My father was a contractor who put me to
work while I was in junior high school,
so we were about the same age. When I joined
the Navy right out of high school, it’s
more like I was finally running away.
I sometimes tell people I was a “draft dodger”, I joined the Navy at seventeen to avoid the draft. Actually I joined to get away from the forty acres where I had walked behind a plow since I was ten or maybe even younger. I know I had work to do from the time I was big enough to pick up a single piece of firewood and carry it up the front steps to a wooden box on the porch. By age fourteen I was an experienced farmhand and expected to go and do what needed doing without supervision. If I was lucky I got a chance to help a neighbor or relative for a few days during the summer and make maybe three dollars for a day in the hot sun. Navy boot camp was more like a vacation than my summer “vacation” from school ever was. Of course, according to my father, my youth was a bed of roses compared to his.
My dad was a contractor too. As a little kid I would be out at his projects. One of my jobs starting when I was REALLY little was to rescue bricks that the brick layers had dropped. “Each one is about 25 cents - if you saw a quarter on the ground you’d pick it up - right?”
Another job I had was to straighten out bent nails. It was only years later that I figured out that was just to keep me busy!
Scrapping drywall off the base flooring. “You may think this is a lousy job - but it’s probably the most important job to do on the whole site. If you don’t get it all up and nice and smooth, the final flooring will move, the nails will work out, and the floor will squeak. That’s the main fault that people will notice.”
One of my early jobs was to sort out the lumber that arrived on site as to what was straight or not. And the warped stuff got sent back. I probably did that for 8 years during the summers. Early on there were the few odd boards that got sent back. Those later years, I bet 1/3 of the load would get sent back! I think my dad said they didn’t have the big trees like they used to have.
As a kid (and the son) I got all of the menial tasks. Hot dusty drywall scraping. Digging a drainage ditch in the rain. Building retaining walls with the gooey black tar getting all over you.
Every time he’d come over and see how things were going he’d say “Well - now you know what you don’t want to do when you grow up!”
I joined in my Junior Year,
GED and Air Force Radio Man!
I escaped also,
Three hots and a Cot
Looked real good to me.
When I got out of high school (and flunked out of my first year of college) my father told me I should join the Navy. Maybe he wanted me to run away! :I