September 13, 2017
“Toil & Trouble – Stories about Work”
by Marci White
Tim Denson ably did the honors as emcee for our show in honor of Labor Day – “Toil & Trouble.” Tim is an advocate for labor rights and in the past has worked as a cowboy, mental health counselor and touring musician, among other jobs.
In 1956 Tom Kenyon became the first person in his family accepted to a university. He was 17 and desperately needed a job to be able to pay for college. He answered a newspaper ad looking for a “strong man” needed for heavy labor for $1.25 an hour. Would he be able to hack it?
After college, Robin Whetstone and her friend Susan shared an apartment and worked at Ray and Dawn’s Seafood Grill, where it was impossible to make enough to live on. But one of their new coworkers “knows a guy” with some really “good stuff,” and if Robin and Susan will help him move it, he promises that their financial situation will be much improved.
Dr. Walter Freeman, early in his career as a chemist, was misled about a job. He took the job only to find out that he would not have access to the superconducting NMR he so longed to use. His determined quest for this treasured and expensive tool would call for him to develop skills not directly related to chemistry, and those came in handy throughout his career.
Gabe Newman grew up near a golf course in a small town in Georgia and spent much of his time “in the woods…looking for golf balls.” He’d really wanted to be a baseball player for the Cubs but found himself living precariously in Athens. In 2007 he had a dream that proved to be a good omen and led to a series of new opportunities that continue to unfold.
Steven Bellan’s name was chosen out of the box to be the Crackerjack Surprise storyteller of the night. As a wildlife biologist, Steven worked in Namibia studying jackals. Part of his job was trapping them to put on, remove or replace the collars that collected data about their movements. This could be very tricky, and late one night it all came to a head.
When Christy Lin decided to stop freelancing to get a steady job at an ad agency, at first it seemed intense but good. The five “creatives” at the agency worked fast-paced, 60-80 hour weeks. It was fun to be part of a creative team, work hard and be compensated well. But when a personal issue came up that demanded some time and healing, she had to face the true nature of what she’d signed on for.
The second job Joe Willey got driving a tractor trailer was a truck driver’s dream gig: hauling carpet and yard from Dalton, Georgia, to New Orleans and to Andalusia, Alabama, and then home for the weekend. But then Hurricane Erin came along to shake things up.
As a professional paramedic and Emergency Medical Services educator, Roscoe McCoy knows how things should go, ideally, when the police and paramedics are called out to deal with an emergency. One day nothing goes according to plan.
Rabbit Box 