William Marvel: Manpower.edu

At the last of my father’s working life, he was the custodian of Conway Elementary School. Besides keeping the school clean, he was responsible for taking care of the boilers and much of the plumbing, and more than once we went up on the roof to shovel off heavy accumulations of snow. I don’t remember a Saturday during the school year that he didn’t go in for a few hours. He bought our first four-wheel-drive vehicle so he would always be able to get to work, because Superintendent David Appleton never called school off over bad weather. It just wasn’t done.

The pay was reasonable, unlike most of the proletarian work in town, and if the benefits were not as appealing as they are now it was because people made less use of medical services. The main draw, however, was the security. Layoffs were a frequent occurrence in construction and all facets of the forest products industry, and they happened with dependable regularity in the hospitality business. Any competent and dependable person working for the school district never had to worry about unemployment.