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Sun Journal, New Bern, N.C., Mike Dewey column: Getting that first summer job is

Mr Roger K. Olsson | 15.07.2007 21:34 | Other Press | London

Giuen Media



Sunday, July 15, 2007


Jul. 15, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
You could call it ironic, I suppose, or fated, even humorous, but the fact of the matter is that the summer I actually had to get my first job coincided with the time that Richard Nixon lost his last one.

I spent my time cleaning restroom tiles with a toothbrush and mowing the grass on the college campus where both my parents taught and it's no coincidence that that's where I began to grasp the awful significance of being gainfully employed.

I was 19 and saved almost every penny I made ($1.25 an hour went a whole lot farther than it does today) toward the eventual purchase of the only thing in the world that I wanted, a component stereo system. Music meant everything to me back then, especially rock & roll, and it used to be such a rush to study the Warehouse Sound catalog, just imagining what turntable would work best with which speakers ... not to mention the receiver.

That was the summer when the Watergate crisis reached its boiling point, the time when the Smoking Gun tape surfaced and even GOP stalwarts like Barry Goldwater knew the game was over and that impeachment was going to be a bad deal all around.

Lynryd Skynyrd weighed in with 'Sweet Home Alabama,' but I spent more time listening to the Eagles and their more poetic 'Already Gone.'

And, of course, those steamy nights were times to sit with pretty girls, who couldn't have cared less about Executive Privilege or the Supreme Court's 8-0 ruling on the incriminating tapes. Even seven years after the newspapers sold The Summer of Love, nothing could stop certain things from taking their age-old course.

Still, I could have done without getting up so early and having to actually Work.

I'd just completed my yin-yang freshman year at Notre Dame and was mentally exhausted.

Nothing says So Long, Hometown than nine months spent in an uber-competitive environment in which everyone thinks he's a Star on the Rise. ND back then had just joined the 20th century, having embraced the concept of admitting women, so all bets were off.

We were part of a grand experiment and the weird part was that no one knew how it was all supposed to turn out, whether or not it would actually work. Most of the time, I was too scared about flunking out and being drafted to even notice all those long legs and drop-dead gorgeous faces. Still, when spring finally thawed South Bend's traditional deep freeze, it was hard to miss the implications of coeducation.

Bikinis will do that, even in a bastion of Catholic guilt and repression.

What was so great and what fueled my desire to own my own huge music machine was the way upperclassmen would, when the thermometer inched above 70, place speakers on the ledges of their upper-floor dormitories and crank it up.

'That,' I thought to myself as the beautiful women migrated toward the tweeter/woofer convergence, 'is what I want.'

So I spent the Summer of 1974 mowing, scraping, sweating, hacking, trimming, painting and cleaning up after kids my own age who'd left after finals and gone home.

It was quite an education.
But I earned enough so that by that fall, my speakers ruled the floor.

Dick Nixon had already cashed his check, but I was flush with the spoils of capitalism ... and even now, I save for some unforeseen tomorrow when it can all go bad.

Mike Dewey can be reached at  mdewey@freedomenc.com or (252) 635-5674.

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Mr Roger K. Olsson
- e-mail: rogerkolsson@yahoo.co.uk
- Homepage: http://giuen.wordpress.com