SHOULD SEMINARIANS HAVE SECULAR JOBS? I DID!

I've become somewhat nostalgic recently, I guess because I turn 69 this year.

When I was in the 4th to the 6th grade I helped my brother seven days a week to deliver the afternoon Augusta Herald newspaper to about 200 customers. We did so on bike. I also had to go to homes on our route to solicit new customers, collect their payment and some other things. Sunday was the morning paper and my father had us up at 1 am to fold the papers delivered to us and by 4 am we hit the road and finished by 6 AM in time to get ready for the 8 AM Low Mass in my parish. 

 But I began working for the Dairy Queen/Brazier in Augusta when I was in the 9th grade and 14 years old. That was 1968 and stayed with them for five years until late 1972, well into my first year of college. I worked those years almost full time and went to High School full time of course. 

I was a supervisor beginning at the age of 16 and earned enough money to buy in cash a new 1970 Chevy Nova, which then cost $2,500.  I managed a stand alone old Dairy Queen (no Brazier of hamburgers) in a bad part of Augusta for a year, my first year in college. I actually packed a 36 pistol in my back pocket to take the earnings for the day to another store. Yes, I did that! I never was held up!

If not for the grace of God, I would have been drafted into the Army in 1972 and sent to Vietnam as I had a low lottery number. But President Nixon deescalated the war and then called off the draft about a month before I would have been drafted!

This looks like the DQ I managed:

 

Then in late 1972 I went to work for Davison's in downtown Augusta as I also went to college full time in Augusta (now Augusta University). Davisons was the southern division of Macy's.  I worked for them just about full time until I went to the seminary in Baltimore in the Fall of 1976. I do think our first Christmas break from the seminary I was Christmas help for the store. 

Then in the seminary in Baltimore, I got a part time job with Cross Keys Drug Store working as a cashier and some other things as well as delivering drugs to customers in the rather exclusive neighborhoods of that vicinity. 

And at the seminary I was sacristan, head waiter in the refectory and "medic" for minor illnesses. 

And in all that time, I managed to get a high school and college diploma. But I still needed one more required subject for my major and so I entered major seminary without having graduated from the college in Augusta and in a very busy first semester at St. Mary's in Baltimore, I took my final undergraduate course at the University of Baltimore downtown. I had to take a bus for the evening class down there and back. 

How in the Name of God and all that is Holy did I do this?