My first actual job, for money, was as a newspaper carrier for The Edmonton Journal. I'll have some of my merry adventures in that endeavour on these pages someday,(when the psychic scars are healed).
At fifteen I started my first job as a labourer, building sidewalks in the Village of Wabamun for the summer.
When I graduated from High School I picked up a job as a Laminator operator/wrapper at a building board plant where I stayed for a year. I may have got laid off this job for complaining too loudly about what I considered a "yellow dog" that the IWWA and the company had signed. Or maybe it was just a "seasonal layoff". I was young and mouthy.
I went across the road, and by showing up at the "shape up" every morning for a week I got a job labouring for Poole Construction. This was the first job I had that involved digging holes and filling them in.
We were hand digging trenches around some houses to install weeping tile, six feet deep and three feet wide. Each afternoon, if we hadn't got to the bottom of the hole and finished the gravel and tiles, the foreman made us fill in the hole with the loose dirt, "so no kids will fall in". So every morning we had to shovel all that out of the hole before we could begin digging again. Sometimes it's good to be paid by the hour.
On the same job we were clearing a cut line for some reason using axes and Swede saws,and piling the brush by hand. One day the foreman decided the brush piles were big enough to burn. Since it was summer all the piles were green wood and he couldn't get a fire going. One of the brighter lights was sent over to the compound to get a five gallon pail of diesel fuel. He came back after a while and the pailful was spread over the pile. The foreman leaned forward and flicked his Bic (or equivalent) and all hell went out for breakfast. Seems that if you dump five gallons of gasoline on a warm brush pile on a hot 
summer day you can get quite a bang for your buck. I was a good hundred feet away and facing the other direction when the boom and wave of heat rolled over me. I still have a picture of a great orange ball of fire and bodies flying in every direction. Apart from singed eyebrows and knuckle hair no one was injured. The brush pile did burn for about five minutes, then smudged out, and I learned a valuable lesson. Use your nose and your eyes to save your skin.
The big city was luring me, it was time to strike out away from home, and it was the mid '60's in Alberta. It was possible to be without a job only if you really wanted it. So my friend and I kised Wabamun goodbye, moved to Edmonton and got hired on as carpenter's assistants for a small construction firm building walk-up apartments. We worked there for the rest of the summer, then I quit to go to Alberta College.
My exciting OTHER JOBS
Return to ME