Coshocton writer recalls first jobs in print

At a recent meeting of Coshocton's Write-On Writers Guild, our Writing Prompt was, "Tell About a Job you Once Had." Would you like to read my offering? It was kind of prophetic, telling about one of my first jobs.

Come to think of it, Glenn may not know about this job that only lasted during the two weeks of my high school Christmas-through-New Year's break one winter. It could have been 67 years ago, when I had the unexpected boon of learning a job that would be connected with my dream of being a writer of letters.

There are many unanswered questions about this long-ago job. Who got me the job? How long did it actually last? How did I get to work, since Daddy drove our only car to work at Togus, which was five miles in the opposite direction from our home? Did I walk the one and a half miles, crossing the Kennebec River from our British side to the American side? That's a mystery. Also, did I carry my lunch with me each day?

Did Mum drive Daddy to work so that she could take me to my job across the river? None of those details are important now. My job was located in a building four streets up from the river, reached by turning left around the big fountain on Haymarket Square on Water Street where we gathered to celebrate a football win over our Cony High School arch rivals, Gardiner High School. Then we would drive up Winthrop Street, which rose steeply from the River, past Water Street then Commercial Street, over the Maine Central Railroad tracks, then turn right onto a narrow, dead-end street to The Augusta Print Shop where I substituted for the proofreader while she was on vacation.

To this day, I can remember the symbol of a double P which meant starting a new paragraph. To eliminate something, like an extra dot for a period, circle it, then have a long tail going upwards. Drawing a skinny box in the middle of a word means to insert a space because two words were run together as one. Drawing a headless snake in the middle of a word, up over one letter then down under a second letter and back up, meant to reverse those two letters. Of course there were many other symbols for spelling and moving words or phrases, capitalizing letters of the alphabet, etc. It was a fun job for me, resulting in making the printed word easier to understand so that the words would flow smoothly.

Thinking about that first job made me recall another thing I did years ago, that had a connection to what I'm doing today. I interviewed someone and wrote a story for the KJ, the beloved initials for Kennebec Journal. Again, the reason for writing about this interview escapes me, but it happened. I interviewed a man in a toll booth at the Eastern end of Augusta's Memorial Bridge. The man would take money and make change for someone buying a strip of 10 tickets or a single ticket to cross the bridge. He would make change. And, he would count the vehicles that went past his toll booth. He allowed me to stand inside the booth and do his job for a few minutes.

When I typed up my story, it was a thrill to choose a title for it. Somehow, someone took a picture to accompany my story. My story used alliteration, "A Tribute to the Ticket Takers." A few days later, my story appeared in the KJ, along with a picture of me taking a ticket. What a thrill it was for me to see my story in print! But my title was changed. It now read, "Toll Booth is Driver's Confessional." I thought my title was better, but, too late, someone with authority changed the title, after I did all the work.

Josie usually changes my title, but it's okay, because she rarely changes the content. It's more important for me to realize that there were early writing jobs that were related to my dream profession. It still gives me a thrill, after all these years, to read what I wrote as it appears in the newspaper.