“Did you have a job while you were in high school?”
To put things in perspective regarding my first “real” job, I started driving at age 16 in 1963. Why mention this? Because, at the time, the Lamb Family lived at what we still call “The Mountain House,” which was in the middle of nowhere, just over the Somerset County line, in Bedford County on Old 56.
You didn’t walk from the Mountain House to Windber or from Windber to the Mountain House (a distance of about 10 miles, plus-or-minus) though I did once (in my baseball uniform) when I couldn’t get a ride home after a game. Otherwise, until I got my car, I routinely hitched-hiked back-and-forth on 18-wheelers because the Mountain House was beside a truck stop, where I often washed dishes to get enough nickels to play pinball machines—one of the truckers' favorites pastimes.
When we moved to Windber, where I went to high school, I worked in the cafeteria in exchange for free food. (Mom and Dad gave me a dollar each week to pay for lunch. Instead, I used that money to buy gas for my 1957 Ford, dubbed “The Blue Diamond”—a two-door sedan with an inline six-cylinder engine and a “three-on-the-tree” manual transmission. Gas was about 30 cents a gallon at the time, so my lunch money put about three gallons in the tank of that old Ford.)
Anyway, my first real job was at Fairview Dairy on Graham Avenue in Windber, which was just around the corner from the house my Dad built (from scratch) at 407 Maple Drive.
From the road, Fairview Dairy looked like a cozy little diner with barstools around at the counter and slide-in bench seats near the windows. It was well-known for its delicious ice cream, probably because the diner was really a front for a small but efficient ice cream-making operation.
In addition to ice cream, Fairview made Joe-Pops, their version of Popsicles, sometimes called frozen treats or ice-pops. (They were available in a variety of flavors.)
The brothers who ran the family-business hired me to help out two of my buddies, Ron Vitucci and Gary Berkey.
Here’s how we Three Amigos worked:
There was a large round vat that looked like a short fat silo in the Joe-Pop room. We’d fill the vat with sugar, flavoring, and water, then hand-mix the ingredients using a canoe paddle. There was an on-off spigot at the bottom of the vat that enabled us to fill Joe-Pop juice into heavy metal molds.
Elsewhere in the room, thin wooden sticks 4.5 inches long and about a half-inch wide were placed into precisely designed steel contraptions that locked the sticks into place. The pre-positioned sticks were placed into the molds, which were carried over to a large rectangle tank filled with specially treated water that was very cold but didn’t freeze.
The molds were carefully lifted and slowly eased into long slots with rails. As the ever-growing length of juice-filled molds were hand-pushed from one end of the long tank to the other, they looked like a train of slowly moving box-cars.
At the end of the trough, molds with the now-frozen juice were taken out of the water, and the stick-holding contraptions were loosened and removed. Pairs of Joe-Pops were then taken out of the mold, slipped into the flimsy pre-printed paper bags, placed into cardboard boxes, and hand-carried to the freezer.
It was a slick operation.
Three weeks after I got the job (which kept “The Blue Diamond” filled with gas) the owners of the dairy told us they had to let somebody go. Since I was the last hired, I was the first fired.
Too bad because I liked the job. It was “cool” in every way—plus, I was allowed to eat all the Joe-Pops I wanted, and I did.
Copyright 2021