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IT’S A COMMON BELIEF that a young person’s first job is important because it teaches life lessons about work and the value of money. There’s a reason this belief is so common: It’s largely true.
Still, letting a young person loose in the world to learn lessons isn’t as straightforward as you might think. I learned the following seven lessons from my first job—some useful, some decidedly less so.
Lesson No. 1: Avoid Celery
My first job was picking strawberries. I thought this was a real job because it lasted for the whole season—several weeks—on a real farm. I was 10 years old.
Early each morning, an old school bus owned by the farm drove through town stopping at certain locations to pick up whichever kids wanted to work. The bus would take us to the fields. We’d get paid at the end of the day, and the bus would drive us back to where we were picked up.
I’d get up a little before 6 a.m. and make myself lunch: a sandwich, an apple, a piece of cheese, orange Tang in a thermos—just like the astronauts—and, because my mother said I had to, some sort of vegetable, such as a carrot or celery stick. Then I’d walk the eight blocks to the country store where my bus stop was.
Work lesson No. 1: I really didn’t like eating celery. The kids often traded food at lunch, but nobody liked celery. It was a worthless bartering item. After I stopped picking strawberries, it was another 40 years before I ate any more celery. When I did, it tasted pretty good. The celery lesson was a bum steer.
Lesson No. 2: Who Makes the Rules
By the second half of my first day, I did learn something about work. We picked strawberries into wooden containers called flats. When you filled the flat, you took it to the scales at the edge of the field. If your flat weighed enough, your pay card got punched. If it didn’t, you had to go back to your row and pick more berries to fill it.
I noticed right away that if your flat was heavier than the minimum, they didn’t let you take some berries out and put them in your next flat. Variations in the weight of your flat didn’t count unless they counted against you.
Work lesson No. 2: The guy writing the checks makes the rules.
Lesson No. 3: Class Struggle
It took two years before I started pondering the fact that not all of my grade-school classmates picked strawberries. The people in my town seemed uniformly similar to me until then. But in truth, there were economic class differences. Yet even after I realized that some kids spent the summers swimming at the country club and others worked picking strawberries, I didn’t think much about it. I liked some country club kids and didn’t like others, and the same for the kids who picked strawberries. Not only that, some of the kids picking strawberries were from families with country club memberships.
Work lesson No. 3: I saw no consistent correlation between a person’s character and how much money their family had. That was a useful life lesson.
Lesson No. 4: Managing Managers
Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure that the farm was picking up kids to work mostly as a public service, giving every kid in town who wanted it the chance to work. The farm was building character through the economic miracle of child labor. If you had asked me if I thought my character was being improved as I inched my way down a row of strawberries on my hands and knees, picking clean as the beating sun turned the dirt to dust, I probably would have just laughed at you.
One day, I noticed the foreman looking over my row. The foreman tended to check anyone further along in their row than other kids to make sure the fast kid was picking cleanly. When he reached me, I was sitting in the dirt, eating my sandwich, even though it was only 10:30 a.m.
“What are you doing?” he said. A good sign: If he found spots I hadn’t picked well, he would have said that first.
“I got hungry, so I’m eating,” I said. I held out my punch card. “I’ve already picked more than the day’s quota. I’ll pick some more, soon as I’m done eating.”
He tilted his head, pondering this. “Okay.” He walked off to check someone else’s row.
Work lesson No. 4: Do your work faster and better than other people, and eventually management leaves you alone.
Lessons Nos. 5 and 6: Seeing and Believing
A couple of years into strawberry picking, I noticed that Susan Dooley also picked strawberries each summer. She was in my grade. Seeing her pick strawberries, while also sometimes surreptitiously eating one, caused me to suspect for the first time that “girl germs,” a widely believed-in and much-feared phenomenon amongst my male peers, was not real.
I was shocked by this thought, because everyone knew about girl germs. But then Susan Dooley would eat another strawberry and the whole idea of girl germs suddenly seemed stupid.
Work lessons Nos. 5 and 6: You don’t have to believe in an idea just because someone else does, and you don’t have to keep believing what you believe if sufficient evidence tells you you’re wrong.
Lesson No. 7: The Road to Riches
At the end of the day, the farm’s family matriarch set up a card table at the edge of the field with a cash box on it. We’d file by and give her our punch cards, and she’d pay us in cash.
When I was dropped off at the country store after work, I’d go in and spend some of my earnings. Many kids spent much of their money, but I had a system. I’d spend whatever change was left above the last half dollar. If I made $9.70, I’d spend 20 cents, saving the $9.50. If my spare change one day wasn’t enough to get what I wanted, I’d add it to the next day’s spare change and spend it then.
