Episode #47: The Jobs I've Had From A Kid To Retirement

The first job I had would have been in the summer of 1968, I was almost 11 years old and we were still living in Irving. I would push our lawn mower around to the neighbors and ask to mow their yard. My going rate was .50 for the front yard and .75 for the backyard. It was really hot that summer and I remember one yard I mowed, I got too hot and and got sick. The guy came outside and gave me a drink of water and told me to come in his house and lay down on the couch. He finished mowing his yard with our mower and he still paid me the $1.25. As I laid there on his couch, I decided this effort was not worth the payday and called it quits.

My next attempt at gainful employment came a couple of years later in the summer of 1970, when my Dad and a neighbor, Tom Cunningham were hauling hay and I was the hay patch truck driver. My Dad and Tom would pitch and stack the hay on the bed of the truck and my job was to drive just the right speed for them to keep up. When we would get to the hay barn I would throw the hay down from how it was stacked several rows high and they would stack it in the barn. I was paid the princely sum of .03 per bale. I continued this hay hauling gig for the next several summers using my pickup with a couple of friends and we worked throughout this part of the county. Granted we spent more time skinny dipping in the local stock ponds and eating at one of the local hamburger or BBQ joints than hauling hay but I did make a little spending money. As a side note, if you have never skinny dipped in a stock pond, it is a little unnerving because I always was thinking about snakes and turtles but, it is a great way to cool off in the hot summer and hauling hay.

The next job in my resume' was working as a weekend busboy at a restaurant when I was 15  years old. The restaurant was owned by Donna Bass and was called the Black Gold Cafe' in Gainesville. This place was popular and very busy. My buddy Steve Petty got a job as dishwasher and he called me to tell me about a job for a busboy and I was in. I said sure and I cleaned more tables the first evening than my entire life combined to that point. This job paid me 90 cents per hour. Part of my pay included meals which were at first hamburgers and fries, but we soon found out how good the t-bone steaks were and that old gal that was the cook, was really good, it was steak and fries from then on.

Than next spring I went to work at a dairy on weekends near Callisburg that milked about 100 cows. I found out that dairies milk their cows twice a day; everyday, 7 days a week, 52 weeks per year. This guy milked at 6am and again at 4pm. This guy had a milk barn with eight stalls and four milkers. Each milking machine was mounted on a swivel between two stalls and there were four stalls on each side so we would milk four cows at a time. As a kid, I hated getting up at 5:00am on Saturday and Sunday mornings but that was the job. After milking in the morning we had to put out hay and clean the milk barn which finished around 11am. I had to be back at 2:00pm  to put out feed in the feed lot and start milking again about 4pm. The job paid $8 per day regardless of how many hours I worked which was usually around 9 hours daily. I worked at this dairy from March until about June, then started hauling hay again for the summer since I wasn't 16 yet, I did not have a drivers license and could not drive to town but that did not stop me from driving around all around eastern Cooke and western Grayson counties along the back roads.

By the time the following summer rolled around I was ready for a regular hourly rated job and worked at one of the four Dairy Queen hamburger joints that were in Gainesville. I started out as a short order grill cook and later learned how to operate the front end. This job paid $1.35 per hour.

My next job was working as a stocker in the grocery department at Gibson the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. I was 16 years old now, had a driver's license and could work various shifts as needed. Gibson's was the pre-curser to  Walmart and as far as I know, they bought all of the Gibson's stores across the country. They were the same business model which was anything you need was under one roof. Almost everybody I knew shopped at Gibson's for hardware to groceries to pharmaceuticals. The pay rate there was $2.25 per hour.

The next summer after  I graduated high school in May 1975, I went to work at another grocery store as a stocker again but this time at Kroger which was a union store and paid more than I had ever made before at $2.75 per hour. If we worked on Sunday they had to pay time and a half regardless of how many hours were worked during that week, so they would schedule some of us to come in at midnight on Sunday since it was technically Monday. I was only 17 and I did not have enough sense to take a nap during the day on Sunday which I would spend all day with my girl friend, so by 8:30am Monday morning I was ready to get home and get some sleep.

Later that summer, I quit Kroger and went to work at Dale Lloyd's Ornamental Iron shop as a shop helper and taught myself how to weld on the thin tubing they used so much. The pay was the same rate per hour at $2.75 but rather than working 20-30 hours per week I would work 40 plus overtime on occasion. During the 2 years I worked here I learned how to use various welding machines (arc, mig, heli-arc, and oxy-acetylene). I also worked in the paint shop for a while and was Dale's forklift operator when he would lease out his large commercial forklift. Once I on a job unloading a flatbed trailer full of clay roofing tiles at Lake Kiowa which was about 15 miles from town. I pulled the forklift behind a flatbed one ton truck that had a winch and gin pole set. I would use the winch line as the safety hook. On that occasion as I was leaving the community the hitch came uncoupled while driving down the hill leading across the lake dam and I looked in the rearview mirror I saw the forklift completely unhooked and nearly beside the truck I was driving. If I had not had the winch line attached, that forklift would likely have found its way to the bottom of the lake.

