what we did
ON OUR SUMMER
VACATIONS ANDY GOTLIEB | JE MANAGING EDITOR
Summertime and the living is … boring?
As much as kids (and adults) long for the warm summer months, the complaint of “I’m bored”
is a common one, especially as those kids become tweens and teens.

And once you get to your teen years, there’s the expectation — or at least there used to be —
that you should be working, if only to have a little cash in your pocket and occupy some of those
seemingly endless hours.

So I polled the staff and asked them how they occupied their teen summers. Of course, some of
those teen summers occurred many moons ago, so memories might be hazy.

That said, here’s what we remember.

Andy Gotlieb
May as well start with myself.

For three years, I did that teen-guy mainstay of
mowing lawns.

Although I can’t convince my teen son, cutting
lawns is the best gig a teenager can have. I set my own
schedule and charged $16 per hour — and this
was back in the early ’80s when the minimum
hourly wage was $3.35 — a sum that undercut
the professional lawn services. All those upper-middle-class
folks in Newtown Square and Broomall were happy to pony up.

When I went off to college, I had to give up the lawn-mowing
gigs so I turned to that college-kid staple of camp counselor. For
the next two summers, I worked at Camp Nock-A-Mixon in rustic
(read: lots of neighboring rednecks) Kintnersville.

Although I went from perhaps the best-paying teen job to
one of the worst (under $500 for eight weeks, with no tips), it
was a lot of fun.

I worked as the overnight hike counselor. One of the first rules
I was told was “don’t scare the kids.”
Of course, my mature 18- and 19-year-old brain interpreted
that as “scare the kids.”
My favorite prank was played on a bunk of 10- and 11-year-old
girls. I had their counselor tell a story about an ax murderer.

While she told the story, I snuck off, grabbed an ax and headed
into the adjacent woods.

The counselor wrapped up her story with, “The ax murderer
hasn’t been seen for more than 20 years, but people around here
still claim they hear the chop, chop, chop of his ax in the night.”
The moment she finished, I began smacking a downed tree
with the ax and letting out assorted grunts and groans.

I don’t need to describe the girls’ reactions.

Another time (I set this up but wasn’t there), after a boy
recounted what happened in all the Friday the 13th movies (Jason
kills everyone) — the bunk decided to play truth or dare.

22 JUNE 8, 2017
One kid took a dare and was tasked with walking onto the
small bridge across the creek and daring Jason to appear.

What the kid didn’t know was that a counselor was under the
bridge wearing a hockey mask and holding the same ax. So, when
he called for Jason, Jason appeared.

I don’t need to describe the boys’ reactions.

Jon Marks
What could be a better job in the world than
selling ice cream in the summer? Who wouldn’t say that?
But as it turns out, driving the truck and selling Mister Softee
was, well, let’s say difficult.

Especially the part where for 10 to 12 hours a day you’d have to
listen to that unmistakable jingle. And trust me, more than 40
years later, I still cringe when I hear it.

It’s one thing listening to that song when it comes into your
neighborhood while the kids line up for their favorites. It’s
another hearing it endlessly through each block, each neighbor-
hood, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

Actually, my ice cream-selling career didn’t last all that long.

Somewhere between getting robbed, having stuff thrown at my
truck, working six-day weeks from noon until past midnight and
being taught by my boss how to rip off kids by putting the ice
cream on the side of the cone and letting it drip down rather than
go down the middle, I decided this was not for me.

Yet there were some nice perks to the job, like being able to
park in my driveway for dinner, then filling up with enough
soft ice cream to last the week. Of course, you wouldn’t want to
eat too much, which cut into your profit margin. But at 18
percent commission — no salary — it turns out no one’s
getting rich there.

Sadly, I left Mister Softee behind after that summer and tried
something else: Willow Grove Park, where I soon found out that
life wasn’t such a lark when working 12-hour days and weekends
for a below-minimum wage $1.35.

THIS SUMMER
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM