Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Congress has voted to end federal funding for public broadcasting. Boo. It means that WNYC and WQXR will lose nearly $6 million over the next two years. Your support is critical. Please stand with us and start or increase your monthly sustaining donation now at wnyc.org. As you've been hearing, it's New York City Food Week here on All Of It. Later in the hour, we're going to talk about where to get a great burger.

Tomorrow we'll go straight to dessert. We'll talk about some of the city's best ice cream places, and on Thursdays, we'll talk tacos. Of course, on Friday, we will talk about the most New York of all, pizza. Now, who's going to serve you those items? It could be someone's summer job.

[music]

Alison Stewart: When school gets out for the summer, millions of teenagers join the workforce. It's a classic tradition of an American summer. The first real taste of independence, a chance to make money and to learn what it's like to have responsibilities outside of the classroom. Everyone has a story about the odd job they held or a memory about a day on the job that went wrong. Maybe it's something you laugh about today, or maybe it launched you into the career you have now.

As we hear your stories, we're also going to hear about the summer job some of our All Of It producers had back in the day. I'm welcoming our team members Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, and Zach Gottehrer-Cohen to the studio. Welcome to all of you.

Kate Hinds: Hello.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Before we get started with this, Kate, you are the parent in the group. You and I are the parents in the room. Why do you think a summer job is a good thing for a kid?

Kate Hinds: Because I'm a big believer in shared experiences, especially ones that you don't entirely control. Kids that are teenagers have generally been to school, and parents have a lot of oversight in kids' education. They know the teachers. They're on the PTA. If your kid goes to summer camp, again, it's a very controlled environment.

I feel like work is really the first experience that your kids are going to have where they are not in a hand-picked group of other kids in your neighborhood. It's a place for them to really stretch out their boundaries and do something entirely new with a group that the parents aren't involved with in any way. I found that really valuable myself as a kid, and my kids found it valuable when they were teenagers.

Alison Stewart: Zach, how did your parents talk to you about working during the summers?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: I actually didn't when I was a teenager. I had to wait until I was an adult. My mom was very keen on "Let the kids have their summers," and it wound up biting me in the butt because I didn't have a very good work ethic until I went and got summer jobs and learned how to pedal to the metal and get it done.

Alison Stewart: You have an excellent work ethic, might I say.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: How about for you? How did your parents talk to you about a job?

[00:03:01] Jordan Lauf: My parents' rule was, if I wasn't playing sports, I had to get a job. When I was cut from the lacrosse team, much to my dismay, that meant I had to go find a job since my afternoons and weekends, and summers, were no longer going to be filled by practices for sports. That's how I ended up having to get my first summer job. I also had a car that I got to drive to school and drive around, which was very lucky of me, but that also meant I had to pay for my own gas. I had to figure out how to make some money to drive around my little Honda CR-V.

Alison Stewart: Kate, do you remember the first time you went out there and you had to apply for a job, what that was like as a teenager?

Kate Hinds: I worked under the table for a long time. My first job was when I was 12 or 13, and I waited tables at a local pizza place. I say, wait tables, I got fired because I used to make people come to the counter to pick their orders up. I didn't want to bring it to the table because I was lazy, but I basically just went down to the--

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

[laughter]

Kate Hinds: I just went down to the cars like, "Hey, do you need anybody?" and they were like, "Yes." My next real job was working in a movie theater. I did have to apply. I had to fill out a whole paper and have an interview experience. I must have done well because I got it.

Alison Stewart: Were any of you intimidated in going out and looking for a job? What do you think?

Jordan Lauf: I had a really scary interview process when I worked at Anthropologie. That was my most intimidating experience. I had to fill out all the forms. Everyone there, as you can maybe imagine, was very fashionable. It was my first experience working with people much older than me. My first summer job, I worked as a kids' summer camp and birthday party person. I was mostly working with other teenagers. Anthropologie was a lot of women over the age of 40 and 50 who really had their Stuff together.

The interview process for that was that I showed up and they gave me a fake scenario. They said, "Ruth is looking for an outfit for her--" It was her 20th high school reunion. "It's a barbecue outside in July. You have five minutes to run around the store, create a fake outfit, including accessories that you would recommend to Ruth." Literally, I was sweating bullets. I had to run around this giant suburban Anthropologie and just grab things that I thought looked cute and put it together. Then I had to explain to them why I picked the outfit. I was like, "It's July. I don't know. She might be hot, so I picked a light fabric."

