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.

My Freshman Job Interview at SAGA Food Service - my first week at Carleton College 1980: Part One

My father and my mother were the first people in their high schools (graduated 7 years apart, my dad was older) in Taney County, Missouri. 

My father was raised in a very self-educated household. William E. Freeland, his grandfather, and wife Minnie Freeland (Pawpaw and Mawmaw) whom I lived with for a few months every year, as a child, had hundreds of books he purchased on a government salary stationed in Four Corners - Shiprock, NM, today - before it was the USA state, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Where there wasn't anyplace to spend your federal paycheck, and nothing to do, so he and Minnie his wife (another family icon) spent their time reading and learning. 

* Pawpaw and Mawmaw Freeland were lifelong letter writers and retired with their friend John G. Neihardt in Branson, Missouri.  Black Elk Speaks was a seminal book I read and re-read in high school and afterwards, only later learning I'd sat on Neihardt's lap as a child... my Dad asked me what I was reading and I assumed he didn't know anything about Black Elk and was surprised when he pointed to the sofa where he and Pawpaw used to talk.

Pawpaw thought welfare and charity were corrupt and corrupting, and in the end thought BIA did more harm than good, "turning a culture morally opposed to hand-outs and charity upon its head".

My mom was raised on a subsistence farm in Taney County - Ridgedale, half a mile from the Arkansas border (she was born in Harrison). Outhouses using Sears Roebuck catalog pages for toilet paper. 

Premise: I was raised by people who didn't beg, borrow, or take family debt. And when I was admitted to Carleton College, the 1980s were when the colleges were absolutely soaking up debt like today's federal deficit. 

The financial aid officer at Carleton told me (and thousands of others) that there is "good debt" and "bad debt" and that a college education was the former.

Not convincing, as I was raised. I asked where the most work was on campus, and was told food service - SAGA. It didn't stand for anything - it was Saga Food Services, a chain providing college and institutional "turn key" cafeteria management.

In Part Two, I'll connect these dots.