At the end of April and during the first two weeks of May, 1970, my life felt like the crescendo at the end of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life” when there is this crazy whirl of noise and music that spirals up in energy, pace and volume.

During that time, I was squeezed into a basement bunker in Boston’s City Hall with dozens of other college students, energy and purpose filling the room as we organized a major rally, protesting the country’s war in southeast Asia. Then I was out on the streets, marching down Commonwealth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other demonstrators, chanting our demands to end the war.

But the shootings at Kent State brought that war on the other side of the world directly to campus. School was suddenly out.

A day later, I sat in the quiet of my suburban, childhood bedroom. I felt as if I were on the backside of that last note of the “A Day in the Life” crescendo –the hurly-burly of the music having suddenly stopped – with the fade of the final chord a metaphor for fade of the excitement of my last  semester.

I was right back where I started the previous September. I questioned whether the last few weeks, the last few months, the last school year really happened. I again was alone, surrounded only by dozens of old covers of Sports Illustrated magazines that I had thumbtacked to the walls years earlier, images of a simpler world view that featured Mickey Mantle, Joe Namath and Muhammad Ali.

I had been so wrapped up in my new, revolutionary life, I hadn’t thought of my old, safe, suburban life. A life that featured my parents, sisters and a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. The life that required getting a summer job to pay for the next year of college. Who needed summer job plans when a week before the plan had been to change the world?

I certainly didn’t plan to become a business owner that summer. And I most certainly didn’t plan to fire an employee. And I definitely didn’t intend to deliver the news while trying to push him out of my 1969 Volkswagen … while the car was moving.

But that’s what happened.

I had been too busy to make any effort to find summer employment during the spring semester, not even checking in with the new manager at Lincoln Dairy to see if I could work there. When I did finally check, all the summer jobs had been taken.

I commiserated with my friend, Jim Tehan, who had endured high school football with me. He was in the same boat. But Jim was a hustler and he had a plan. He said we needed to start our own company … and employ ourselves. We could do odd jobs and mow lawns, but primarily we would be a painting company, because Jim calculated that house painting could earn us the most money in the least amount of time. And that was important because we were getting a late start on our summer earnings.

The first thing we did was put an ad in the newspaper. Then we had some magnetic signs made and slapped them on the side of my car. We’d cruise around town, hoping that someone might see us drive by or at a stop light and realize that yes, they did need their house painted and we looked like just the fellows who could do the job. For cheap.

We weren’t sure if the signs would actually work, but the big benefit of the signs was that they gave us an excuse to get out of our houses in the morning, away from any potential hectoring by our parents about our lack of employment.

Luckily for us, within the first week, we had a response to the newspaper ad and had to prepare our first bid. While most people had an idea of what’s a reasonable charge for lawn mowing, few of our potential customers had any idea of what was a reasonable charge to have a couple of college kids paint a house. We certainly didn’t.

But Jim and I soon figured out what the market would bear. And we found out we were way under the market. We bid $500 for the first house, a one and a half story Cape Cod. That was so quickly accepted, when the next call came in for the same sized house, we bid $600. That was accepted relatively quickly. On the third Cape, we bid $700. On that one, the owner paused and said he’d think about it. Since we needed every job we could get to earn our tuition for the next school year, we sweated it out until he called the next day and accepted our bid. That’s when we figured we had hit our price point.  

Within two weeks, we had booked enough work to last us the summer – including one full two-story house that was going to net us $900 plus about $100 in kickbacks from the paint store for buying our paint there.  Neither Jim nor I liked heights so we put that house off until the last week of the summer, hoping each successfully completed house would eventually give us the courage to tackle it.

With all that painting lined up in addition to some yard work and odd jobs, we decided to really dive into the business world: We hired two of our unemployed friends to work for us. However, Jim and I quickly found out that while we could manage each other, we couldn’t manage other people.

Within a few weeks of being hired, one of our new employees decided he didn’t want to work full time because that would mean less time to see his girlfriend. He hitchhiked down to the city every week to see her. Jim and I were not happy about that demand since accommodating anything less than a full 40-hour work week would make it very difficult to complete all the jobs we booked before we had to head back to school.

We felt our new employee was taking advantage of us. There’s no way this friend would have made these demands successfully on a real job with a real boss. We argued about working a full 40-hour week. Since he was more my friend than Jim’s, Jim smiled and said: “Fire him.”

Sure. Easy for him to say.  I found it’s not as easy to fire someone as it’s portrayed on reality TV shows. So I delayed, worrying about how it was going to affect his ability to pay his college tuition and, frankly, how I was going to say it.

But the final straw came to a head one day as we were driving back to a job site after lunch.

The guy wanted to leave at noon the next day because the week before he’d gotten to his girlfriend’s place an hour later than he wanted to. Hitchhiking, he said, doesn’t run on a schedule. He wanted to get an early start at the highway entrance to give him more time and chances to get a ride.

As we drove along, inches apart in my 1969 VW Bug, I argued that summer was halfway over and we had several more houses to paint. That we needed all hands on deck tomorrow to finish the house we were working on and beat the rain that was forecast. Time was running out.

My friend turned employee said he didn’t care as he was just the hired help. Jim and I were “the Man,” the ones who had promised the homeowners we would do what we said we would.

The argument ramped up in intensity and volume and soon my erstwhile employee and I were screaming at each other –I may have been the only one screaming as I was so loud and so angry, I couldn’t have heard him if he HAD been saying anything.

 Suddenly I snapped. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, I stop thinking rationally and react.

I quickly reached across my soon-to-be former employee and opened his door and gave him a shove. The move surprised him because I hadn’t slowed down. But I was so mad, I didn’t care. If he wanted to go early, he could go now. The only thing that saved him on my first attempt to shove him out was that he latched onto the grab bar that was just above the glove compartment.

I wasn’t done, however. With the dexterity of a 19-year-old, I lifted my right leg up over the stick shift and planted my foot on his hip and shoved again. Lucky for him – and me, I suppose – he managed to hold on to the seat and the grab bar and not fall into the street. And since my foot was no longer on the gas, we slowly rolled to a stop.

But he was fired.

I should say, in my defense, we weren’t on a major road. It was a sparsely traveled lane in an expensive, leafy enclave with thick carpets of grass running all the way down to the street. There were no curbs or sidewalks. So even if I had been successful in launching him from the car while it was moving, he might have only suffered minor bruising and a few grass stains.

Our other employee was a pipe smoker. Pipe smokers are a type, I discovered. Those that I have known, at least, are very careful, fastidious people. This particular pipe smoker would paint a stroke or two and step back – way back – and admire those few strokes. And by then, his pipe would need relighting, tamping, or reloading. And then relighting. With a few test puffs.

In his defense, I must say, he was a very good painter.

But he was so slow.

Jim and I would finish one side of a house and then we’d come around and find that our last employee had barely finished painting the trim around the windows.

Jim and I decided we could get more done without the chore of monitoring the extra help. So we found an excuse to let the other employee go, too, and, working long hours and on weekends, we finished the houses we had lined up by ourselves. We finally painted that two-story house, taking turns climbing the 24-foot ladder to the second story. I’d be up there in the mornings, painting what I could while stiffly clinging to the ladder. Then Jim reluctantly would make the climb in the afternoons.

Our dreams of a painting empire died that summer, but we did manage to learn to paint and to earn enough money to keep us afloat for the next school year.

In September, I headed back to Boston.

Next time: Chapter 29: A Forgettable Fall