Anyway, I got the job somehow, but I just remember running around Anthropologie like a chicken with my head cut off, looking for a nice, chunky necklace that Ruth might want to wear to her fictional high school reunion. I was definitely intimidated by that experience.

Alison Stewart: Did you ask for background about who Ruth was? Did you try to get in her head?

Jordan Lauf: I was like, "How scared is she of her high school reunion? Is she nervous?"

Alison Stewart: Is her ex-boyfriend going to be there?

Jordan Lauf: Exactly. No, I had no follow-up questions as an 18-year-old. I was like, "Please just let me survive this."

Alison Stewart: Zach, you worked at a seafood restaurant in the city.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Yes, Red Hook Lobster Pound.

Alison Stewart: How did you end up there?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: My friend Jackson was the manager of that spot, and he recruited three of us to be in various different places because they had the facility in the CBGB's little alleyway, and then they also had food carts that would just be around the city. I, unfortunately, was not getting to go around the city. I was at the facility. He was a very intimidating cook person, kitchen person, and I was extremely not. I was extremely nervous to try to do a good job for my buddy Jackson.

Alison Stewart: What memory stands out for you from that time working at the seafood restaurant?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: I was back of house. When you clean a griddle, the griddle is on, you pour vinegar on it, and have to scrub it really hard with a heavy brick scraper thing. The smell of the vinegar as it's evaporating directly into your face is still in my nostrils right now. It's so intense, and the heat on your hand, if the glove has even one small hole in it, just very-- The people who work back of house, it's occupational hazards. You can get hurt easy. It's crazy.

Jordan Lauf: Could you ever eat at Red Hook Lobster Pound again now that you've worked there, or do you know too much?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: I would definitely eat there again. I know enough to know that it's tasty.

Alison Stewart: It is tasty, it's true.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: How it's made. I know the difference between a Connecticut roll and a Maine roll.

Alison Stewart: Would you like to share with a class?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Oh, thank you for asking. Yes. A Maine roll is, you make the lobster salad with equal parts lemon juice, mayo, and chopped celery, and then that's just the lobster on there in the toasted bun. The Connecticut roll is you poach the lobster in clarified butter for about a minute, and then pop it in the bun, a little more butter on top, and then paprika and scallions. Very easy, very tasty.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we are talking about summer jobs with Team All Of It, and with you. What is a memorable summer job you had growing up, either in high school or college? Were you a lifeguard, an ice cream scooper? We want to know, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or maybe you found yourself working at a totally random and strange summer job. We want to hear your stories as well. 212-433-9692. Did you take away any lessons from your summer job? Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's get to some calls. Let's go to Camille in South Orange. Hi, Camille. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Camille: Hi, Alison. I have been a fan since the '80s. I love your show.

Alison Stewart: Thanks.

Camille: I fall into this strange summer job category. I worked at the New Orleans 1984 World's Fair when I was in high school. It was an amazing place because they used a lot of the same giant papier-mâché sculptures that they use on Mardi Gras floats. I worked in this outdoor structure called the Wonder Wall, which was trying to simulate a Mardi Gras parade, floats all connected. I had to sit outside in New Orleans, in the summer, all day, selling a patio plant called miniature weeping crepe myrtles that has been hybridized by a botanist at Louisiana State University.

What I learned was how to stay cool and pace myself. I also got to read a ton because it was pretty quiet. I read my way through the library while I waited for customers. It was amazing.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling in. Let's talk to Carol from Brooklyn. Hey, Carol, thanks for calling All Of It.

Carol: Hi. I also have a very random and strange summer job. The summer of 1986 and 1987, I was an intern at WNYC.

Alison Stewart: All right, then.

Carol: I worked for a show. The way it happened was I was a big Doctor Who fan, and they had the Doctor Who presentation trailer in Central Park, and I hung out there so much because I had nothing to do that I ended up being a tour guide. It was being sponsored by WNYC. The woman who worked for that, she thought I was pretty cool, and she said that I should talk to the guy who produced Kids America, which was a show that was on in the '80s. I met with a producer, and he really liked me.

I was the only person who really knew current music. They all knew the kids' songs, but I knew Top 40 because I was a teenager. Then they put me in charge of getting various kinds of music. I came across this song called Star Trekking, which couldn't be released in the United States because Paramount blocked it, but I got a copy of a 45 from England, and I wanted to put it on a cartridge, which you probably remember is what we used back then..

