First job experiences can be career building blocks

As a workplace columnist, I am sometimes asked about the best job I’ve had. Here’s the answer:

I was new in town, my freshman year in college behind me, with no clue of how I was going to spend the next three months.

The family, meaning mom and dad, had moved from Chicago 75 miles south to this comparatively one-horse speck of a town called Kankakee, Ill. I had no friends and no contacts.

But my father did, and he decided I wouldn’t be lounging around the house, doing nothing until school and Big Ten football started again in September.

“Why don’t you take your resume and a few clips of stuff you’ve written to the local newspaper and ask if they’ll give you a job this summer,” he suggested. He wasn’t kidding, although I knew that I stood a better chance of getting tickets to an Elvis concert.

My reply was appropriately respectful but nevertheless translated, “Yeah, right, Dad.”

But he didn’t give up, and on Monday morning he figuratively booted my behind out the door in the direction of the Kankakee Daily Journal.

With nary a shred of confidence and a huge sense of doom, I sauntered up to the counter, where receptionist Norma Jean graciously took my application, resume and clips and walked away to a place unknown. I could have bolted right then, knowing full well that my application was short on education, experience and anything meaningful.

Instead, Norma Jean returned smiling and said, “Mr. Shipley will see you now. Follow me.” I whispered, “Who’s Mr. Shipley?”

“Oh,” she said, “he’s the managing editor.”

Indeed, this bear of a man, his shirt rumpled and his tie askew, was so intensely reading my measly resume and limited writing samples that he did not acknowledge my presence for what seemed an eternity.

Then he said, “Well, son, have you ever been on a farm?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m what you call a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, never been on a farm.” From his expression, I sensed this was the first of several wrong answers I would give in what promised to be a very short interview.

He rubbed his chin and looked over his wire-rimmed reading glasses. “Well do you know the difference between, say, a steer and a hog?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied shaking, having no idea where this was going.

Then, “If I were to drive you into the country, could you point out to me a field of corn and a field of soybeans?”

I gulped. Sweat soaked every inch of my shirt. “I could show you the cornfield; not sure about the soybeans.”

“Well, that’s just great,” he barked, obviously the preamble to being summarily dismissed from his office. Just as I prepared to leave in defeat, he continued, “because I want you to be our new farm editor this summer.”

Farm editor for a 25,000-circulation newspaper, a guy who had no idea (but would soon learn) that John Deere tractors were green, heifers were cows and butter sculpting was a big county fair competition.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It turns out that the previous “farm editor” – a misnomer I was soon to learn – abruptly quit a few days earlier, leaving Shipley with no one to cover the seven county fairs and other farm news (such as the cow that every day climbed a 350-foot Indian burial mound to view the sunset) in this important portion of the Midwest farm basket.

So desperate was he that he broke just about every hiring rule imaginable. He hired a total stranger off the street, a teenager with no college degree, no experience and no knowledge of farming to be his farm editor.

His decision that day in 1961 gave me the chance to grow from freshman frat boy to a young man with a wealth of journalism experience.

Over those four summers, I learned how important farmers, their families, their livestock and sculpted butter, the mentally ill (Kankakee County was home to two state mental hospitals), local business people, cops, coal miners, the rural poor and high school football coaches were to the fabric of life in the farm belt.

It was my first job in journalism, and upon reflection the best one I’ve had over 40 years. A job I should not have gotten, but did. A job that shaped my life.

Write Eric Zoeckler at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206, or e-mail mrscribe@aol.com.