I went to work there in August before Carol and I married in October. Dale had a contract to build several hundred ornamental iron porch posts, window guards and decorative iron handrails for a large DFW tract home builder so they were all exactly the same. He put on a second shift that was from 3pm to midnight. Dale had enough people to meet the manufacture requirement, but not enough welding machines and tables with the other business he already had and I ended up on that second shift for 2 weeks before and a month after we married. We ran into Dale and a friend at breakfast about a year ago and after we shook hands and visited for a moment we sat down a few tables away. He told his friend that he had hired me as a kid out of high school and that I was one of the best employees he had ever hired, and that was 49 years earlier. Dale witnessed my work ethic and desire to be successful and he treated my more than fairly and I always appreciated that about him.

It was now 1977 and  I was 20 years old and was starting to think more about my future and knowing I would not want to be a welder for the rest of my life when I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for an assistant manager trainee at the local Firestone store. I went to work there a couple of weeks later and was the assistant store manager about a year later. I worked there for about three years when Firestone decided to close this Gainesville store as a downsizing strategy and I was to transfer as assistant store manager in Wichita Falls which was about 100 miles west. Carol was several months pregnant with our first baby and her Dr, was about 30 miles east of Gainesville. I did not know they were closing the store, I thought Firestone just wanted me to work for a different store manager before I got in line for a store manager position so I rejected the transfer and a couple of weeks later I found myself out of a job. 

The next several months I worked for my Dad who had a small daily freight delivery service local to Gainesville, kind of a pre-Amazon company. I had an opportunity to go back to work as the assistant store manager for Firestone in Ft Worth so I did. We moved to Hurst for about 6 months and did not like living and working there and had an opportunity to come back to Gainesville as assistant manager for a guy that bought the inventory at the closed Firestone store and he opened it as an independent dealer. Apparently he was not a very good businessman and within a year he went bankrupt, closed the store again and left town. That left me out of a job on December 29th, only this time I  was responsible for a wife and a 9 month old baby boy.

The week after this job ended, I applied at a locally owned concrete company called Davis Concrete Company who was in need of a welder. I started this job in January 5th 1980 and worked as a welder and plant mechanic for the next 10 years. I had no idea I would spend 38 of the next 44 years in this industry. In 1990 I was promoted to Plant Manager of the Denton plant which was the largest and busiest location of the 5 plants they owned. Three years later the company was sold to Redi~Mix Concrete and I was then promoted to an Area Manager and had responsibilities for all 5 plants. Three years after that I was promoted to Vice President of Operations with responsibilities that included all company owned plants which had now grown to 12.

Redi~Mix was sold to US Concrete in June 2006 and I remained a Vice President of Operations. I was one of 3 Operations VPs and was told by the new company that the existing staff would run the operations and train others to replace us as we retired. That was not the case, by December 2008 I was the last of the original VPs and in March of 2009 I was let go saying my position had been eliminated. About three months later the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

I took a few months off and then went to work as an HR and Safety Manager for a small family owned concrete company in Aubrey Texas, Bartel Ready Mix. They let me go only 9 months later claiming they could not afford my payroll as the construction industry economy continued to falter and business was not good. I was out of work yet again.

I was in an active job search for the next 10 months and could not find work in the industry. I finally landed a job as an asset manager for a crude oil truck transportation company in Mesquite Texas which was almost 100 miles from my home. My job was to track assets and make recommendations for equipment replacement and then deploy new assets to owner operators over the 15 states they hauled crude oil. I would execute the lease agreements and also help troubleshoot issues in the field with the on-board GPS and ticket printer systems which were mounted in the trucks. I did this for just over a year and then negotiated a move into the safety department and became the National Safety Manager. That job ended in June of 2015 when crude oil futures fell to about $20 per barrel. Two months later while I was still receiving severance I went to work as the Corporate Director of Safety for Bridger Logistics in Addison, same industry and same owner operator business model. Six months later crude oil began to fall sharply again and the company was for sale. I had an opportunity to get back into the concrete business, so I resigned and a month later I am back in a more familiar industry.

In February 2016 I went to work as Senior Vice President for Nelson Bros Ready Mix in Lewisville and worked there until I decided to leave in the May of 2021. The owner and I suddenly shared a different vision on how the business should be operated and he, in my opinion went off the rails going into massive debt in an effort to buy his way into a larger share of the market, which again in my opinion was a very bad business decision. I left after five and a half years to work for Hope Concrete. This job was closer to home and a year later I went to a 4 day work week and that schedule remained until I retired in December 15 2023. 

I never minded the hard work or the extensive hours demanded by these industries and as a result, I worked my way up the ladder and achieved success in two different industries. These jobs allowed me to make better that fair money and I was able to walk away on my terms and into retirement. I also had the great fortune of meeting some very good people that I still stay in contact with long after our professional association had ended.

 

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