From caddying to paper sales, he’s worked hard through life. But this job stands out

I worked hard. I was only 10 years old when my mother handed me a big farmer hoe and said, “Chop them weeds outta the fence row.”

So I did.

“Now, rake ’em up,” she said.

So I did, which proved I’d missed a bunch of dock and bindweed.

“Now get the rest!” she growled. So I cried, which did me not one bit of good.

She made me chop anyhow, till they were all gone. Oh, sure, she finally heated hot chocolate for us both to drink, but it was hard — and just the bare beginning of work.

They were so short of caddies at Tulsa’s Oaks Country Club they let 12-year-olds carry for one particular twosome of long-legged women. The women just had a few clubs — not like the big old guys with leather bags. We carried maybe 15 clubs plus a portable seat hung on the side, plus zipper pockets stuffed with 10 pounds of golf balls and maybe a fifth of bourbon (in Oklahoma, a dry state). Heavy. But I lived through it at $1.50 for 18 holes single, $2.50 hauling double for those two ladies.

My first indoor job was ushering for 35 cents an hour at the Cozy cinema on Tulsa’s crummy north end. The biggest thrill came at a Saturday matinee in 1951 when we played “The Thing from Another World.”

In a theater stuffed with schoolkids, all was calm until movie actors — probing through this Arctic habitat — warily opened a door. Pressed close on the other side, The Thing swung his mighty arm and ripped out the doorframe.

“Aaaaaaaaaaargggh!” he roared.

The theater spilled squalling kids. They swarmed up the aisles to mill around, terrified, in the lobby. That happened two or three times a day, thrilling me as well. After closing, as the only usher, I had to clean both restrooms. My first time into the women’s, I saw a wall painted glossy white, a blazing expanse covered with kisses. Women and girls, dozens of them, maybe a hundred, had blotted their lipstick on that wall, plump lips, thin lips, wide ones of scarlet and pink and maroon and even blue. Luscious lips. Unschooled in the mysteries of love, I stood there taking deep breaths.

Hard to believe I would give up all that for a 15-cent raise in wages. But the classy Rialto theater, farther downtown, dressed me up in a tuxedo tailcoat and black bow tie with a white cardboard dickey to hide my bare chest. I earned a fat 50 cents an hour as an usher while luxuriating in fantastic movies like “High Noon,” “American in Paris” and “Singing in the Rain.”

So my wages briefly rose at the Rialto, only to tumble during my college-era job as reporter for the weekly West Tulsa News. Sure, they said, you can write for the paper and you can edit. Then, for a salary, you can go house to house selling $2.50 annual subscriptions and keep all the money. Lucky you.

But it worked. I picked up enough bucks for gas and even to court Lenore, later my bride. I wrote, I edited, I hand-set antique Babbitt type, precise replicas of the 1856 version you can see today at Kansas City’s Arabia Steamboat Museum. I wedged it into a steel chase and printed the news on a flatbed press (along with the bulk of content set by Linotype). Then the desperate little paper, born in 1922, died.

So I walked into KTUL radio and soon was writing the 8 a.m. newscast for Jack Morris, a famous radio guy. This was what we called “rip and read” — tear an Associated Press news summary from the wire, rewrite (steal) some stories from the Tulsa World and hook on a weather report. Jack would glide in a full two minutes early, sag down in his chair and read. One day when he didn’t show up, the station engineer in his glass booth pointed his finger at me. Me! A college freshman broadcasting news on a major outlet.

Then they fired me because they were going big time into television. The same thing was happening at their rival, KVOO. The news boss there, Ken Miller, told me he couldn’t use a freshman journalist, but he did need boxes moved into their new TV studio.

I was such a fantastic box mover that Ken sent me out with a Bell and Howell 16 mm film camera to record the Santa Claus parade. He liked that film. Then it was a new downtown amusement park. I hopped on a Ferris wheel, aimed the camera straight ahead and caught the wild whirling on film. He liked that, too. And when I fearlessly climbed an open ladder on the new 1,135-foot KOTV television tower and chickened out halfway up, that was OK. Because I backed tremulously down that ladder with the film.

But Ken and I had differences.

Next, I was feeding a Wonder bakery machine that shot raw loaves of dough into moving pans: boom, boom, boom. It was assembly-line work, the hardest I ever did for the best college-era wages I ever earned, $1.35 an hour. All this leading to still more jobs and the U.S. Army and best of all, in 1958, to the most exhilarating job I would ever love, as reporter for the Kansas City Star.

Here was a chance to tell people truths I myself had discovered: splendid truths I knew that nobody else did. What more can anybody ask of a job? What better can any of us ask of our daily work?

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.