Craig Rice
Montgomery County Council member
“I worked at the Plaza del Mercado McDonald’s in Silver Spring starting in 1988. I was a cashier at first, but then became a swing shift manager on the weekend. I had to open on Saturday and prepare the breakfast buffet, prep the restaurant, order supplies/inventory, and train new employees with the store manager. When I first started, I was making minimum wage, which I think was $3.35 an hour. But then when I became swing shift manager, I actually made $5 an hour, which was a lot of money at the time. I remember we used to have competitions to see who could make the biggest ice cream cone and hand it to the customer without it falling over. The looks on their faces when they got an 8-, 9-inch tall ice cream cone were priceless. It took some real skills to make the layers just right.”
Cokie Roberts
Political commentator and analyst for ABC News and National Public Radio
“I worked the summer of 1961, after freshman year of college, for the Office of Civil Defense Mobilization that was later split up, with some of it going to the Department of Defense and some of it eventually becoming FEMA. I think I was supposed to look at evacuation plans in case of emergency. As I remember, they made no sense at all. I don’t know how much I was paid, but it was enough to keep me showing up every day and living through it. I guess I learned what everyone learns with the first job: Your paycheck is much smaller than you expect. Whoever heard of deductions before that first check?”
Brian Frosh
Maryland Attorney General
“I had a construction job as a carpenter’s assistant the summer after I graduated from high school in 1964, helping build an apartment building just over the line in D.C. It was unbelievably hard, hot, dirty. The first day I went to work it was 100 degrees. I think that whole summer was 100 degrees. I’m carrying around these steel I beams, I’m fetching stuff, pulling nails and occasionally pounding nails in. The second day of work I didn’t have anything to do for about five minutes, so I sat down and caught my breath. Thirty seconds later the foreman walks by and yells, ‘Boy, get off your ass!’ I learned that no matter what was going on, I had to look like I was doing something. Six weeks later I got an offer to do inventory at the Music and Arts Center in Bethesda—and it was indoors! I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
John Harwood
Chief Washington correspondent for CNBC
“My most memorable summer job was as a copyboy at the old Washington Star in 1974, between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college. A core responsibility of copyboys/girls was to monitor the wire room. That’s where news poured in via a bank of loud machines that spit out continuous streams of printed material from the AP, UPI, etc. In my initial orientation session, an editor explained that I needed to bring him immediately any wire stories marked URGENT or BULLETIN—the designations signaling really big news. An hour or two later, he walked into the wire room and asked me where all the wire copy was he needed to do his job in putting out that afternoon’s paper. ‘I didn’t see anything marked URGENT or BULLETIN,’ I replied, ‘so I threw it all away.’ I quickly set about digging copy out of trash cans. At least he didn’t fire me.”
