So in Part 1 I told about my background, and how I was raised to avoid debt "at any cost". And digressed a bit to the great grandparents and grandparents who helped to raise me, and their skepticism of charity.
So I was a bit shocked, in 1980, at the tuition and board cost at Carleton (and you can't really live off campus, so "and board" is priced into tuition). So I signed up for work to offset cost and was assigned, like most Carleton College freshman, to food service. I signed up for the food kiosk in Sayles-Hill.
When I showed up on time the first week of school, there was a sign that said the food service was on strike - Saga Food Service was the campus contractor, and their employees were on strike. The College had closed 3/4 food joints and everyone had to dine at Burton Hall. So I went to Burton to start work.
It was a bit of chaos that day as all of the 2000+ students were dining in 1/4 cafeterias, but I elbowed my way in to ask about work.
Brian - I don't remember his last name - was the Saga Manager (the company the strike was upon). As I recall he was six foot three and very fat - maybe 350 lbs. Big guy. Intimidating. I asked him, in the chaos of fourfold feeding in a onefold cafeteria, where I'd be working.
Brian said sorry kid, all the positions are full. Come back next week.
This. Was. Not. An. Option. For. Me.
I was overwhelmed already by the tuition cost at Carleton, and my grandparents stories about jobs and wages and desperate tiimes in the Depression and "Dust Bowl" all lighted up within me.
Brian had turned around. I circled and pushed my chest right up to him and said I NEEDED THIS JOB.
Brian said listen kid, there are a lot of rich kids here who quit the first few weeks and I should just relax and come back in a week or two, there would be openings.
He turned away again. I got up into his chest again. I said with all my heart, PLEASE, I need to work, I can't afford this place. PLEASE. LET ME WORK.
Brian looked down and made eye contact. He said that while he had no positons open ,that my insistance was something new. Something he didn't see often. And he said "hypotentically" that he needed another student manager. But that he had NEVER hired a student manager from a first week freshman.
I SHOUTED I WOULD BE HIS BEST STUDENT MANAGER.
I was hired with no experience as a student manager, working directly for Saga Food Service, which was a dollar more per hour but more importantly, not restricted by the student work office to 7 hours per week. I frequently worked 20 hours, and stayed in that job 4 years.
Maybe I was the best student manager of Saga Food Service at Carleton College. I was hired and worked there four years. My biggest contribution to Saga Food Service was recruiting other Student Managers. I was elected Student Body President thanks to all the people I met working food service.
And as Student Body President in 1983, I made a LOT of noise about tuition inflation. And screamed about debt, to the point that some Carleton Administrators contacted me privately to say it WAS a problem and to keep making noise - but don't tell their bosses the encouraged me. #FrankWright
And there are a lot of people living today who would be proud to have been the best freshman student food service student manager, and who would not see this blog as being tongue in cheek at all. I am thinking about a lot of young Africans who are as desperate as I was to find work and who, if they had a "student manager" position for four years at a prestigious school like Carleton College, would be content for life.
My youth learning from my subistence farming Ozark grandfather, and my Ozark great-grandparents with the county newspaper, set me up well to toe-to-toe with massive Brian. And other big players. Jim Puckett is a bully and I am not intimidated.
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