Articles by Jeff: My First Jobs

By Jeff Barton

(My son's teacher asked father and son to each write about their first job.)

John Pfeffer didn't wear shirts and he didn't shave, and he didn't like little kittens, or teenagers. He bore a striking resemblance to the photographs I'd seen of Charles Manson, guru to the crazed-murderer set, except for his eyes. His eyes, bulging out from a face all but hidden by that wild, spreading beard and that thick, black matt of uncombed hair, reminded me of descriptions I'd read of John Brown standing at the gallows, unrepentant.

They were not murderer's eyes. They were not even mean eyes. But they were eyes full of mission; full of a gospel that only John could hear. I was happier when they were not focused directly on me.

John rode a motorcycle that came with a wonderful-looking but slightly scary woman as an attachment. He lived in the cedar breaks, drank heavily, smoked substances of which my high school counselors disapproved, and was a master at coaxing his big web press through the darkest hours of the night. He did this with skill and dedication, and, most of all, with a heavy iron wrench that he would smash into the printing press at regular intervals whenever it misbehaved, cursing it with all his considerable might.

John Pfeffer was my first boss. I jumped when he said jump. For that matter, I jumped when he raised his eyebrows. I did not trifle with him.

To say he was my first boss may not be strictly true. I grew up on a work program that had dual lanes: newspapers and ranching. John was one of my newspaper bosses.

As for ranching, I should clarify. I did not ride at dawn with Roy Rogers to fetch the herd back from bad-landers. I did not swim rivers on Old Paint. I picked up rocks. I dug fence-post holes. I was taught how to castrate calves, but never quite got the hang of it. In that world, my grandfather was my boss. He had calm, quiet eyes, to go with well-trimmed hair, a neat Stetson, and a smooth-shaven face. He did not drink. He sang in the church choir (not well, but loudly). He paid a dollar an hour and he expected a boy to work.

My grandfather had been in the horse cavalry. He had been on real cattle drives. In the winter of '29, he had raised lambs in his kitchen to keep them from freezing, to keep them from coyotes and mountain lions - from "the wolves," as my grandmother called them. He also had a master's degree in economics, had studied at Columbia University in New York City, and wore spit-polished pointy-toed boots. He played dominos on Saturdays. He did not like to kill things. He did not like me to play cowboys and Indians if I favored the cowboys too much. As superintendent of schools in the Depression, he had defied tradition - and perhaps board members - by putting "Spanish kids" on the school bus.  He thought poorly of anyone who did not rise before sunrise and sweat during the day. I did not trifle with him.

These were my first jobs, overlapping and on going - newspapers and ranching. After school and any summer week when I wasn't away at my grandparents, I worked in the vineyards of journalism, pressing out newsprint from a six-unit web, squeezing out sports stories and obituaries from a banged-up Royal typewriter with faded ribbon and sticky keys. Then for weeks or months at a time, for a dollar an hour and all the tuna sandwiches and Frosty root beer we could swallow, my cousins and I would turn brown and hard in the summer sun, repairing fence lines or clearing fields of rock each morning, swimming and playing our special invention, "water baseball," each afternoon.

On the surface, John Pfeffer and my grandfather could hardly have been more different. One was sure that drug enforcement officers were secretly watching him, and, for all I know, may have been right; the other, decades later, would see conservative former students petition for a school to be named in his honor. Soon I would go on to work mainly for editors, and then, finally, on to other professions. But looking back, I can see that each, in his own very different way, taught me about work, tolerance, the different faces of passion - and the different uses for a good, solid wrench.