The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

I have had a lot of odd jobs, spread out over the years.

I don’t think I was in my teens yet when I took my first official job.

I set pins in the Palouse bowling alley. I got 5 cents a line, not something I could get rich doing.

 A line of bowling took about 30 minutes, so you can see it wasn’t a great deal.This was before they got the racks you put the pins in.

There were black circles painted and you were supposed to put the pins right on the painted circles.

First you had to clear the down pins and then jump up on the retaining wall so the bowler didn’t hit you with his second ball.

You sometimes had only a split second to get out of the way before pins started flying.

If bowlers tried to test us we would spot the pins off the painted circle and watch when they couldn’t understand why the pins didn’t fall.

Sometimes if we did a good job, bowlers would give us a tip.

Our family knew a lot of farmers in the area, and one asked me to get a lot of my friends together and come out to his pea field and pick rogue plants. The pea rogue plants had purple blossoms and those plants degraded his harvest.

We lined up and swept the field carrying any of the plants we found to the end of the field where the farmer would pick them up.Then we would turn around and go the other way. I think we got 25 cents an hour for this.  Sure beat setting pins.

I made a friend of a classmate’s father who had a shoe repair business, and who also made logging boots on order.

When he had several orders, he would have me cut leather to the pattern and then he would sew them up.

I got a little money for helping, but would have done it for nothing because I liked the man.

Years later, when I was in college, I tried selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. When successful, I got a nice commission. 

One time I sold a Kirby to a farmer who didn’t have money for a down payment, so I took a gunny sack of chickens and an old wood stove for the down payment, then gave the cook stove back to him.

I worked my way through that and got into selling waterless cookware. There I would get someone to host 

friends for a dinner, which I would prepare in the waterless cookware.

When I could persuade someone to purchase the cookware, I would get a commission.

While in the Boise Valley covering sports, I got to know one of the principals quite well. Since the paper, The Idaho Statesman, was a morning paper, I had most of the day to myself, going to work about 5 in the afternoon.

The principal talked me into being a sub teacher. My first assignment was a kindergarten class of about 25 kids. I had kids of my own about the same age, so I wasn’t shocked, just exhausted by the end of the day.

My next assignment was a high school orchestra class.

I didn’t know one note from another then, and still don’t. I was struck with fear until I got a brainstorm while on the way to class. I decided to have members of the class elect a student conductor and after doing so I was off to the races. When push comes to shove, I side with the teachers every time.

While in the valley, I came to know a guy who bid on strange jobs and I did some work for him.

The first thing was to unload fertilizer rail cars of 80 pound bags of fertilizer. It was one of those deals where you were expected to take two at a time.

He later bid on and took a job of jack hammering a concrete floor out of an old warehouse.

I got to use the jackhammer. He paid me well and became a friend in the process.

We later moved to Othello, I guess on my way to the Seattle area.

There I teamed up with the newspaper owner, the manager of the radio station and the undertaker, and made a foursome on the tennis court.

The undertaker asked if on occasion I would go with him when he picked up his customers.

I agreed and made the trip to pick up dead people a number of times. He decided to go on a short vacation and I agreed to take care of any calls that came in, hoping of course that none would.

Sure enough I got a call and handled it by myself.

I remember one Saturday morning the phone rang and the undertaker was on the line. He asked what I was doing. I told him I was eating breakfast, and he said, “stop, and I will pick you up.” Turns out we had to go pick up a person who had passed several days earlier.

That trip spelled the end of my helping out friends.

He also had the ambulance service, and I ran shotgun for him as he raced sick people to Spokane. He was a crazy driver and several times nearly ran oncoming traffic off the road. Of course, I wasn’t trained to be with the patients.

Odd jobs sometimes are the best teachers.