Jobs – Some Fun, Some Not!

I have always been blessed with a job when I needed one.   When I was young I did some babysitting and house cleaning for people.  Strangely enough, many of my early jobs centered around potatoes!

As a child, I was hired to pick potatoes.  We would follow along behind a tractor as it dug the potatoes up and turned them to the surface.  We had gunny sacks hooked to a belt around our waist and would pick up the potatoes and put them in the sack.  We were paid by how many sacks we had filled.

As a teen, I was hired to cut potatoes.  In the spring farmers would hire workers to cut the seed potatoes in half before they planted them.  They would set up a cutting table down in the spud cellar and the workers would slide the potatoes over knives that were mounted on the table.  The cellar was dark, cold and smelled like old potatoes.

In Idaho, schools were released during the two weeks of spud harvest.  I worked on the potato combines.  It was a fun job.  The potatoes would be dug up and sent over a conveyer belt while we picked the rocks and other debris before the belt dumped the potatoes into the truck to be transported to the potato cellar.  We often worked thru the night hurrying to get the potatoes harvested before hard freezes would come.

One summer I worked at the Pro-Ida potato processing plant that made potato flakes.  The plant operated 24 hours a day.  It was the only shift-work job I ever had and I hated it.  Every three weeks we had to work a seven-day graveyard shift.  The first day was a killer—24 hours with no sleep.  For endless hours, the flakes would bounce along a conveyor belt in front of me.  My job was to scoop off any burned flakes.  It got to the point that every time I closed my eyes I would see the bouncing conveyor belt.  The stupid flakes would bounce in front of me when I tried to go to sleep at night and sorry to say, even during the Sacrament!  The only thing that kept me going was knowing that I would leave for BYU at the end of the summer.

While I was in college I always had a secretary job.  At Ricks I was secretary for the P.E. (Physical Education) Department.  I loved the variety.  At BYU I was secretary for the Honors Program.

During the summers, I would go home to Idaho and find any job I could, saving every penny I made.  My summer earnings would pay my first semester’s tuition and my part-time job would pay my food and rent.  I would borrow the second semester tuition and have my wages garnished during the term and would have the loan paid off by the end of the school year.  When I graduated I only owed $200 to the BYU Credit Union.  It was for a loan that I took out to buy clothes to go on tour with Young Ambassadors.  The loan officer looked at me like I was crazy.  I just stared right back determined not to have another Aunt-Roma moment with my hand-me-down ward robe.  He gave me the loan.

There were many hungry days.  I remember looking at an apple in a vending machine with my mouth watering with no quarter to buy it.  But, I was at school and I didn’t really mind!

My summer jobs included working at a convenience store; a secretary for Forsgren Perkins Engineering; the above-mentioned Pro-Ida; and two summers working at Heise Hot Springs Resort as a fast-food cook and cashier.

My favorite summer job of all was a recreation supervisor for the city of Rigby.  All summer long I worked with elementary age children whose mothers worked and needed a place to go while she was away.  We played ball, went to movies, went swimming, etc.  It was my last summer-time job and I loved it!

After I graduated I was hired as the full-time office manager for the BYU Honors Program, a position I held when Steve and I got married.  We would go to campus together in the mornings and (often met for lunch.  Problems hit when I got pregnant with Ryan.  I had a terrible case of mononucleosis on top of morning sickness.  I was so ill that my liver was damaged and I was ordered to bed-rest for a few weeks.  I was sad to learn that they wanted to replace me at the Honors Program, but was deeply grateful that the department next door, Ancient Studies, would hire me as soon as I could return to work.

What a wonderful job it was!  I worked for a few different professors, but my favorite of all was Hugh Nibley.  He was a world-renowned retired professor of ancient scripture and was a funny little old man, a very thrifty gentleman who wore suits he had purchased from Deseret Industries and always had a safety pin on his lapel—just in case.  He was very well-known and I had a very different mental image of what he would look like.  I often thought if you lined up a hundred men and asked me to guess who Hugh Nibley was, he would have been the last one I picked.

He was so unassuming and ordinary by appearance that he had been chosen by the military to be a spy in World War II.  He was a paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines and would go from pub to pub gathering information.  He went to Germany on his mission and was fluent in German and many other languages.

Every morning he would bounce into my office, having just swam his daily laps, commenting on the wonderful Jonathan apples he had grown.  I typed several of his articles and his book on the Book of Mormon.  My boss had me hide a copy of it because Dr. Nibley’s office was a disaster and he was afraid if Dr. Nibley died, we’d never find it.   He loved to have me type while he dictated.  It was very challenging because he used several different languages and used a twisted form of shorthand that he had invented and miracles of miracles I could read.

One day he came to the office after having met with the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles talking to them about the temple endowment.  People would often want to meet him for lunch.  He would always have me decline the invitations saying that he was sure that they would find him far too boring.  In reality he was engulfed in a new project and would have been bored by them.

We got along famously!  Seeing the Book of Mormon through his eyes was deeply moving.  I learned so much from him.  When I had Ryan and quit my job for good, we received a baby card from the Ancient Studies office.  Along the bottom of the card was a secret message scrawled in his cryptic short hand that he knew the new secretary couldn’t read, “Sure miss you.”

Thanks to Steve’s amazing ability as a provider and several months of financial support from his parents until he graduated, I was fortunate enough to be a stay-at-home mom.  I was on to another chapter in my life, wife and mother–the best chapter of all.

(Almost 30 years later I began a new venture as a BodyTalk practitioner–another story; another day.)