Summer jobs are inspiring
Columnist and former doctor share a common educational motivator: hard work during summers when they were younger.
Date published: 9/1/2002
By ROB HEDELT
WHEN I WAS growing up in the Northern Neck, the most important part of my education didn't come from books or classrooms.
It came one high school summer at Potomac Supply Corp. in Kinsale, where I worked pulling thin boards and thick, heavy chunks of just-milled lumber in an operation known as the grading table.
In a shift that started at 6:30 every morning, I'd hustle my way from one pile of lumber to another all day long, pulling boards and thicker sills off the line to plop them into their designated piles.
The work wasn't hard, but to me was so tedious and boring that I immediately developed an appreciation for any education that could prevent an assembly-line future.
Recently, I met an interesting Stafford County resident who had his own educational catharsis from hard summer work--which in his case came on the railroad tracks in New York state.
Dr. Clement J. Robbins III, a gynecologist and obstetrician here for 35 years before retiring in 1995, got in touch following a train accident in Maryland that was caused by heat-buckled rails.
The pleasant, entertaining 74-year-old arrived with several scrapbooks jammed with black-and-white photos of summers working on student crews for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in New York, which eventually merged with the Erie.
In summers from 1948 through 1951, after he'd returned from Army service and was going to school at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, Robbins was glad to join other young men in his hometown of Bath, N.Y., on the crews.
"We were tickled to get those jobs," said Robbins of the rail-maintenance jobs. "They paid a whole $1.50 an hour. You couldn't beat that back then."
Meeting at a railway siding and journeying out to wherever the day's job would take them, Robbins and the other young men would shovel gravel, put down new rails, pound spikes or build new facilities or signals.
It was hard work that did the same thing for the young Robbins that it did for me.
"I didn't mind hard work, none of us did," he said. "But it did give you an appreciation for getting an education. You realized that would be tough work when you were older."
Date published: 9/1/2002
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