24  Earning money

Although I never felt poor, money was always something my family needed to watch carefully. Later I would hear about truly poor families, those who had to go light on food at the end of the month, and I couldn’t relate because it never seemed that food, of all things, would be something to be rationed. In the middle of farm country, there was never a shortage of fresh food; people gave us stuff, not because they thought we needed it, but because there was so much extra that it made sense to share.

Still, money was not the type of thing to be given to children without a specific purpose – school lunch money, for example – so if there was a purchase we wanted, we needed to find our own money. Christmas and birthdays were one source, but for real freedom we knew we had to earn it ourselves. Fortunately, this was easy to anyone willing to work for it.

My brother was the first to find his own income. Mr. Swenson, an older man in our neighborhood, ran the newspaper delivery services for Neillsville and Gary became the delivery boy for a paper route. It paid by the delivery – on the order of a few cents per newspaper per day – but once you accumulated a few dozen customers, as he did, and were willing to work six or seven days a week, the income easily surpassed whatever any of us could expect from gifts.

Gary setting out on his newspaper delivery route.

As soon as another route opened in our neighborhood, I grabbed the chance too. My route wasn’t as many customers as my brother’s, but it was still good pay as far as I was concerned. Over time, between us we accumulated additional customers as other neighborhood paper boys grew older and dropped out, leaving the routes to us. Later an even bigger opportunity came, to deliver a weekly free classifieds paper (“The Shopper”). We had to deliver to every house, and this time we were paid by the insert as well, which came as a separate pile of papers and needed to be added to each paper before delivery. It was boring, manual labor but I learned to see every one of those papers, not as a tedious chore, but as income: a tiny downpayment on bigger and better things.

A paper route requires getting up early in the morning, every single day, good weather and bad. We had to be responsible, not only for delivering the papers in good condition to each household, but for collecting and tracking the money from subscribers. If we wanted more money, we could also walk the neighborhood door-to-door and find more subscribers, a sales job that I hated, but was absolutely part of the business.

Besides carrying newspapers, as we became older we found other jobs in the neighborhood: raking leaves, shoveling snow, mowing lawns, and occasionally a more substantial offer for another labor-intensive job cleaning a field or something. None of these jobs was particularly well-paying, certainly not by today’s standards, but it was real money and I learned to pay attention to every penny.

Although there were minimum wage and other laws, such legal technicalities were irrelevant to our job-by-job work. Our payments came in cash, without deductions for taxes or fees. We didn’t report anything to the IRS – we didn’t even know how – and if anything the idea of submitting a tax form would have filled us with pride, something to prove our adulthood.

We learned about earning income this way my father, who also worked odd jobs. His meager pastor’s salary, less than $1,000 per month in 1970s money, was barely enough to live on, so he supplemented it with whatever extra money he could find. When I was younger, he roofed houses – a hot, backbreaking, and often dangerous job that he rarely did without a partner. Later, and more regularly he would paint houses, and sometimes I would go to the site with him, mostly to watch (apparently my mother believed the job was too dangerous for a young boy).

Our father earned his main side income in the woods. Rural Wisconsin, with its abundant forests, has long been a land of loggers. Paper mills were always ready to buy cut timber, and the men of my family had several generations’ experience cutting trees. I think my father was born with a chainsaw in his hands, and throughout his life few things gave him more pleasure than the sight of large trees ready to be harvested.

Throughout our childhood, he teamed up with another pastor, his best friend, who lived in another small town. They found work subcontracting for another man who had the big tree-moving equipment, a “skidder”, and contracts with paper mills to deliver the logs, each of which had to be carefully cut into eight-foot segments, called “sticks”, with the bark removed. Removing bark (“peeling”) was a tough job, but it wasn’t especially dangerous for kids, so my brother and I were soon recruited and I worked in the woods with my father most of the summers of my childhood, right up to the final year before I left for college.

Dad cut the trees and then paid us by the “stick”. When we were too young to peel, he recruited us to measure out the logs as he sliced the fallen tree trunk. As we grew older, we were given our own hand-sized crowbars to peel the bark and pile the logs for later skidding.

Each stick was worth five cents, and a reasonably strong and ambitious kid could do several dozen per hour, perhaps ending an eight-hour workday with several hundred sticks, or ten or twenty dollars, perhaps up to one hundred dollars per week. Older kids, once they mastered a chainsaw for themselves, could earn much more. For small town kids, without job possibilities at fast food or other service establishments, this was great money.

The work was very unpleasant. Getting to the worksite often required a significant hike through the woods – usually through thick brush, along clearings from previously-harvested trees. Mosquitoes and big, evil horse flies were a constant menace, made even more annoying while sweating in the hot sun. But the worst insect of all was the wood tick, a small creature that liked to burrow into clothing, then skin and could be difficult to remove. You wouldn’t find them until arriving home, by which time they had already begun sucking blood, leaving large itchy welts that persisted for days afterwards.

We cut the trees with gas-powered chainsaws so noisy that Dad issued each of us earmuffs to protect our hearing. The gasoline that had to be hauled into the woods as well, in large cans, and cans of oil too for lubricant. I was too young to touch the saws, but I’m sure Dad brought repair equipment as well. He carried two saws, and probably extra chains, to prepare for inevitable breakdowns.

