Last Saturday, I did a 1–4 serving shift in the Rotary Pork Chop on a Stick booth during Decorah’s Nordic Fest celebration — 1000s of visitors and 100s of chop lovers. I volunteered to manage the money, still comfortable counting up sixty years later.

Because the chops were $8, there were lots of ‘two makes ten’ and ‘four makes twenty’ returns and one ‘92 makes 100 ‘. An hour into the experience, I felt 16 again. Two hours later, I felt every bit 76, my age.

Once a teenager was more than enough.

Fortunately, I had help from a lot of people, especially these three.

Wendell

My Social Security account tells me my first year of official earnings was 1965, $585. So by the summer of 1966, I was a veteran ice cream scooper at Baskin-Robbins, used to the scowls of my first boss, Wendell, the owner, who said to me on my first day a year earlier,

Paul, wherever you are in the store, I can see you.

Wendell was a friend of Del Riefe, owner of Riefe’s restaurant, where my engineer father and his friends ate lunch. My dad had mentioned to Del that his oldest son, a high school junior, was looking for a part-time job, and Del relayed the message to Wendell, who said I should come in and fill out an application.

Two years later, Del would recommend me to Pierre, the chef at the Davenport Country Club, who was looking for someone to manage the pool snack bar during the summer; two years after that, Del hired me as a weekend short-order cook while I was in college.

Early in my life, I got used to standing on shoulders. And I also began my inoculation against the silliness of America’s self-made men myth. No one treks alone.

I don’t remember my first interview with Wendell, but I do recall his three uncompromised expectations: that each scoop be precisely 3.5 ounces and that as we excavated the ice cream from the three-gallon containers, we do it evenly across the top. Even today, when I walk into the local parlor, the first thing I look at is the tubs under the glass casings, and what do I see? A lunar landscape of deep crevices. Tut Tut.

The third requirement was that we count up, not down, from the 13¢ charge for one scoop on a pointed cone to the dollar the customer gave me; flat or cake cones were the same. Try it. You’ll understand why Wendell was right.

Sharon

The lessons I learned from a demanding boss were the second best thing about my first job. The prize was my first girlfriend, who happened to be Wendell’s daughter, Sharon, who also worked at her father’s store.

By the time I was 16, I liked the theory of a girlfriend. Playboy pinups had replaced Parent Trap’s Hayley Mills in my after-dark, under-the-cover fantasies. My friend Jim shared his brother John’s used copies that we hid in the woods a block from my house.

But a real girl? She was more complicated than scooping Chocolate Mint, leveling a tub, or counting out money. The magazine models seemed so welcoming, always smiling. How do you even start with an actual person?

Fortunately, late one Saturday night, Sharon was closing up her father’s store when she discovered her car would not start, and her parents were at a movie. Desperate and seeing my phone number in her father’s office behind the large freezer, she called.

At this point in the story, I need to tell you something. I’ll make it short. A few months earlier, Sharon and I had our first date. The longer story is here. It didn’t go well. Hey, even Willie Mays struck out at first. Who does things right the first time?

Regardless, that night, when I picked her up, we sat and talked in my parents’ Pontiac, in the shopping center parking lot.

Soon after we had a second date, then a third…

Mom

When I was 12, I attended a Saturday morning school for boys who wanted to umpire youth baseball games. For whatever reason, I didn’t go back the next Saturday.

At 13, I went to the first of five sessions to become a lifeguard. During a pretend drowning, the victim elbowed me in the face, and I panicked. I didn’t return for session two.

At 16, after my first week under Wendell’s whip, I told my mom I wanted to quit. She said,

It’s too easy to quit hard things.

I didn’t.

She also said, a year later, “You know, you and Sharon can’t really get serious because she’s Jewish. You need to stop seeing her.”

I didn’t.

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