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Carol: It was literally 20 minutes before airtime, and I had to get this thing on a cartridge. I went from control room to control room to try to just dub it onto a cartridge. Everyone was busy. They kicked me out here, there, and everywhere. I went into Control Room 1. Little did I know that Control Room 1 was controlling the live feed of All Things Considered coming out from DC. The woman who was in the room, her name was Lucy. She and I were friendly.

I said to her, "Are you on the air?" She was like, "Well, no, I'm standing at the side of the room talking to someone. Of course I'm not on the air." I was like, "Okay." What I meant was, "Is board live?"

Alison Stewart: Oh, no.

Carol: I was like, "Well, I see the needles moving, but clearly, they're just listening to the feed." I popped in my cartridge. I put my 45 on the turntable, and I turned on an oscillator. All of the New York listening area heard for about 20 seconds was [onomatopoeia].

Alison Stewart: You're our favorite person. Didn't that happen during Kids Day here at WNYC?

Kate Hinds: Yes. There was, I think, a minor mishap with Bring Your Child to Work Day. I just wanted to throw out a fun fact about Kids America. It first started as Small Things Considered.

Alison Stewart: This one is a tee-up for you, Kate. It says, "Best high school summer job ever was Teaneck, New Jersey, Dairy Queen, '76, '79. Unlimited free ice cream. After closing, we could trade with the local pizza shop. Wonderful experience." Now, you also worked in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Kate Hinds: I did. I'm pretty sure the Teaneck Dairy Queen was on Teaneck Road. I worked on Cedar Lane, which was then called the Cedar Lane Cinemas, and I worked the concession stand at the movie theater. The big challenge for me was, we popped our own popcorn, and we did it with this old-fashioned giant metal popper. At the end of the night, you had to clean the popper. Unlike Zach, which used vinegar and hard work, we used Easy-Off. We would pour this violent chemical in the popper.

You had to do it before closing. You were hustling to get out of there and go have your summer fun. We would clean the Easy-Off out of the popper and then go do our thing. All my friends were like, "Oh, you must eat so much popcorn," and I was like, "Really, no."

Alison Stewart: "No, we don't."

Kate Hinds: "I really don't."

Alison Stewart: "We don't." You also worked at the Bergen County Mall.

Kate Hinds: I did. [laughs] My mother will never let me forget this. I hope she's not listening. I worked at one of those stands in the mall that engraved things, engraved ornaments, and beer steins. I had a tumultuous teenage relationship with my mother. At one point, she comes in and she wants to buy, I think, a beer stein for a friend of hers and have me engrave it. I was so mad at her for some fight that I can't even remember, I wouldn't give her the discount. I made her pay full price. She won't let me forget it.

Alison Stewart: Still not to this day. Jordan, you're known as the person who organizes things for our team. You had a job organizing birthday parties-

Jordan Lauf: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -for a little kids. This is in your blood, organizing?

Jordan Lauf: I guess so. I guess I've been a-- What did you call me? A cruise captain? An event, entertainment planner?

Alison Stewart: You just did the bridesmaid weekend.

Jordan Lauf: I did. I'm a maid of honor for a friend, and I just planned-- I just came back. If my voice is a little hoarse, I spent a whole two days with 22 people on a joint bachelor and bachelorette party, which I planned myself. No, that went really well. Yes, I'm no stranger to organizing parties. I worked at The Field House in Fairfield, Connecticut, which is just basically an indoor field complex where people would play indoor soccer, other indoor sports, but on the weekends, they would host children's parties for kids who just basically wanted to run around but maybe it was the winter, so they couldn't run around outside.

It was a lot of Capture the Flag. It was a lot of soccer games. People cried always. You had to help the kids who were unhappy with their kickball performance or whatever else was going on. My favorite part of that job, and I probably shouldn't share, is that often, the end of the party was always that we would serve pizza and cake to all the kids. What often happened is that the parents way over ordered pizza. They would have 10 full pizzas for 12 kids, and there was just no way that they were going to finish all of it.

What my friends and I would do is we would go around, we would hand out the pizza, and then when the pizza box maybe had three slices left in it, we would shuttle the pizza box away into the area that was the garbage area.

Alison Stewart: Otherwise known as where you're having lunch.

Jordan Lauf: Exactly. We would do that with a couple of pizzas, and then by the end of the party, we would have a full pizza left for the rest of us that we would just eat. I'm sorry to all the parents of Fairfield, who I might have stolen a little bit of your party pizza. I got really good at cutting cake. That was the other thing I learned from that job.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Richard. He's calling in from Babylon. Hey, Richard. Thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

Richard: Hi, Alison. My summer job was a little different from, obviously, everybody else's. I was a clamor. During the summer months, we'd be able to go out and go clamming out on the great South Bay and earn our money. Was interesting was, you get up at dawn and you get out there on the great South Bay or off Pavilion or West Islip or those areas, and it'd be continually boats coming out, more boats, more kids, more boats. At some point, there was so many out there, you felt like you could walk from boat to boat.

