Summertime employment revisited
Summertime employment revisited
Reprinted by reader request from the Oregonlive.com and written by
Douglas W. Larson
Somewhere I’ve heard that summertime is when the livin’ is easy. But don’t tell that to the thousands of high school and college students now scrambling in a recession to find summertime jobs. I can feel their pain.
Fifty years ago, after my sophomore year at Jamestown College in North Dakota, jobs were so scarce that even some people working at the state’s employment office in the city of Jamestown were laid off. Aside from unloading 80-pound cement sacks from railroad boxcars at the local lumberyard, the few jobs that were available required specific skills, none of which appeared on my thin résumé. And by the time I applied at the lumberyard, the boxcars had already been unloaded.
Jobless, and certainly not eager to re-enlist in the Marine Corps, my initial optimism surrendered to despair and desperation. Then, the clouds of hopelessness suddenly parted and the free spirits of innovation and entrepreneurship entered my thoughts.
“Why,” they asked, “should you be searching vainly for a minimum-wage job when you could be your own boss and make a small fortune that will cover next semester’s college tuition?”
“Agreed,” I replied, “but what can I do?”
