Get a job…

For a kid like me, that pretty much meant Gengler’s.

Here it is … middle of May. College students are heading home for the summer; high school kids are in the grips of terminal senioritis, whatever grade they’re in – just putting in the time until the final bell rings and they’re free at last. Summer’s upon us … finally.

For those of tender years who’ve yet to take up the full mantle of adulthood, this traditional extended interlude between school bell and school bell is usually referred to as “Summer Vacation,” a designation that grows progressively more ironic as one passes beyond the middle school years. For them summer vacation is more accurately translated as summer job … a full-time preview of their life’s next half century quite possibly will be.

For most of us, our first job, first real job -- the kind of job that involved social security numbers, W4 forms, FICA deductions and the like -- was a summer job.

My own work history long preceded such formalities. My first job was probably something rather innocuous or even semi-useful Mom assigned me to as a toddler, something to keep me occupied and out of her hair while she did whatever it was she was needing to do. Then there were the parentally assigned tasks, chores and domestic labors I was put to do as a growing child and young adolescent — weeding carrots, digging potatoes, cutting the grass, and the such like. Once I got heavier than a hay bale, I’d get farmed out to do day labor come hay harvest, but that was strictly cash and carry, off the books, not a job Uncle Sam was aware of.

I learned young that real jobs are scarce in a small town, especially for a high school kid with no car, no particular skills, no real experience, and who wasn’t related to somebody who either owned a business or was the biggest customer of someone who did.

I fell into neither category.

For a kid like me, that pretty much left Gengler’s.

Now the official business name, the one registered with the Secretary of State and printed on the side of the shipping boxes, was Sno-Pac Foods, but everybody just called it Gengler’s because old Leo Gengler owned the place and his son, Ray, and daughter-in-law, Darlene, pretty much ran it. Truth be told, the place was really ahead of its time…back in the mid-1960s nobody except a few oddballs on the east and west coast were willing to pay a premium for ordinary enough corn and peas that hadn’t been fertilized with anything stronger than cow shit or sprayed with anything but God’s own rain. But somehow old Leo had gotten wind of this rather exclusive market for organic food, quit spending money on fertilizer and shipped all that Houston County could grow off to those folks who clearly had more money than common sense.

The hard fact is, the Minnesota harvest season for any vegetable crop is pretty much measured in days — weeks at the longest. That makes building and maintaining a processing plant that’s only going to run a fraction of a fraction of the year a rather dicey proposition, a lot of money tied up in building and equipment gathering dust. Old Leo came up with a way around that quandry. Back in the day, Sno-Pac Foods operated out of a ramshackle compound generally used as warehouses, storage sheds, garages for the county highway maintenance equipment, and other various and sundry purposes — none of which required the attention, much less approval of the state or county health department.

Then a few days before the peas were ripe or the sweet corn was ready to pick, the road graders and dump trucks would be rolled out to park on a nearby vacant lot and other odds and ends shuffled about to make room for the steam cooker, cooling tanks, sorting conveyors and packing tables. The place would be aired out and hosed down, better to accommodate an ad hoc food processing plant.

What the health-conscious east coast foodies didn’t know wouldn’t hurt ‘em.

Staffing the pop-up operation was equally ad hoc. Leo’s list of regulars included several retired bachelor farmers from the boarding house on Main Street, a half-dozen bored stay-at-home moms who no longer had any kids to stay at home for, three or four questionable characters who chronically had a hard time holding a job since the lunch they routinely drank pretty much minimized their usefulness for the remainder of the day.

To fill out the rest of the crew he’d pretty much hire whichever teenage boys wandered in looking to make a little cigarette money. For the most part these would be the pool hall boys, our local hoods, doing their best to out James Dean James Dean, but with limited success.

We just lived up the street and down the block from Gengler’s operation and Annabelle Dundee, one of Leo’s bored housewives ever since her only boy went off to join the Navy, lived across the street. I was into my fifteenth summer when she spotted me comfortable on front porch with a new book and waved me over to let me know Leo was hiring and I’d best get my butt down there instead of wasting the summer with my nose in a book. The fact that she had me firmly by the elbow marching me down the sidewalk made going along with her suggestion less of a voluntary enlistment than a shanghai or a draft.

Leo, a pudgy old shaven Santa with a sharp eye on the naughty list, looked up as Annabelle checked in with me in tow.

“You wanna job?” he rasped, looking around Annabelle to take a measure of me. “Pay’s a buck twenty-five an hour. Be here tomorrow morning at seven. Bring your social security number if you got one…if not, come anyway, Ray’ll put ya to work.”

I was hired.

Annabelle headed off to work.

Leo went back to what he was doing.

By the time the last of the corn went into the freezer I’d leaned where to sneak a cigarette, been the butt of more than a few rookie pranks, heard some really funny dirty jokes, and joined the rest of that motley crew for a belt of cheap whiskey at the end of the shift

The next summer, I was a regular.

For better or worse, until fairly recently, I’d pretty much had a job every summer since.

Spring, fall and winter as well.

At long last, summer’s here and I feel like a kid again

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