re: Jobs You Had as a Kid

Chopping cotton

paper route > grocery bagger > movie theater

Sorted and boxes tomatos at tomato farm.

Worked at Dairy Queen.

Swore I would never work in fast food again and never have.

First job. mixing chems for crop dusting at 13-14 years old.

Second job 14-15. Water proofing huge cotton storage sheds in Texas panhandle. First time smoking weed.....with a Mexican.

Third job 16-17. Working at a feedlot. Doctoring cattle, cleaning water tanks. Nasty job.

friend's grandpa was a cane farmer. this was before chopper harvesters. double row cutters would cut and stack full stalks, then would burn, then a grabber would come and load them to trailers. well, our job was to "scrap cane" which meant walk each row behind the cutter and any stalks that didn't make it into the pile, typically because they were rolled over by the cutter and pushed into the mud, had to be picked up and put into the piles. talk about fun!

worked for my grandfather and great uncles, I cut hay, planted tobacco, chopped it, hung it and stripped it. also had to work in the horse stalls, shoving shite, loading it up on the fertilizer spreader and spread it out in parts of the fields. after every storm, had to ride the fences and saw up trees that had fallen.

Worked at a peach orchard in North Louisiana freshman summer of high school, day one the owner told us all to eat as many peaches as we wanted.

I haven't eaten one since.



The old man knew how to cure stealing peaches

Every summer I worked on my uncles cow farm pitching hay off the back of a wagon, wrestling calves to tag that were too small for the chute, etc. it was tough work but the best conditioning you could get for football.

Food, construction, selling grass

Delivered newspapers for a weekly paper when I was 9-10.

Mowed yards throughout teens. Mowed and landscaped at a swim and tennis club at 15.

Washed dishes and worked in the kitchen of a pizza place starting at 16. Bagging ice in an ice house at 17.

Full service gas station attendant one summer when 19.

Research farm work in college.

Made and sold tie dye t-shirts at the French Market in New Orleans between undergraduate and grad school.

Always worked. Left home at 18 and never moved back.