The year of my seventeenth summer began with job hunting, much the same as the one before it had. I graduated in a college prep program but had taken typing and shorthand as backup so my job search began in the want ads for secretaries, office assistants and on down the ladder. This was before fast food places, and temporary summer jobs were hard to find in a town of less than 10,000, but then my aunt came through with a real winner.
Aunt Dorothy worked for the Motor Vehicle Department, Drivers License Division. She had some seniority so when an opening came up in the Highway Department, she put in a good word, and I got the job. It seemed perfect. I was a summer temp for secretaries on vacation. By the time one office got boring, I was off to another one more interesting. I guess you could call it a secretarial pool, except I was the only one in the water.
My home base was Clara Warrington’s office. She was secretary to the Director of Operations. At first sight, I was awestruck by her appearance, a tall model-like platinum blond, expensively dressed, completely in-charge individual. When she told me to do something, she didn’t have to say it twice. If no one was on vacation, Mrs. Warrington kept me busy sharing duties with her office staff. I typed letters, filed, made copies, collected and sorted the mail, answered and re-routed phone calls and anything else she told me to do.
Clara sent me to other offices most of the time, some in the same building, but many in locations across town. Mondays were the start of all vacations so on the prior Friday I went to my new place of employment to meet the vacationee and find out what the job required.
The Office of Right of Way was first on my list, one week only and by the following Monday I was more than happy to go back to Clara. Everyone in the R/W department seemed depressed including my boss and most of the typing was statistical with lots of degree signs and more-than or less-than arrows that I never could keep straight. It was an office of all men, and my most important job was keeping coffee in the coffeepot.
The next week I went down the hall and across the back of the building to Human Resources and met Marilyn, my favorite of all those I temped for. She had the best boss, too. He took his vacation at the same time she did, which left me not very busy. I read a lot that week. Clara’s assistant checked in a few times with things for me to do to keep me from getting really bored.
A couple of weeks after that I went to the stinkiest place you can imagine, the blueprint department. It was a huge room, wall to wall with drafting tables and located on the second floor of a strip shopping mall. The ammonia smell was overwhelming, but like everything else after a while you get used to it, and it actually became one of my favorites. Typing, filing, and opening the mail were my duties. The guys went out of their way to be nice, probably hoping I would show up the next day. They even gave me a little present and cake party at the end of the two weeks.
A short time after that I went to a statistical department that I can’t actually remember the exact name of, where all day I did nothing but type legal descriptions. I almost went bananas that week. One entire wall was nothing but girls in front of typewriters. The regulars competed with each other for the number of pages typed per day. I wasn’t interested. The girl I replaced deserved her vacation. I wonder if she came back.
My last assignment was in the soil testing lab. I think this was mainly done for highways and the entire building was full of engineers. All these years later the one thing I remember about that week is the steady pounding on the core samples. It went on all day and in my head even after I left the premises. I have no memory at all of what I did that week.
On reflection, the variety of the places and the people was an education in itself. Although some of the jobs were not pleasant, they certainly were not difficult, and the summer went by quickly. I was sad to leave Clara’s office and hoped I would be lucky enough to come back the following summer, the summer after my freshman year at the University of Delaware. But that was not to be. There were no openings that year, and I ended up waiting tables in a family restaurant called Kirby and Holloways. That’s where I met my husband, Jim, and as they say, the rest is history.
