One thing that fascinates me about social media is the fixation on generational stereotypes. I can’t count the number of videos about GenX I’ve watched portraying them as the unsupervised generation—sent out into the world without a cellphone and bottle of water, allowed to stay out until the streetlights came on, while drinking water from the hose spigot, and hustling to get jobs to make money. 

Whenever I hear the boasting of the rough and tumble GenXers, it makes me giggle, because I think about my own childhood. While I didn’t walk six miles through the snow to get to school like my grandparents might have boasted, I did drive myself six miles across the lake each day to get to school—from the age of fourteen to seventeen—in a leaky boat I had to bail out each morning, and once started to sink on the way home. It had no windshield, which made winter traveling especially cold. I had no cell phone—heck, my family didn’t even have a landline. They had an unreliable mobile phone in their truck, with multiple party lines.  And if I didn’t make it to school in the morning, they wouldn’t know until I failed to return home that night.

One trend for some GenX videos is to ask that generation to share the age they were when they got their first job—and what that job was. Those videos got me to thinking about my first job, after all, I am a boomer and isn’t it all about us? LOL. But before I tell you about my job—let me set the scene.

For my first thirteen years I lived with my family of four in Covina, California, a suburb in Southern California. Back then, it was a predominately white community. Residents tended to live in housing tracts —where all the houses were similar in floorplan and built by the same builder—think Leave it to Beaver neighborhoods.  Some lived in apartments—and other lived in custom homes, the latter being considered the more upper class of the suburb.

My father was a general contractor, and the two homes we lived in during our years in Covina were custom homes, both designed and built by him, and located on large lots in what was considered one of the more exclusive areas of Covina. My older sister drove a MGB sports car. Our parents said someday we could get a horse.

But then Dad had a crazy dream, and Mom, my sister and me went along with him. My parents became the major shareholders—and managing partners—of Havasu Palms, a resort aka park located on Lake Havasu. 

My sister’s MGB was sold, we never got the horse, and we all moved from our beautiful Covina home into a ten-wide travel trailer (no, it was not a mobile home) at Havasu Palms. Our Covina house was eventually sold, and Mom, now no longer a stay-at-home-mom, worked alongside my father to build his dream.

The park was initially located on government lease land and comprised of 27 travel trailer sites, a campground, boat docks, primitive store and marina. The lease land was located on 4 ¼ miles of shoreline on the California side of Lake Havasu and was located twelve miles north of Parker Dam, California—with the only access road into the park being a dirt road that wound through washes and was vulnerable to flash floods. It was six miles south—by water—from Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

There were no phone lines into the park—so my teen years were spent without a landline OR cellphone. At first there was no television, but after Dad put up an antenna, we got three stations from Lake Havasu City. Three stations—ABC, CBS, and NBC. 

My parents were busy implementing Dad’s dream to develop the resort, which meant they couldn’t spend all their time working at the park’s little store/marina.  In the early years, that task fell on my older sister and me.

I was thirteen when I first started working at Havasu Palms’s store. I worked weekends, and summers, until my last year of college. The year between my junior and senior year of college, my mother told me I could take the summer off—something I have always been eternally grateful for. 

This may surprise you, but it was totally legal for me to sell beer at the store when I was thirteen. If it was not opened, I could sell it.  I worked primarily alone at the store—no supervision. There was no bathroom, so if I needed to use the bathroom, I had to lock up the gas pumps and store, walk up the hill to our trailer, which was located on the future site of the Road’s End Restaurant. 

The store building included three sections, with the icehouse on the end near the road. Sandwiched between the actual store and icehouse was the bait room with the minnow and waterdog tanks. The primitive building was made from recycled material, with a tin roof. The store was cooled by a rusty swamp cooler. And considering Havasu heat, swamp coolers are useless in the dead of summer. Fortunately, there was a large tamarisk tree helping to shade the store, and Havasu Palms temperatures tended to be about ten degrees cooler than across the lake, at Lake Havasu City. There was also a large rock patio in front of the building where people gathered to visit. 

What were my duties? I rang up sales on the cash register in the store. The store offered bait, ice, gas, propane, beer, soda, water, sundries items, candy, ice cream, cigarettes, some frozen meat, and the type of groceries you might find at a gas station store.  

 We didn’t have fancy registers back then, so I learned to count back change the first week I worked the store. I pumped gas at the gas docks and on the road. I would sometimes go into the icehouse and cut 100 pound blocks of ice into four 25 pound blocks.  I would scoop up minnows and waterdogs for fishermen and dump out the nightcrawlers and red worms into a metal container, to make sure they were still alive before selling, and then dump the worms back into their original containers. We rented out fishing boats with little engines that you had to pull start, so I would have to show the renters how to use the boats.

I sold fishing licenses, stocked the store, and played store janitor. One thing my dad didn’t have me do—I didn’t fill propane tanks for our tenants. 

Because of the Havasu heat, during the summer my sister and I often worked in our bikinis. When we got hot, we would jump in the lake off the docks and cool off. Because of the heat, we would be dry within minutes of getting out of the water.  When working the cash register, I’d typically throw on a large T-shirt or summer shift over my bikini.

If it was a holiday weekend, the store could be super busy, and that would usually require more than one person working and hiring extra people to work the gas docks. But on other days during the summer, we could go for hours without a customer. On those slower days, after getting the store cleaned and stocking the shelves, we’d find other things to do. Sometimes I would read a book, or float around by the docks in an innertube. One summer, I wrote my first book.

I was fourteen that summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school; I took my old manual Royal typewriter down to the store, and when not waiting on a customer, I worked on my book. I finished it that summer. It was just under 100 typed pages. It’s title, The Privileged Ones.

Early on, my father found an old wooden juke box in one of the outbuildings. He brought it to the store and set it up on the porch. My sister and I loaded it with all our 45s (records). We kept any money it made, but it rarely made any, because we would open the back of the juke box, flip all the levers, and play all the songs.

I remember one summer, one of my friends and I learned how to knit.   It must have been a crazy sight to some random customers who just happened off the lake and found a couple of teenage girls wearing bikinis and knitting behind the store counter.

Tenants of Havasu Palms didn’t live at the park fulltime back then; it was their vacation spot. But I became friends with our tenants’ kids, who were about my same age, and we’d hang out together in the summer or on weekends. Some of them, like Tim Loyd, Mike Russum, and Gary Morris, worked for the park at various times over the years. Mike used to hang out at the store with us and taught me how to play the guitar. Well, I learned a few songs, at least, like Puff the Magic Dragon. Tim was like a brother to me, and Gary introduced me to my husband and was the best man at our wedding.

It was a great first job, with lots of adventures and meeting new people. But sometimes I’d bitch and want to go on strike.  If memory serves me, I think I made $1 an hour. But I could have all the candy and ice cream bars I wanted.  

(Photo: Havasu Palms store)