By Cindy Stauffer
Published Jul 25, 2005 13:08
But once upon a time, in long-ago summers ...
There he was, Terry Madonna, the Italian kid with the gift of gab. He was wielding a shovel, filling in a ditch dug for a city sewer line. He got the job because he went to the mayor and asked for it. He knew about politics, even as a teenager.
Down at the shore, he might have helped to park your car or waited on your table. The Ziegler kid, Jack? He would give you a parking spot up front, or extra cream for your coffee, if you asked him. He was all about customer service.
At the Ross Street school, Gary Kirchner was the playground supervisor, watching over the kids as they played sports and made crafts. He always did like to keep an eye on things.
Amy Banks got busy stocking shoeboxes in a warehouse. Back then, she wasn’t singing or even whistling while she worked. But she moved east, where hundreds now hear her songs.
Summer jobs are a rite of passage for many teens. A recent poll of more than 1,000 teens by the Junior Achievement Interprise Poll found that 79 percent of teens planned to work this summer, mostly to save money for college.
Most of them expected to work in restaurants or fast-food jobs, followed by retail/sales jobs and baby-sitting jobs.
Those jobs often teach teens basic job skills that they may take with them into their adult years, says Scott Sheely, executive director of the county Workforce Investment Board.
“Kids learn a lot of customer service skills,” he says. “No matter where you go, if you’re going to be successful, you need the ability to deal with other people, ... talking to adults, looking people in the eye.”
Summer jobs also can end up shaping you in ways you never imagined, say adults looking back on those experiences.
G. Terry Madonna, 63, director of Franklin & Marshall College’s Center for Politics & Public Affairs, says he learned a lot from his first summer job, helping to fill in a ditch being dug for a city sewer line laid between Maple Grove and the Marietta Pike.
Madonna got the job the summer after his junior year at Lancaster Catholic High School.
“Someone I knew sent me into the mayor’s office,” he recalls. The mayor at the time was Tom Monaghan. “I walked in the door, told who I was and that I wanted a summer job.”
The job was hard work, Madonna recalls, but he learned more than how to move dirt.
“I learned that I had to be at work on time and do what I was told at work and do it to the best of my ability,” he says.
The next summer, he got another job for the city, working in the parks department, trimming grass and bushes in city parks.
“I didn’t like grass!” he says, laughing. “I moved to a condo as soon as I could, where someone else could cut it. I never had a home with any sense of a lawn after that.”
His early summer jobs, which also included working at a metal factory and driving a forklift, also taught Madonna lessons he has never forgotten.
Now a loquacious political pollster, who hosts the “Pennsylvania Newsmakers” TV show and is called upon by media from across the state, says he thinks he comes across as “a bit on the arrogant side” to some people, but that is not his true nature.
And it’s not what he learned from his early days wielding a shovel or hedge trimmer.
“What it taught me is that I’m no better than anyone else,” says Madonna, who says he came from a “poor, Italian family.”
“Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, I always believed that hard work and a certain pluckiness will get you ahead,” he says. “I also believed that people have to help. ... Everybody didn’t get where they are without someone looking over their shoulder and pulling them up.”
That’s why he says he answers every phone call from every student, writes letters of recommendation when asked and tries to keep in touch with students and help them when he can.
“We’re all in this life together,” he says.
Jack Ziegler, 57, also learned some valuable lessons at his first summer jobs, lessons he still uses every day as the manager of the Boscov’s department store at Park City.
Ziegler grew up in Philadelphia but his family had a summer home in Wildwood. When he was 12, he got his first job working as a parking lot attendant, working six or seven hours a day, seven days a week.
After that, he worked as a bus boy and waiter at shore restaurants.
Both taught him the responsibility of showing up at a job and the value of learning to deal with all kinds of people.
“There are so many different personalities out there, and you have to take every one individually when you make a decision or judgment,” says Ziegler.
It was in those early days that he also developed his sense of humor, one that he tries to cultivate to this day.
“Sometimes you have to overlook things and go out of your way to please a customer,” he says. “I enjoy dealing with the public.”
Dr. G. Gary Kirchner, 71, has had many jobs, starting as a playground supervisor, working most of his professional life as a surgeon and now serving as the county’s coroner.
In the early ‘50s, one of his first summer jobs was as a playground supervisor at the Ross Street playground, overseeing kids as they played sports, did crafts and put on an occasional puppet show.
Kirchner liked the job, adding with a laugh, “It was fun. It, A, was outside, and, B, wasn’t one of those jobs associated with a lot of manual labor.”
The next summer, he worked as a meter reader for the city, a job that could be a bit stressful at times, he says.
At the time, water meters were inside homes, usually in the basement, so if the homeowner was not home at the time, well ...
“You started to do stuff like slip hooks off screen doors so you wouldn’t miss that particular house,” he said. “I did that one time and was down in the basement with a flashlight under my arm, reading the water meter. I hear, behind me, breathing.
“I turn around and there’s the biggest dog in the whole world. I said, ‘Nice doggie,’ and I backed out of there as quietly as humanly possible. He wasn’t wagging his tail but then, too, I wasn’t standing there checking. I was getting out of there!”
He recalls also getting grief once for jumping a backyard fence of a rowhome, so he could quickly get access to the next house.
“Working for the city was interesting. You got to meet a lot of people. You learned a certain degree of communication skills,” says the gregarious county official.
Later, Kirchner got a job working at the state health department and it was that job that opened the world to him, showing him hospitals and sanitariums and teaching him about sanitation and other health issues.
“I learned stuff I applied in later life,” he says. “That was a good job. I was almost embarrassed that they paid me.”
Amy Banks, 37, grew up in St. Paul, Minn., and moved to Lancaster about two years ago, where she already has made a name for herself as a singer.
You may have heard her sing at the American Music Theatre, local restaurants, clubs or even at downtown’s Central Market, where she sings holiday tunes during the Christmas season.
But back when she was about 15, between her sophomore and junior years in high school, her working life was not quite as glamorous.
“I stocked shoeboxes in a warehouse. Basically, I caught shoeboxes with my face,” she says, with a rueful laugh. “We had to move the shoes that would go out and I can remember trying to stack up six or seven boxes, lift them high on the shelf and scoot them around.”
Banks soon wanted to make more money than she was earning, which was minimum wage at the time. That taught her some interesting lessons about money, she says.
“When you’re thinking about what money is at that age, it’s how easy it is to take it for granted, or that a job that paid well would just fall into your lap,” she says.
Shortly after that she started waitressing, a job that had a basic wage that could be supplemented with tips that rewarded her for her own enterprise.
And after that, well, she always had a job.
“It was a sense of responsibility that I got as a person being able to work and able to earn money,” she says.
Any job, even the mundane ones, can be good if you work at them, she says.
“I would encourage young people to be open to possibility,” she says.
When she was stocking shoeboxes, she did not know she would become a singer. But opportunities started presenting themselves to her in ways she didn’t expect, through local bands and singing jazz.
“You just never know,” she says, “what the world will open up for you.”
