Your first summer job
Every job has some perk
This post originally ran on July 10, 2025.
By Tim Wilson, co-publisher, contributor
I didn’t get my first summer job until the summer after my junior year, just after I had turned 16 in the spring. I was on the decidedly young end of the age spectrum in my class.
Like a lot of us, I got the job because a friend was already working there. It was a Dairy Queen in Somerville, Mass.
In New England, and especially Greater Boston, Dairy Queens are not as common as in other parts of the country. I had a lot to learn about making things like Dilly Bars, perhaps the most tedious task I’ve encountered. One by one, stick a popsicle stick in a mostly frozen disc of vanilla ice cream. Once you’ve got sticks in a dozen or so discs, dip them one by one into chocolate until you fill a metal sheet with about a dozen of these chocolate-dipped Dilly Bars. Slide the sheet into a freezer and then start the process again; over and over and over.
I also had a lot to learn about how the boss was always right even if it made no sense to me.
Dairy Queen wanted the cones to have a certain look to them that was a product of holding the cone just right as you worked the lever on the ice cream machine. You also had to master the technique to make the amount of ice cream appropriate to each size cone. This is where I had a problem.
When working to get that look just right, I was more focused on shape than size. As a result, my boss was unhappy with the amount of ice cream I put on a cone. She didn’t want customers expecting the uber Tim cone every time they came to the counter.
But what stumped me was what happened if she was there when I made one of my mega-cones. She would take the cone and dump the whole thing in the trash and tell me to do it over. That just didn’t make sense to me. Even though it was soft serve and not my preferred Brigham’s hard ice cream, seeing that much ice cream go to waste was shocking. All I could think was, “well, I would have eaten it.”
As you might expect, my Dairy Queen career was short lived. They canned me after about two weeks.
It was just as well. It let me focus on getting ready for my one season of high school football as a 5-foot-7, 135-pound offensive linemen. Don’t laugh. I needed a big growth spurt to get there. Freshman year I had been young enough and small enough at 5-foot-3, 115 pounds to play Pop Warner football.
One year later after graduating high school I overcame my first-job trauma and found my niche – washing dishes at a Howard Johnson’s. Ahh, the memories. Scraping egg yolk off dishes first thing Saturday morning that piled up from late Friday night when no dishwasher was on duty. Cleaning up puke in the men’s room from the same Friday night customers responsible for the yolk-caked dishes.
My Howard Johnson’s highlight was calming down an enraged late-night diner who was impatient for his pancakes and was calling for the cook’s head. The cook was hiding in the walk-in freezer with a large knife. The diner and I bonded over – what else – washing dishes. He’d done the job himself and recalled scalding his hands on the dishes fresh out of the dishwasher. I let him know I felt his pain, literally.
Every job has some perk. At HoJo’s it came when I had to vacuum the cocktail lounge on Saturday mornings. Friday night drunks dropped an amazing number of quarters and sometimes even bills when fishing wallets out of their pocket to settle up with the bartender. But the cocktail lounge treasure was the second-best perk. This was the 1970s and cocktail waitresses at Howard Johnson’s actually wore hot pants. Remember them? I certainly do.