The good comic books—Spiderman, Fantastic Four, The Hulk, The Silver Surfer—cost 15 or 25 cents, depending on the issue size. Big Hunk candy bars cost five cents. At the end of each season, I put all of the money I’d saved in a savings account. I was saving for college.
When I went off to college, I decided to sell the comic books. To my surprise, by then they were worth about twice as much as all the money I’d saved from three seasons of picking strawberries plus the interest earned on those savings.
Work lesson No. 7—the most rigorously data-based lesson from my first job—was: Saving money doesn’t pay. Comic books are the true road to riches. This was likely not the lesson my parents were hoping I’d learn from my first job. But fortunately, unlike the “avoid celery” lesson, I didn’t wait 40 years to unlearn the “saving money doesn’t pay” lesson.
David Johnson retired in 2021 from editing hunting and fishing magazines. He spends his time reading, cooking, gardening, fishing, freelancing and hanging out with his family in Oregon. Check out David’s earlier articles.
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While it wasn’t my first real job (I used to sell seeds & Christmas cards door to door and also delivered newspapers) my first job working for a “real” company was is the restaurant business, trying to save for college. I HATED the job, but unlike today jobs were hard to find. I would complain to my Mom every time I was leaving for work. Her advice was always the same: “Remember how much you hate this job when you go to college. Find a career you like. You don’t want to go to a job you hate for 40+ years.” So, not exactly learned on the job, but learned from the job (& my Mom!).
In my family it was blueberries…. we all picked blueberries in the summer. $.10 a pound was the going rate. With my coffee can tied around my neck…. would pick all day to fill one 15 lb. basket. $1.50 for a day’s work….
Excellent article. Your observations resonated with my youth and the jobs I held.
I have one observation on your third lesson, on the class struggle. I fully agree that there is no consistent correlation between a person’s character and how much money their family had.
But I did learn one lesson after I had been at my college for a year or two. I saw differences between people from “old money” families, and people from “new money” families. (I was from a “no money” family.) I found the “old money” kids to be unassuming, modest and accepting of everyone, and they never talked about their financial position. In contrast, I saw that the “new money” kids liked to show off their possessions, and they found ways to brag about how well off they were. Of course, this wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but it occurred often enough that it has stuck with me all these years.
Celery DOES kinda suck. I diced some up for the potato salad I brought to the family 4th of July BBQ, but other than that, I don’t really see the point.
Interesting article. I can relate. My first job was selling concessions at minor league baseball games at age 10. There were child labor laws but they were not strictly enforced. I had a lot of different jobs growing up and I believe, like you, I learned a lot from them.
Later in life, I was an IT director. One of my vendors was an Indian who had immigrated to the US and was now a US citizen. He had US and Indian based staff. He had a lot of interesting things to say about Indian workers vs US workers. One thing he said was that Indian college grads are less mature than their US counterparts. He attributed this to the fact most Indian college grads have no work experience before graduation, whereas most US college grads will have lots of work experience while they are in school. We learn a lot from that work experience even though it usually has nothing to do with our college major.
VERY enjoyable article, David. Had me grinning several times.
Lesson 7 for me was about two non-tangible riches… benefits of working in a restaurant kitchen. The first was picking up some basic cooking skills at age 14 that mightily impressed my dates when I was 24 and 34. My kitchen flourishes generated some… return benefits.
But second, watching the line cooks and broiler guys — mostly Mexican immigrants, mostly undocumented — work the line on a 90-degree summer day with no air conditioning in the kitchen gave me an enormous respect for the work ethic of people who consider it a privilege to come to this country. I have had that respect reinforced a thousand times over the subsequent 50 years, but never more strongly than what I felt for those guys in front of the gas stoves at the Pickle Barrel.
I agree with you completely.
In an early draft of this article–one even more wordy than this one, if you can believe it–I discussed the reason that I knew that the strawberry farm was giving kids a chance to work as a public service was that most of the volume picking was being done by Mexican migrant workers. They were in fields next to ours, and they were living in a tent camp down by the Willamette River, adjacent to the fields.
Though they weren’t picking in our fields, I could watch them. They were unbelievably fast and hard-working. Even their kids worked and almost all of the kids picked faster than I did. I would pick a couple of kids and try to keep up with them–you could see how many flats they were bringing to the scales. It was not easy and I wasn’t fiddling around.