It was interesting from the standpoint of it taught you a responsibility to get up. You had to size all the clams when you brought them into the dock to sell them to the commercial buyers. I'm not sure if they wound up on different restaurants in Manhattan, but it was an interesting job from that. It definitely built up upper body strength and a good tan. After you came in from the dock and usually by 11 o'clock in the morning, or noon, you'd sell them, you'd grab the surfboard, and you'd get back on the boat and head over to the beach and get a little surfing in until the afternoon.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn from having that job clamming?

Richard: I really found I wanted to work at an office after that. It was really hard work.

[laughter]

Kate Hinds: He said, "Only emails for me after this."

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Richard, for calling in. Listeners, we want to know what your memorable summer job was growing up. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more calls, we'll have more with Team All Of It after the break.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In studio with me, I have All Of It's producers, Jordan Lauf, Kate Hinds, and Zach Gottehrer-Cohen. We are talking about the summer jobs that we held. We want to hear about your summer jobs as well. Zach, this one says, "I worked my summers through college painting houses, both interior and exterior. To this day, I do all of my own painting thanks to those jobs." Another text says, "My first summer job was as a land surveyor's assistant. It was an incredible way to become familiar with much of NYC from Times Square to Tottenville, from City Island to Coney Island.

When you were working and you got your first paycheck, how did it feel?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: A little weird. Like, "Oh, oh," because usually, I don't know, it was school, and you don't get a paycheck, but you put in all the effort, and then you just get a grade at the end. Who knows? Here's this thing that now I'm holding in my hand, and what? Do I have to cash it? How do I turn this into stuff that I can spend? I don't actually remember all that well what I spent it on exactly, but it felt like the start of, "Oh, this is how everyone else does it. This is how money gets made."

Alison Stewart: How about for you, Kate? When you got your first check, did you spend it? Did you save it? What did it feel like?

Kate Hinds: I do remember, as Jordan said, I had a car, and because I was living in New Jersey, and this was New Jersey in the '80s, which was the car insurance highest price in the country, I had a car that was bought, I think, for $300. My car insurance bill was $1,300 a year because my mother was like, "I'm not putting you on my car insurance. If you hit someone, I don't want to be sued." I paid for my own car insurance. A huge chunk of my paycheck went to my car, but I was really proud that I was able to afford it and could pay for it myself.

Alison Stewart: Jordan, you had a situation with people who, how shall we say, shoplifted?

[laughter]

Jordan Lauf: I did. I also want to add to the paycheck conversation that at Anthropologie, you got a 60% discount on all clothing. Unfortunately, working there was also a shopping expedition for myself. Too much of my paychecks went right back to my employer, which was unfortunate on my part, but yes. Sometimes when I worked the cash register, I would have people try to get away with things. One time, a woman came in and she had a giant bag of returns. The way returns worked at Anthropologie was, you had to fully process them before you could give the customer any of their money back.

I had to scan all the tags back in, re-tag everything. As I was doing that, I would scan the tag and it would say, "Oh, here's a beautiful cashmere sweater. It should be blue. It should have a turtleneck." The sweater I was holding in my hand with the tag on it was moldy and full of holes. I was so confused, but I was also a child. I kept scanning them, and eventually I said to myself, "This is not an Anthropologie brand." Naively, I looked at the woman, and I was like, "Oh, are you sure these are from our store?" She was like, "Yes, I'm very sure. They came from your store."

Then I could tell she was getting nervous. Then I alerted my boss, and it turned out that what this woman would do is she would shoplift a bunch of clothes from an Anthropologie, take the tags off of those clothes, and retag moldy old clothes from her house with the Anthropologie tags, and then try to return them to get-- Sorry, she wouldn't shoplift the clothes. She would buy them so that she could get all the tags and then get her money back by returning fake, nasty clothes from wherever in her attic. Apparently, she was notorious for doing this around the Connecticut area. She almost got me because I was an unsuspecting teenager.

Alison Stewart: Looks around, summer job, go into that one.

Jordan Lauf: I was an easy target for sure.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Susan in Astoria. Hi, Susan. What was your summer job?