Tree-cutting was itself as much of an art as a science, a skill my father developed with long experience judging wind conditions and the location of nearby trees. In a thick woods, there was a trick to deciding which trees to cut first: make sure they fall in the right direction and leave holes in the forest to make it easier to fell succeeding trees. A botched job of cutting one tree could increase the danger in cutting the next, because a tree that fell into another would now require a second tree to be cut, and possibly others after that, like dominos, each hanging dangerously high in the forest, potentially all collapsing at once on the helpless loggers below.

That my father did this successfully year and year out, was as much due to luck as to his long experience and apparent enjoyment in the work. When we pleaded him to slow down, or to take a few days off, he told us that his own father – my grandfather – had been an even harder worker.

The dangerous work produced its share of minor injuries: usually welts from branches that slapped into us unexpectedly, or cuts from peeling bark in places that were difficult to reach. Once, when I was in third or fourth grade, Dad had a serious accident: a deep chainsaw cut into his knee that required a doctor’s attention and long weeks of recuperation.

It was hard work, but monotonous, so to pass the time I began to amuse myself with a game that I played in my imagination. A “stick”, I imagined, was a year of my life – more precisely, the life of a fictional hero of mine. At age one – the first stick – perhaps something happened with his parents. At age two or three – the following sticks – came the first signs of precociousness, an inchoate musical ability breaking forth. Soon, as the sticks piled on, he was my age and quickly proceeding through school, skipping grades far faster than his peers, until by twenty he was out of college, on to a PhD, and further, farther in his career.

I don’t remember the details of my game, but besides driving away the monotony, I learned to look forward to these daily imaginations of the future. My hero would get older, wiser, richer, marry and have children, make fantastic accomplishments, each day better than the previous one. I was not nearly as fast or efficient a worker as, say, my brother who would routinely rack up a few hundred sticks a day. To me, reaching a hundred was a big milestone, rarely met by the end of the long day, which was just as well, since it kept me from needing to confront the mortality of my imagined hero figure, but just leave him comfortably into an old age while I thought about the money I’d collected that day and looked forward to even more the next.

My brother was better at earning money that I was. In addition to his larger paper route, he early on decided to get a “real job”, at the grocery store. Starting as a stock boy, over the years he developed a reputation as a reliable, hardworking employee and by the end of my time in Neillsville, the owner was seriously talking to him about joining the business.

24.1 The Neillsville Foundry

Our house was located at the outskirts of town, the very last house, separated by a field from a small steel foundry that provided good employment for hundreds of low-skilled workers in the area. One Spring day, my brother was asked if he’d like a job there too, for the summer. Since he already had a good position at the grocery store, he passed the information along to me and I eagerly accepted. So began my first major experience with the world of blue collar labor.

The foundry produced small metal objects, which is as close to an accurate description that I’m able to give. Perhaps it made parts for the other blue collar employer in Neillsville, the Nelson Muffler plant on the other side of town. Or maybe the objects were simply finished manufactured products useful for their own sake. Who knows. I only remember seeing the large steel smelting facility inside, and lots of metal molds in large sand pits.

I was hired to help dig out some of those sand pits, which apparently needed some attention after years of usage. There were other odd jobs around the factory too, like a field that was overrun with junk, and ancient supply rooms that needed clearing and sorting. Somebody in the factory had decided these tasks were perfect for some summer employees, and I – plus a half dozen other workers – became one of them.

I say half-a-dozen, because I vaguely remember there being several of us, but the only two I remember well were the person assigned to us as a “foreman” and a fellow classmate named Mark Dayton.

The foreman was the son of the town dentist, the older brother of a fellow student of mine. He himself was a student at UW Eau Claire, intending to be a dentist himself someday. This job was, to him, simply a way to earn some cash for college and expenses. This alone made him different from most of the other older workers, nearly all of whom thought of this factory as a career.

Mark Dayton was one of these. He got the job thanks to his older brother, who had been working at the factory for a number of years after leaving the army. Mark had no plans for college, and no real plans for what to do after high school, which was itself something he thought of as a parking place for himself until he left home and got a “real job”. He wasn’t a particularly good student, so I don’t think he would have minded dropping out of school entirely, if he had a permanent job offer from a place like this factory.

Mark and I became good friends. The work was lousy, lots of digging, lots of lifting; but there were breaks and frequent opportunities to talk, and it was natural for the two of us to spend our time that way.

One day Mark came to work with an announcement for me.

“I started something yesterday,” he said, proudly. The night before, in discussion with his parents, he had decided to pick up smoking. He showed me a new pack of cigarettes.

“Mom wants me to smoke the same brand as the rest of the family,” he said, “but I’m going to smoke Marlboros for a while instead. If I’m going to smoke, I want to taste something.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way, like somebody discussing the reasons for buying a specific brand of toothpaste or choosing a candy bar.

