working part-time at the URI library as a lowest-level clerk while taking a full-time load working for my masters degree in Library Science, I had never worked in a library. I got the job when the woman they first selected had bogus references; at least mine were legit. We did get that building done, and I did learn everything they didn't teach me in library school, and I grew up in this job where, with a couple of exceptions, everyone in the building was old enough to be my mother. For the most part, they were patient with me and we had a wonderful library. It was through the library that I met and became great friends with the poet, Fran Quinn, who went on to become our bookmobile driver. I cannot recall all of the adventures in growing up that we had together; but, maybe a few of them will prove interesting enough to document another time. Some of them might involve Fran's creative use of the date-due stamp with some of his customers on the bookmobile. . . . .
34. Bookstore Owner - My wife at that time (Paula), was manager of a local book store called Annie's Book Swap. The idea was that you could bring in your used paperbacks and get store credit toward purchasing the used paperbacks that other customers had brought in. That way you could buy a book for about 1/4 of its list price; and when you finished reading it, you could trade it back in toward more books. It was a pretty good system, but the owner decided she could make more money by selling franchises than by selling selling books. Paula decided that she would rather run her own store than manage someone else's, so we bought one of the first franchises. Paula had done much of the training for the new owners of the early franchises so she really knew the ropes. While I kept my job at the library, I was head of maintenance at the store and eventually worked many Saturdays in order to make a little extra cash to buy stereo equipment. Years later, we opened a second store and Paula and I ran them together. It turned out that we could make a decent living doing this, but we could not make enough to save any money for the future. So I eventually went back into library work, after I sold stereos for nearly ten years.
35. Stereo Sales Manager/installer - After nearly ten years as a library director, I was a burnt-out basket case and needed to move on or move out. One evening, Jeff Boccaccio, owner of The Stereo Shoppe of Newton, MA, delivered a pair of speakers to my house. He was stressed to the max to say the least; I offered him a martini to enjoy while we listened to my new purchase. He had never had a martini before, and the silky liquor had a wondrous effect. Before long, he was telling me how incredibly busy he was; business was booming and he was going crazy because his only employee had just left him in the lurch, leaving he and his wife Patty to do everything. Well, by the end of the second martini, I had a job offer and a new career. Little did I know that I was about to begin the most scintillating, fascinating, demanding, insane and fun-filled era of my life. There is no one on the planet like Jeff Boccaccio; working with Jeff was like working with Mt. St Helens, Hurricane Katrina, Mother Teresa, King Kong, and Robin Williams rolled into one. My jaws still ache from all the laughter; my brain still sizzles from all I learned. I learned more in the first year with Jeff than in twenty years of formal schooling. I will need to come back to this.
36 . Reference Librarian/Assistant Director - To keep the chronology straight, after I left the Stereo Shoppe, I worked at our Annie's and then opened a second Annies. I had some aspirations of becoming a fiction writer, and wrote one or two pieces, but, I ended up having to work at the stores a lot more than either of us had anticipated. After a few years of this, it was clear that we needed the medical and retirement bennies that a real job would provide. So I looked into returning to libraries. It was a great stroke of luck that there was a desirable opening at the Gale Free Library in Holden, the very place where I had checked out a book on careers in libraries back in the 1970's. I have worked there since May of 1996, first as Head of Reference Services, and then as Assistant Director. It was here that I met my second and final (not to mention very, very favorite) wife, Susannah. That makes this job the best one that I ever had; it's my intention that it will be my last.
I think that is it, but surely I have missed a paycheck or two somewhere along the way. If you remember working with me somewhere on a job not on this list, please drop me a line and I will be happy to squeeze it in.
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