Summer Maintenance Worker
by Henry Stimpson—Age 57—Wayland, MA
Billy told us right away he was the boss of our crew of high-school boys raking up city parks and playgrounds for the summer. “You do what I tell you to.” He had a dirty-blonde ducktail, tight black jeans, pointy boots and wiry arms.
Our real boss, John, was a stumpy Parks Department employee in his forties. He drove the dump truck while we sat in the rusty bed watching trees and telephone poles whiz past. Billy usually rode in the cab.
Under the blazing sun, we raked leaves, dead grass, weeds and Dixie cups from treeless playgrounds and ball fields. It was sweaty, dusty, and mindless—obviously beneath me, an honors student taking advanced classes, unlike all but one of the rest.
We were raking an old cemetery dotted with crabapple trees. Egged on by Billy, the greasers pelted me with a nightmarish barrage of tiny crabapples because they thought I wasn’t pulling my weight.
The next morning, Walter, the head of the Parks Department, called me over. In his fifties, Walter had ruddy jowls and bug eyes. We called him The Frog.
“I hear you don’t want to work,” he croaked. I said I did want to work. Flunking out of this stupid job would have been unthinkable. I was never pelted again, so I must have worked harder or put on a better show.
They sent us to clear brush and weeds from a little-used playground that sloped under the trees to a scrubby area. Soon, our hands and forearms were blotched with poison ivy. We complained to John.
Walter visited for a motivational talk. “There’s no poison ivy here.” He reached up, grabbed a low-hanging branch, pulled off an oak leaf, crumpled it and theatrically rubbed it on his fat, ruddy jowl. “See, I’m not afraid.”
My forearms soon bubbled with blisters, my skin turning into alligator leather. A few days later a caller said we’d been transferred to the Sanitation Department for the last few weeks of summer. No way I’d go on a garbage truck—despite the urging of the social worker who came to my house.
Back at school I ran into Loran, the other honors student. Why didn’t I take the job?
Collecting trash was much easier, he said, and if you got done early, you still got paid for a full day.
I made $205 in the summer of 1965.
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