I once flipped burgers.
Not for a living, mind you.
I did it as my first real job at age 14.
By that, I mean with a paycheck per se
Selling greeting cards door-to -door to buy a reflector telescope doesn’t count.
Nor does it count spending a summer with a friend three days a week bicycling the countryside around Lincoln and retrieving tossed aluminum cans and glass beer bottles with a split before school started that netted us each $700.
Before you speed dial the state labor board or Child Protection Services, the job was at the Squirrel Cage.
That’s right. The Squirrel Cage.
Kind of a nutso name from an old-fashioned drive-in that wasn’t much more than an oversized sheet metal box that my mom owned.
She worked seven days a week, often 12 hour days.
She didn’t complain. She wasn’t getting rich but that said as a widow with four young kids it allowed her to house and feed us with the help of Social Security death benefits.
I might add that she never hesitated to open her home to teen friends of my older brothers who, for whatever reason, were kicked out of their homes.
People reared in the Great Depression and came of age during World War II really do look at things differently — including their moral obligation to others.
And although at the time she could have paid us less because we were family or were under 18, mom paid us minimum wage. It was as a whopping $1.30 per hour for employers with less than 25 workers. I say whopping not to be sarcastic. That $1.30 an hour...
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