Forty-five Days and Out!

Today marks the forty-five day point in my countdown to retirement. It's hard to believe that just six weeks from now I'll be joining the ranks of the unemployed, really for the first time in my life. My employment history started with my working summers for Sam Trubo at his concession stand in Brookside Park near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. That would have been about 1963 when I was fourteen years old. I made snow cones and dispensed Coca Cola into waxy cups for the park's thousands of visitors.

About 1965 I started working in the grocery business, first as a meat department cleanup boy, then as as boxboy, and finally as a retail clerk. By the time I went in the Navy in 1969, I was a journeyman clerk for Alpha Beta working out of their Hill Street Pasadena store. In those years I was not only working twenty to thirty hours a week, but going to college taking a full load as well.

Once out of the Navy, I continued working and going to school for a time. In 1973 I got a job as a crewman on a yacht in the Mediterranean for a year. That adventure came to an end in 1974. Finally, starting in August of 1974, I began working a 40-hour week and have been doing so ever since.

On August 15, 2008, I will have worked 25 years with the State of Nevada, most recently in the Department of Public Safety. Since Nevada allows you to "buy" retirement time, I actually will be retiring with 30 years of service. It's sometimes hard to believe that I have, for the most part, got up and gone to work every day since 1965, over forty years.

Most of my co-workers believe I won't will be able to find enough to do to keep busy. On the contrary, I have a million interests. Everything from writing to photograhy, from traveling abroad to working on home projects, from genealogy to collecting, from attending college classes to driving antique cars are favorite things to do. I've never had enough time to persue any of my interests in the past. Hopefully, now I will.