Susan: I had a Messenger job in '76. I didn't ride a bike. I was not good on a bike. I didn't want to get killed. Back then, there was no protection. I had a foot messenger and public transportation job. It was based out of a company called Cosmic Messenger Service on Water Street. I lived in the East Village. I didn't really know very much of the rest of the city. I found out the hard way. On my first run, I was sent to Harlem to an envelope factory, and I hadn't realized so much that Broadway goes from east to west.

From the east side where I was, I took the wrong train, and I ended up lost. I walked past a lot of vacant lots and things. I was wearing these messenger-type pants with lots of pockets, like cargo pants. I remember a lovely elderly Black man saying to me, "Well, this is all well and good, but where's your bicycle?"

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. This one says, "I worked a night shift in a hardware factory making turnbuckles and operating a third thread roller." The summer before, I worked in a bank vault, all day counting money." Let's talk to Kareth. Hey, Kareth, thanks for calling All Of It.

Kareth: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Kareth: You said my name right, which never happens. Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: I love it. You're calling in from Jersey. What's going on in Jersey?

Kareth: I just wanted to share a story about how my father, shortly after I became eligible to work as a teenager, drove me down to the boardwalk, I grew up at the Jersey shore, and dropped me out of the car and said, "Come back when you have a job. Head up onto the boardwalk and see what you can find," and I did. I worked for several years at two well-known shore landmarks. One was Jenkinson's and one with Martells-

Alison Stewart: Point Pleasant.

Kareth: -doing everything from shucking clams, scooping ice cream, making candy. You name it, I did it. My father taught me a very valuable lesson about not being fearful and marching up and asking adults for a job, and instilling very strong work ethic.

Alison Stewart: All really good things. Thanks for calling in. Let's talk to Peter. Hey, Peter.

Peter: Hi. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: I hear you great. You're on the air.

Peter: This was the summer of 1965. A friend of mine was connected to showbiz, and he got a job working at the Forest Hills Music Festival as a general gopher, but he had to go to summer school, so I ended up getting the job. I was helping everything out, and I was helping get Judy Garland up on stage. She seemed like she'd been drinking a bunch, and I had to help her up. I know. It was also the year that Dylan went from acoustic to electric, so the whole audience was in uproar and were attacking the stage. It was a very eventful job. I met Frank Sinatra, Alan Ark, all these well-known people. Anyway, that was the high point of the most glamorous job I ever had.

Alison Stewart: Zach has a question.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Peter, you called it a gopher. I didn't know that that's what it was called, but I did that for a music festival in Woodstock where the musicians needed shuttling from where they were staying on the site to the stage and then also from where they were staying down to the airport, like LaGuardia. Just a lot of driving around and just whatever anyone needed to get done. Was it a catch-all kind of thing?

Peter: It was definitely a catch-all thing, but I was too young to drive, so that was not in my job description. I did everything else. Get them food, get them something to drink, help them up if they were too unstable, whatever they needed.

Alison Stewart: This is a great text. "Making popcorn in a movie theater, the butter topping machine shot the stuff into my hair, and it took a week to wash it out."

Kate Hinds: Been there.

Jordan Lauf: Oh, no.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: That movie theater butter also is really intense, and it sticks butter in the air.

Alison Stewart: "Butter." You told us about your shoplifter. Do you have any memorable stories from your job?

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Not stories so much as, I still know how to cut scallions really tiny.

Alison Stewart: Oh, really?

Jordan Lauf: Yes. You use your knuckles as a guide and very, very slowly work your way down the scallion.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I love that. That's what you can take forward. Did you take forward anything from your summer jobs, Kate?

Kate Hinds: I made a lot of friends. For me, summer jobs were about making money but also socializing. I really do feel like I worked with a lot of different people, and I worked with the public, which was a real eye-opener for me. Random people coming in off the street to just talk to you when you worked at the movie theater. It was very educational.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Barry from Manhattan. Hey Barry, thanks for calling All Of It. We want to hear about your summer job.

Barry: Oh-oh, no, you don't.

[laughter]

Barry: For two summers, I was the assistant organist at a boys' military camp upstate.

Alison Stewart: Oh boy, I'm scared to do a follow-up with that.

Kate Hinds: Was Donald Trump enrolled?

Barry: I say it was great training, but six days a week at 7:15 in the morning, I played for the chapel service.

Alison Stewart: There you go. Thanks for calling. I have so many questions. Alistair in Manhattan on line nine. Hey Alistair, thanks for calling All Of It.

