Worker's playtime

Player's worktime

by Jerry Fraser

I went to a prep school called Mount Hermon, which was founded by a 19th century evangelist who'd had this crazy notion about manual labor: everybody ought to try it.

To that end, students were assigned "work-jobs." Freshman year, mine required that I spend three mornings a week digging holes and raking leaves and otherwise toiling as a member of "the campus crew."

The crew consisted of 13-year-old pukes like me who wore ties to class and addressed each other using our last names. We were supervised by burly locals who looked on us with a mixture of contempt and amusement. Some of them probably were earning no more than our parents were shelling out in tuition.

Mr. LaChance was the boss of the crew. He seemed always to be backing around the campus in an official pickup truck at 40 miles per hour.

A few of the boys took naturally to work, but not Master Fraser. "Study hard," an old timer named Frank told me soon after I came under his charge during the fall of my freshman year. "You ain't goin' far in the pick and shovel field."

My feelings were unhurt.

Sophomore year I became Mr. Gillett's problem. Mr. Gillett ran the physical plant at the gym, and my job was to mop half the locker room, three mornings a week. Mr. Gillett left me and the boy who mopped the other half alone as long as we got the floor clean. Better still, it was his policy that we could scram when we were done. No doubt he just wanted some peace. The locker room, which accommodated 600 young men with varying notions about what constituted acceptable behavior when naked, would become a boisterous and not especially pleasant smelling place as the day wore on.

At any rate, I was by now on academic probation, so I used the free time to memorize the various declensions and conjugations with which students of Latin are tortured.

I would have loved to have gotten the locker-room work-job again, but no such luck befell me my junior year. Instead, I got up at 5 a.m. three mornings a week and trudged up the hill to West Hall, the school's cavernous dining hall, where I worked the breakfast shift. Specifically I was a dishwasher, which was fine by me. I had no inclination to scramble eggs in kettles the size of cannibals' pots.

My senior year I got what should have been Mount Hermon's equivalent of a sinecure, a job working for an inter-school paper. However, following a string of successful college interviews I began sleeping in most mornings, and eventually, I stopped attending afternoon classes as well. Why not? The future was assured.

Alas, my grades began to decline and my class-cutting privilege was suspended, and the next thing I knew I was up before the notorious D.C. -- Disciplinary Committee -- which most of us equated with the Gestapo. This, as any Hermonite will tell you, was serious business, and I found myself praying that I would not soon be arriving on the doorstep of my mother and explaining that her precious first-born had changed his college plans and would be applying for one of the paying positions on the Campus Crew.

I wasn't thrown out, but my fate was almost as bad. Old magazines had for more than 40 years been piled haphazardly in the basement of the school library, and I was given the job of burrowing in and organizing them. I was given neither supervision nor a schedule. When finished I was to find Mr. Bauer, who would inspect the job and give me a thumbs up or thumbs down. If work was not completed by graduation day, I could stop what I was doing and go home.

I made it, but only by the skin of my teeth. When I think of the second half of my senior year my mind's eye fills with metal shelves and old issues of Business Week, which like everything in that musty pit was too boring to read. For months, it seemed, I made no progress at all, and the last two weeks of May, when my classmates were off on do-nothing "senior projects," I was in the bowels of the library, sweating like a pig and praying to Jesus that I would be in the procession when the class of 1970 filed by my mother.

And indeed I was. But there's irony yet.

That September I bailed on college and decided I would get a job on a fishing boat. Fishing is the only job I know of in which you are certain to experience, and in very short order, every negative aspect manual labor has to offer: it is a life of long hours and heavy lifting, and often enough you are soaking wet and half frozen. Falling down, throwing up, and going unpaid are all in a day's work.

There was some culture shock, to be sure. I went from an environment in which a job was something few of us took seriously -- "You've got your whole life to work," was our nonchalant credo -- to one in which how hard and how fast a guy could work was all that mattered.

Frank would have been disappointed.

By and by, of course, I snapped out of it and took up journalism. Thank goodness.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cavu@cybertours.com.