He wondered why I didn’t smoke – at least a few puffs now and then – and I tried to explain that I was concerned about lung cancer or other ailments. Of course, working as we were inside a filthy, smoke-filled factory, one where the management felt compelled to offer us face masks – it was hard to argue from a purely medical standpoint that cigarette smoking was a particularly bad habit.

He and many others at the factory offered me cigarettes, but when I refused, they never asked me again. I believed it was sinful, a violation of the Biblical commandment to treat the body as the “temple of the Lord”, a place never to be deliberately defaced. I realized even at the time that this commandment was subject to interpretation: we drank coffee and tea – hardly examples of healthy beverages – and for that matter, what about chocolate cake? Both of my grandfathers used tobacco – my paternal grandfather’s car perennially smelled of cigarettes, and my maternal grandfather enjoyed snuff—so I don’t think we were against smoking for any serious Biblical reasons as much as the simple fact that it seemed an expensive, wasteful, and generally unhygienic habit.

Even without cigarettes, I’m pretty sure that summer caused some strain on my lungs. We were issued face masks on the particularly dirty days, but even then, it seemed by the end of the day that every pore in my body was filthy. The pits we had to clean out were full of a fine sandy substance. Some of the pits seemed to have a different type of sand than the others; one in particular had a foul odor that I still remember. Even when I had been away from the factory for several days, I’d still find bits of this sandy powder coming out of my ears, or emerging from my nose. It was awful.

As awful as the labor was, on the other hand, the weekly paychecks were wonderful. Even after the various deductions (what is FICA anyway?), the total was more than months of delivering papers or mowing lawns. It felt like real money, too, earned through an official “job”, like a grownup. In those days, the odd jobs or the money earned from helping my father cut wood, didn’t feel as “real” for some reason. To be a serious job, you needed an hourly wage at a significant business, and for all its faults, the factory was definitely significant.

I had a goal in mind for the money I was earning: I wanted an Apple II personal computer. I had already carefully studied the prices and specifications, and the model I wanted was going to cost a bit over $1,000 including the color TV needed for a display. The purchase was well within my summer’s budget from my factory salary, and every day at the factory brought me a bit closer to my dream.

But just as suddenly as the offer had arrived at the beginning of the summer, the foreman one day made another announcement: our positions were being eliminated. I was laid off.

Suddenly, my dreams of saving money for the summer were shattered.

24.2 Odd Jobs

During the summer before my senior year, my father suggested we take advantage of the large empty field next to our house and grow a cash crop. Word at the time was that cucumbers were the way to go, so when Spring came, Dad found somebody with a tractor who tilled the field and made it ready for planting. We bought seeds and dutifully planted half an acre of cucumbers.

Agriculture is not an easy occupation, but somehow I ignored my father’s warnings about the importance of regular weed control and irrigation. The plants took longer to grow than expected, and by the end of the summer had produced far less than it would take to break even on our investment.

Cucumbers are sold to a distributor in town, who paid based on the size of the vegetables. Our field produced maybe one or two large sacks of cucumbers, but most of them were tiny and worth little. I remember bringing them to the distributor’s place and one-by-one inserting our crop into specially-measured holes, after which our results would be weighed. I no longer remember how much cash he gave us – perhaps $50 – but it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for all the trouble it took that summer.

Technically I was supposed to repay my father for the upfront costs of seed, fertilizer and the cost of tilling the field, but he had pity on me and let me keep the entire pitiful amount.

It takes a few years of growing before your crop starts to be profitable, he explained, a potential future that didn’t matter to me. I intended to leave town long before the next crop anyway.

24.3 Real Jobs

Despite our family’s history with family farming and the fundamentally entrepreneurial outlook that brings, I grew up thinking that “real” money came from a job with an employer and a steady paycheck. In Neillsville, as it is today for many teenagers, those jobs were in retail.

The ideal place to work was at the one fast food restaurant in town, the A&W root beer stand. The older, prettiest girls in high school seemed to get hired there, along with the best-looking guys who followed them. Although I supposed we Spragues might have liked to work there, it seemed like too much of a reach, so we never bothered to consider that as an option.

The town gas station was a more likely option. Before the oil crises of the 1970s precipitated the regulatory changes that allowed self-serve gasoline, boys were needed to pump gas. I knew an older boy who had worked there, but I was too shy to ask him about the process for finding a job there.

My brother was bolder. When, around age 16, he got serious about finding a part-time job, he approached all the places that seemed likely to hire. The gas station had no open spots, but Gary found more luck at our grocery store.

Neillsville had always had several small grocery stores, the largest of and oldest of which was a supermarket called the Neillsville IGA. Sometime when I was in elementary school, the IGA came under the ownership of Bob Solberg, who had begun his career operating a tiny competing dry goods store down the street from our house. We knew him partly through his daughters, Lisa (my grade) and Kim (Gary’s grade). Bob had a reputation as a hard-working, honest, and no-nonsense business man. Gary was a perfect fit.

Years later, when Bob looked back on the hundreds of employees he’d hired, he remembered Gary as the best of all. Always on time, reliable, focused on completing the necessary tasks rather than simply punching the clock.

The job paid well by Neillsville standards, and for a high school kid raised by frugal parents, Gary was soon saving lots of money.