Alistair: Hi Alison, longtime fan. I just wanted to describe probably my worst summer job. I've had a bunch of different summer jobs, but this summer I was in high school. I was what's called a PBP, which is a package belt person for UPS. It was from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM, and on that entire three-hour shift, you're in a 40-foot trailer with a conveyor belt fed into the trailer. Your job was just to stack the trailer, and you had to do it in a specific way. You had to build these walls.

Then after two weeks of being there-- It's 100 degrees outside, but it's 120 degrees inside these trailers. It's so hot, stifling. Then, about two weeks into the job, a guy comes in and he says, "Well, your touch rate is good." I was like, "Well, what's a touch rate?" He goes, "Well, you're touching 60 boxes a minute, but we need you to get up to 200 boxes a minute." Then I'm really figuring out how to stack these boxes. Then you learn tricks. You put up a wall that's waist high, and you put it three feet from the last wall, and then all the odd-shaped stuff you just throw behind that wall. Then you make the wall go up to the top, and then you're good.

Then another manager, two weeks later, came in, and he came in with a two-foot stick. He pushed it between the boxes, and if he couldn't touch the other wall. You had to take down the wall and build it again. Then you're building these walls, and your touch rate is good, and then two weeks later, there's a manager that came in about the levelness of your wall, make sure your walls were level because they didn't want the walls to fall in transport. Then finally, the final manager after my month in, imagine, comes in and goes, "Did you get my salts?" I was like, "No. What's assault?"

He goes, "Oh, it's a package that doesn't belong in your truck." I was like, "I wasn't even told I was supposed to look at the addresses." He goes, "No, you just look at the zip code." In addition to touching more packages and building the level walls, now I had to pick up the boxes and spin them, and make sure that the zip code was right. That day, he put the salt in early in my shift, and we had to take down every wall that I built up in the last three hours and find the salt that he put in. These managers were all PBPs. I'd never seen another guy stack wall-- The guy was like a Tetris pro. He's like a master.

Alison Stewart: We're going to stop you right there, but thank you so much for calling in. I want to read a few more before we end. This says, "This is from John and Fanwood. I worked at a band uniform factory pressing seams. I saw large white fur drum major hats go by. I saw them two nights later at the RNC when Nixon was nominated." This one says, "My first summer job was detasseling corn at the age of 13. The hardest work I've done to this day, and I'm 62 years old. What did I learn? That I was allergic to everything in that corn field." Then this one says, "I worked at a fish market in Hackensack, New Jersey, in the '90s, cleaning fish. I still found scales stuck to my skin a week after I stopped. The lesson is, you work hard, you learn something, you make a little bit of money."

Kate Hinds: Alison, just briefly, I'd love to know a little bit about your summer jobs.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Definitely.

Alison Stewart: One, I worked at Friendly's in Bloomfield, New Jersey, as a hostess and scooping ice cream. I had a bicep like you wouldn't believe, but you would go home at night, and you would find fudge behind your ears. That was the worst.

Kate Hinds: Saving it for later.

Jordan Lauf: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: All right, then. I worked in a bakery. I had the 5:00 to 11:00 shift because I was a teenager and I could walk there. None of the college kids wanted the early shift because they were out the night before drinking. I was like, "Yes, I can be useful." Then, my final one, I was a babysitter. I told this in a meeting. They had a dog named Wells, and Wells was this big bulldog. No one was paying attention to Wells. One day, I got a call that said, "Wells is in the hospital. He's sitting in the hospital. He wants people to pet him." I've got the baby, so I put the baby in the carriage. I'm like, "How am I getting Wells out of the hospital?"

I grab hot dogs out of the refrigerator and I go down to the hospital, and I'm like, "Hey, Wells, here's some hot dogs." Wells was like, "Good deal." I walked back up the road with Wells and the baby."

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Wait, Wells was not a patient at the hospital?

Alison Stewart: No, Wells was a dog.

Jordan Lauf: He had escaped.

Alison Stewart: Yes, he escaped.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Oh.

Jordan Lauf: Oh, he just was looking for love.

Alison Stewart: He was just looking for love. He didn't stay in his little pen. He went off to the hospital looking for love. We made sure we gave him love and hot dogs once he got back to the house.

Jordan Lauf: That's a good name for a memoir. Love and Hot Dogs.

Zach Gottehrer-Cohen: Love and Hot Dogs.

Kate Hinds: Wells' Story.

Alison Stewart: Wells' Story. Thanks to everybody who called in. Thanks to Zach, Kate, and Jordan for sharing their summer experiences.