I’d been raised to believe that a person’s willingness to work hard and the ability to do it well and fast and steady over the shift were critical elements in judging a person’s character. Those folks had an intense work ethic by any measure.
Such an entertaining and useful article, David. Well done!
I started working after school and on weekends in high school, worked every summer through college, and then full-time for the next 40+ years. Everything from stock boy, retail store clerk, hotel,porter, taffy puller at an amusement park, trash collector on the night shift, loading and unloading boxes in a warehouse, electrician’s helper, and an endless list of other such jobs. At best, some of them were tolerable; most, though were pretty odious. And yet, looking back, they were all useful. They helped me focus on the value of education and the fact that once I was done with school and ready for full-time work (I was a lawyer), I wanted a job that was mentally challenging. It was also important to not do work where I’d be counting the hours until the day was done as was the case in my summer and part-time jobs. An invaluable life lesson learned. And so much better to learn it at an early age.
Great article! Lesson Number 4 – Managing Managers – is golden. Everyone should understand that concept.
Great article David. It got me reminiscing about the many jobs I help in my youth. The closest I came to farming was occasionally my buddies and I would help a local farmer load hay bales on a trailer. We would walk behind his trailer and throw the bales up to some of our buddies who would stack them. It made me learn how debilitating an allergy to hay can be.
David – I sold my baseball card collection in the early 1970’s to help pay for college. It included early Mantle, Koufax, Aaron and Maris cards, but they were well worn. I’d bet we’d love to still have those comics and baseball cards today.
One of the baby sitters for my brother and I lived down the street from us. She was about 10 years older than I was, and she had a brother who was 10 or 12 years older than she was. When her brother moved out, he left boxes and boxes and boxes of comics. Our baby sitter discovered that if she brought over a box and let us read the comics when she babysitted, we’d just sit there and read the entire time and not bother her.
About half of her brother’s comics were old Superman comics, mostly from the 1940s and early 1950s, I think. I don’t know what happened to them, but I shudder to think how much they declined in value from the grubby little fingers of the Johnson brothers as we rifled through them.
My first real job (not counting my paperboy gig when I was 12) was washing dishes. I had to bike the 5 miles to get to the restaurant. The low man on the totum pole got stuck cleaning the pots and pans. And they required alot of scrubbing and sweating. Once you have a batch cleaned, someone dumped another load into the sink. Sweated my you-know-what off for $1.75 per hour. It was a great life lesson.
I did restuarant work too, starting with dishwashing. Adds another layer of amusement to watching today’s celebrity cooking shows.
It was something. 8 months in and I was working when a December snowstorm hit during the evening. I attempted riding my bike home and made it about halfway. I remember carrying the bike the rest of the way. But saved enough to buy an old 66′ Belvedere with a slant six for $225. Got a job bagging groceries at a supermarket. Best part was meeting girl cashiers my age. After closing, we would sneak out a few six-packs and meet up with the girls and have some “fun.” THAT was the best job that I ever had.
I did some grocery bagging too, August, but we never had any luck with the cashiers. They looked down on us bag boys because they knew what we were making. The assistant store manager and the meat manager had their pick of the cashiers.
Fun article, David. I worked evening shifts in a factory as a temp employee the summer after my freshman year of college…definitely learned some lessons of my own. You might have been on to something with lesson seven. I wonder how much your comic books would be worth today?
I’ve tried to stop torturing myself about what I’d have made if I put all my money into comics.
It helps that in 1979, the spring of my senior year in high school, my younger brother told me about this company that might go public soon and he thought “it might be a good idea to invest in it, if we had any money.” It was a weird thing for a sophomore in high school to say.
I’ve always taken my brother seriously when he talks about money, but I didn’t come close to taking his suggestion, because at that point I’d saved almost $8,000 from summer jobs on ranches and logging crews (and comic book sales) for college.
I more seriously thought about buying a house, renting out extra rooms to college students to make the mortgage, and seeing if I could find a used backhoe and go into business as a backhoe guy.
Went to college instead.
Not sure how the backhoe idea would have worked out, but investing 8K, as my brother suggested, in Apple Computers when they went public in late 1980 would have worked out okay. Missed that one.
Like the comic books, there’s a high probability that you (or most any of us, really) would’ve sold out Apple too soon. So don’t beat yourself up too bad for missing that one 🙂
Good job teasing out some helpful lessons from hard work in a humorous form. Number two took me too long to learn, but applying it across the spectrum of my life has brought a lot of peace.