A circuitous route brought me to Carleton University in the summer of 1958. Spending money required a job, so I found work at the Regent Theatre as an usher for .50 cents an hour, with perks: a gold buttoned uniform and a pillbox hat. The Regent, now long gone was at the corner of Bank and Sparks, an area I was familiar with because I also had a Saturday job as an office boy at the nearby Ottawa Journal, also long gone. I saw the movie “Blackboard Jungle” at the Regent – not my favourite movie, but remembered because Bill Haley and the Comets, playing “Rock Around the Clock” was my introduction to rock and roll. Blackboard Jungle was not playing on my first day at work, but rather, Danny Kaye in The Court Jester, and after three shifts I knew I had to find another job.
The new Carleton University campus on Colonel By Drive consisted of two buildings, the library, and the Tory Building. Construction of Paterson Hall and a connecting tunnel was just beginning when I parked my bicycle and asked the boss, Tony, for a job. Tony looked me over and I could see the wheels turning, a hopeful sign. He said he paid labourers $1.25 per hour but being 15 years old, he would pay me $1.00. Double my salary! I thought I won the lottery. I called my friend Larry and told him to get over here right away because Tony said there might be another job. I weighed about 165 pounds and Larry a bit more. We were not fully grown, but getting there, and we looked like maybe we could work. We just had to prove it. Tony said we needed construction boots, but we never bought them, and he didn’t push it. He would send us somewhere out of sight when the safety inspector came around. One day I stepped on a nail and remember the pain and the board sticking to the bottom of my running shoe, a sickening sight. A band-aid, iodine, and back to work was how it was handled, but the experience, if you will excuse the pun, proved the point about construction boots.
Behind the job site, could be found a network of pathways winding though the underbrush and revealing small clearings. These were all that remained of cottages and shacks, that once populated this area of the riverbank and we spent our hall hour lunch break, eating sandwiches in one of these clearings. It was a pleasure I still recall.
We carried scaffolding to be assembled and then disassembled and pushed wheelbarrows of cement. I remember Larry on a scaffold maybe, 20 feet in the air, backing off the edge, still clutching his wheelbarrow full of cement. The foreman, a big man with a cigarette sticking out of his mouth, grabbed Larry by the wrist, pulling him back. He may have saved his life that day but work just carried on.
We traveled by bicycle, while the rest of the workers came by cars and pick-up trucks, rust buckets mostly. One guy though, an overweight Italian, stood out from the rest, because of his car. A $1.25 an hour labourer, driving a brand new shiny red Buick. Clearly, somewhere was another source of money.
One Friday a section of the tunnel roof was poured, and the cement had to be watered to prevent cracking. Living close by I got the weekend watering job. A dollar an hour just for watering cement.
Today, only these snapshots of memory remain. The rest is as they say, through a glass darkly. I can almost, but not quite recall Tony’s voice and I think he may have had a moustache, but I am not sure. He was a great boss though and I remember that summer with fondness. It was hard work but not exhausting and although tired at day’s end, it was a good tired. On my last day, Tony said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, Jimmy, why not stay here and not bother going back to school? He made his point.
The following summer, I found a job on a survey crew in Churchill, Manitoba, and never worked for Tony again. Larry returned for another summer. When I pass the Carleton campus today, it is never without thinking of that summer job.
Jim Bickford is an Ottawa resident who attended Carleton University part-time for a couple of political science courses in the eighties. The piece is a recollection of a summer job at Carleton University in 1958. .
