What was your first boss like?
Boss? I have a hard time thinking of one.
It highlights what I have come to recognize as a core motivation that drove me to be entrepreneurial: I am averse to supervision. That mindset derives from my less than closely supervised upbringing, where “Do right” was about the only rule, and I was left to figure it out. But it does not do justice to my parents, my mom’s sister Helen, and Blanche, our housekeeper.
Daddy projected himself into my life as someone to emulate: He was a physician and a damned good one. “Charismatic genius” is a phrase I’ve applied to him many times. It catches his essence even if it is a bit of hyperbole. He was handsome, attentive, well-groomed, smart as a whip, and had, in Mother’s words, “the most beautiful manners you ever saw.” Every part of his being was refined beyond expectation. Even his handwriting was beautiful. On the other hand, he was addicted to intravenous opiates, smoked like a chimney, and abused alcohol. Though I never saw him in a rage, Mother said once he might become violent if he could not get his “medicine,” as he called it.
Despite almost insurmountable problems Mother nurtured Jim and me by staying married to Dad. To divorce him, she once said, would be like “abandoning a child”. Despite the chaos, she did a good job with us under very difficult circumstances. Mother’s sister, Helen, lived at Daddy’s hospital and was a rock of morality and reliability. Blanche, our Black maid, cooked and cleaned and, like Helen, was always there. A rock.
Growing up, I wanted a job, any job. To my delight, I was hired at the first place I applied—sacking groceries I was about 13 years old.
First boss: The first person that comes to mind as a “boss” is the checkout clerk to whom I was assigned. I sacked at her station. I recall only one thing from the experience, an episode on my first day.
During a lull, she dispatched me on an errand to the pharmacy around the corner to fetch some sodium chloride. “Be sure to ask for Mr. Jones, he’s the pharmacist. I want to be sure you get the right thing.”
So, off I went. I dutifully inquired. Mr. Jones reached under the counter and fetched up a salt shaker. He shook some into his palm and said, “Here. Want to lick it to be sure?” Laughs all around from the guys in the store.
I retreated red-faced and went back to work angry that someone would make me the butt of a joke on my first day at work.
First boss lesson: Bosses can abuse their subordinates.
The next boss I recall was the real thing—the crew chief for a road contractor. It was the summer of 1953. I was 15 years old.
A two-lane black top, in Texas called a Farm-to-Market (FM) highway, was being built outside the hamlet of Como, seven miles from Sulphur Springs. David Jackson, my next-door neighbor, hunting buddy, and schoolmate, and I went to the job site to apply for a job.
David snared a lucky break: HDD was hired by the county engineer to work for the survey crew. Lots of time riding around in the truck, making survey notes, and waiting in the shade for the contractor to finish something.
I got the lowest job in the contractor’s crew—rocks and roots detail. The road was being laid on soil delivered by dump trucks. The raw dirt, mostly red clay in that part of East Texas, had to be purged of rocks and roots, or the base would shift over time and the tar top would crack.
My work tool was a 16 lb. sledgehammer, which I used to break big rocks into small ones. Pulling roots was much harder than the chain-gang labor with a 16 lb. sledgehammer.
It sounds awful. It wasn’t. I was a healthy teenager, equal to the physical task, but best of all I worked alone and at my own pace. I showed up for work each day and got paid on Friday. I rarely saw the boss except when he cruised by in his truck and chatted for a few minutes.
Every now and then I had a work companion, a huge Black man who showed up irregularly. His job required only a big shovel, with which he muscled spadesful of dirt to smooth out the edges of the fill the graders hadn’t made just right. Once, when he had gone across the fence to pee, I tried picking up a spadeful of dirt. I could barely manage. It must have weighed 100 pounds. Later, I asked the boss why the big guy sometimes came to work and sometimes didn’t. I’d have been fired for if I did the same. “Son,” he said. “When you can do what he can do, I make allowances.”
Second boss lesson: Good bosses don’t interfere and reward hard work.
My final boss in this string of early ones was actually two bosses—the big boss was a guy who owned some dump trucks and hired them out to drivers to carry fill dirt. My direct boss was a young man, about mid-twenties, who independently gathered drivers, for a cut of their pay, to drive the trucks for the big boss. I applied and became a dump-truck driver building what is now Interstate 30 between Greenville and Sulphur Springs. It was the summer of 1956, after my freshman year at Rice.
I liked it a lot. We worked independently. Were paid by the load. A round trip began at the “pit” where we rustled our trucks into position and waited while a backhoe spilled truck-rocking bucketsful of dirt in the back. Jam the gear into low and grind forward a few turns to the pit boss, who checked the load and waved us out to the highway. On the road, it was speed, speed, speed. More loads, more pay.
I learned the tricks of the trade: jamming the gears, maneuvering the heavy truck, and joking with the load counter who punched my ticket with each pass. To avoid dirtying neighborhoods, drivers shook residual dirt from the truckbeds by banging the dangling tailgate against the box with a series of rapid starts and stops.
As I was doing this on one occasion, the big boss, a fat, florid man, jumped onto the running board, so close I could smell his breath. He cursed me to stop banging the dirt out. To hell with the rules. It was ruining his trucks. The whole world could get dirty. He didn’t give a damn.
Third boss lesson: Some bosses are coarse and don’t care about legalities.
The young boss who hired me never gave me my final week’s paycheck.
Fourth boss lesson: Some bosses will steal from you.
English