Mr. Chaplin asked me one day to help him under his house. He had a home that was sitting on a sloped lot, where the right side of the property was higher than the left. On the lower left side, there was a small door that lead up under the house where he kept all his yard tools, duck hunting decoys, tools and things. It went back about a third of the way under the house. Well, as you walked back through the cool musty basement air, you ran into the hardest red clay that in the world.
He hired me to use a small pick and shovel to dig out the dirt and haul it to low spots in his yard. I was making $7 per hour and it was sure to promise many, many hours of work. That work was brutal, but it paid well. You couldn’t make that kind of money at that age. Today, it feels like I was underearning, but at the time, I was grateful for the work and would recommend kids to that to keep them busy and let them work and sweat with their hands.
