My case just felt much, much worse because I was used to winning
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- April 23, 2018
- 1729
Most Americans, regardless of their political persuasion, probably remember the summer of 1974 as the backdrop for President Nixon’s resignation. And that’s as it should be. It had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. So far.
I come at it from a different perspective. However much I followed the day-to-day machinations of the impeachment hearings and their attendant drama, what consumed most of my attention that turbulent season was my first summer job.
As I limped home from my decidedly desultory freshman year at Notre Dame, I was ready for something positive to occur, a tonic to erase the taste of failure that remained, lingering and bitter.
To say that I was unprepared for college would be akin to likening my writing skills to John Updike’s. I mean it was no contest.
There were so many mistakes, miscalculations and misadventures. Though at the time, I ascribed it to the freshman blues, something every first-year student had to endure.
My case just felt much, much worse because I was used to winning.
Having been found wanting as a roommate, a scholar, an athlete, a journalist, a broadcaster and a boyfriend, I was more than ready to put the Golden Dome in my rearview mirror as I left South Bend.
Ironically enough, my first summer job would find me back on a college campus, and it was there I finally began to turn a corner, doing something that at least resembled growing up.
Landing a position on the maintenance/groundskeeping crew had been relatively easy because both my parents were professors at the school and I was a reasonably fit 19-year-old with energy to burn.
And I didn’t care how little the job paid. I mean $1.25 an hour was more than I’d ever earned before. Additionally, I set a goal for myself. By the end of the summer, I was going to save the $650 I needed to buy my first stereo system.
I already had it picked out: the amplifier, the turntable, the speakers, the tape deck, even the headphones. All I had to do was work for it.
When you’re directly related to two faculty members and are home from your first year in school, you become, ipso facto, the “College Boy,” as in, “Hey, College Boy, grab a toothbrush, time to clean the frat house restroom.”
Well, the lifers didn’t call it a “restroom.” As with most of their discourse, more colorful language was utilized, which was fine with me.
I couldn’t swear much at home because Mom subscribed to the maxim that profanity was the sign of a limited vocabulary. Now given the freedom to employ the native tongue, so to speak, I began to fit right in.
“Bring it the (blank) on,” I said. “I hope there’s puke up to my knees and (blank) in every urinal.” Which was pretty close to what I dealt with my first day on the job.
It was a nasty task, probably the worst one available, and I intuited that I was being tested in some important way. To back down, to show any kind of weakness, would fit right into the whole “College Boy” persona that the veterans had imagined for me.
If, however, I whistled as I worked, figuratively speaking, I figured that better days lay ahead. And they did.
Once I had developed a bit of a reputation for not backing down, I began to get pretty plum assignments, things like planting flowers for the graduation ceremony and trimming the hedges outside the gymnasium. One hot day, three other part-timers and I spent an afternoon boxing up library books and moving them — using a cool dolly — from one floor to the next … in air-conditioned comfort.
Which is not to say that I didn’t mess up now and then.
The maintenance department had three vehicles at its disposal. One was strictly for the boss, who drove the sedan around campus hoping to catch one of us lounging in the shade of the stately pines. The second was a mid-'60s Ford pickup for the painting crew. And the third was a rusted-out, busted-up postwar Jimmy’s Jeep.
It was a (blanking) miracle, the full-timers all said, that the thing started every (blanking) morning.
As the lowest brave on the totem pole, I had never driven even a mile in any of them, but that changed one day in August. A few guys were on vacation, some others occupied getting things ready for an influx of would-be freshman and of course the paint crew was off somewhere, probably hiding in one of the dorms, crashed out on the couches, watching Watergate on TV.
“Hey, College Boy,” one of the old-timers said with a smile. “C’mere.”
Someone had to drive the Jeep into the countryside, far from campus, and pick up three picnic tables that were in storage. I was shown how to get the engine started by rolling it downhill and popping the clutch, letting it engage in second gear.
“First gear,” the man sighed, “well, it’s history.”
Third, fourth and even fifth, I managed just fine because I'd had a bit of experience with a stick, having driven a friend’s VW Beetle in high school.
When I reached the barn, I left the Jeep running, loaded the tables into the truck bed and drove back to campus. Along the way I became aware of a burning smell in the cab but dismissed it as rubber-factory odors, something you got used to in my hometown, the self-proclaimed “Balloon Capital of the World.”
I drove up the grade to the parking lot outside the maintenance shed, turned off the ignition and set the gear shift in second, which was standard practice, owing to the steep incline.
Then the Jeep very slowly began to roll backward, gaining speed before it stopped suddenly but softly in a stand of shrubbery.
Turned out I had driven the entire 25-mile round trip with the emergency brake engaged.
No one was that mad. Actually my mishap provided the impetus to upgrading the crew’s stable of vehicles.
As one of the full-timers put it, “Lesson (blanking) learned.”