The road to gainful employment*

When I was in junior high and high school, I earned a little money babysitting and, during the summers, mowing lawns. As high school graduation loomed, my parents wanted me to get a better-paying summer job between high school and college. I ended up wandering around filling out job applications at fast food restaurants and retail stores. None of those generated a response. 

I’m not sure what my parents were thinking. Maybe they thought jobs for teenagers with no connections or work histories were just lying around waiting for applicants. Eventually, the maid who cleaned once a week after my mom became a full-time grad student arranged with her son-in-law to get me a job pumping gas. The station was on the other side of the river, so when the station closed at 11 PM, I had to ride my bike home in the dark across a narrow bridge.

This was the first clue that it helped to have connections if you’re looking for jobs. The next clue was when, a few days after I started at Bull Run Oil Company, a high school friend told me he knew of an opening for cook at the local Pizza Inn. I took that job and quit the gas station job.

The other thing that didn’t occur to my parents is the kind of company their son would have while working in these places. I don’t know if the other guys at the gas station even finished high school. I know they weren’t college grads, which is what my folks wanted me to be. The Pizza Inn in Oak Ridge had a reputation as a mafia front. I was paid below minimum wage. Once, a motorcycle gang showed up at closing time demanding food and beer. There was a shotgun at the back of the store—I don’t know whether it was loaded.

I was allowed to give free pizzas to my friends and take some home. Sometimes, as I headed home around midnight during the hot Tennessee summer after working for hours in front of 500 degree ovens, I’d stop off at the local community swimming pool, climb the fence and take a short swim to cool off.

My first year in college, I attended Vanderbilt University. I earned a little money typing papers for other guys in my dorm. One of them had horrible spelling and expected me to fix it while I was typing. 

 

By the spring, I’d applied to transfer to the University of Tennessee—Knoxville. Since Vanderbilt let out earlier than UT-K, I applied for a campus job in food service. I worked there for about a week and slept in an unoccupied dorm room. Then I got a work-study job at the graduate library starting summer quarter. That summer, I rented a room in a frat house.

I liked the library job because the first half of each quarter there was little to do but read, since all the books were being checked out. Shelving returned books, which is mostly what I was hired for, mostly happened in the last four weeks. To keep the job, though, I had to be enrolled year-round, so I took classes in the summer. I ended up with way more credits than I needed to graduate after four years.

The rest of the staff at the graduate library were full-time. One of them, Mike Gallagher, was a master’s student in English. We became close friends. Between quarters, when I wasn’t working, I’d go over to his apartment after he got off work and we’d smoke pipe tobacco, drink lots of coffee and stay up all night playing war games, these board games based on battles like Midway, Waterloo and Stalingrad. 

Mike was from Falmouth Kentucky. He owned several firearms, including a 16-gauge pump shotgun, a black powder pistol and a Lee-Enfield 30.06 bolt action rifle. Once he took me out deer hunting in Fentress County with some of his friends. Before we went, he took me out to the Knoxville City dump where we could shoot at garbage and I could handle the 12-gauge semi-automatic he’d arranged for me to borrow. 

Deer season is in the winter. After spending all day in the woods, we spent the evening drinking whisky and shooting at trash can lids, which made an awful racket. The only deer we ever saw were driving by on the backs of other people’s pick-ups.

One time, Ira who also worked at the library had gotten into a fight the previous day and was afraid the person was going to mug him on the way home from work. Mike brought two pistols, one for Ira and one that he would carry while he walked a few steps behind to shoot anyone who ambushed Ira. In the event, there was no ambush.

After I finished college, I went directly to graduate school, where I was supported by a stipend. I did hire myself out to an undergrad who was struggling in a genetics course. He had money to pay me from the GI Bill, but he was a horrible student and never learned anything I tried to teach him, so I told him to keep his money.

 

While you’re in college, you cultivate professors who will write recommendation letters. I did, and those got me into a grad school program supported by an NIH training grant. This paid my stipend and tuition for three years. The remaining two years were supported by my mentor’s NIH research grant. Again, my time in grad school got me letters of recommendation for postdoc positions, and I landed one at Washington University in St. Louis. There, I was awarded an NIH postdoctoral fellowship for three of the four-and-a-half years I was a postdoc, After that, I was Monsanto Fellow in Insect Biology until starting a faculty position.

Faculty in A&S typically have 9- or 10-month appointments. They can pick up summer salary from grants or teaching or from off-campus jobs. Med school faculty have 12-month appointments, although they’re expected to get ≥50% of their compensation from extramural sources (grants, contracts).

When my daughter was in college, we helped her get a summer job with a gifted children summer camp. Her college expenses were paid by Washington University and a couple of scholarships from Colorado State University. 

*the title is a nod to Hayek’s “The road to serfdom.”