Thanks so much, Dad
What we owe to one generation, we repay to the next
The best raise I ever got in my life was when I was bumped from $4.25 an hour to $4.50 an hour as a cook at Perkins’ Pancake and Steak House on Route 60 in Fredonia, NY during high school.
Things were a little bit tight at home, so I was working for spending money and college savings. I’d done a short stint as a dishwasher previously and remember being nervous as heck to ask for the much more ‘glamorous’ line cook job.
I got it!
$4.25 was already a lot more than the $3.35 I’d been earning previously, so I was “stoked.” I worked Friday nights, and then Saturday and Sunday mornings on the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift.
There were times I hated it, slinging hash instead of getting to blow off the weekend with friends.
More than once, I told my Dad I needed to quit - I couldn’t take it anymore.
And more than once, my Dad talked me through the paternal lecture on the importance of hard work, earning your own money, and finding your way in the world.
Thank you so much, Dad. It would have been his 87th birthday yesterday, and thinking about the lessons he taught me, I remember that what we owe to one generation we repay to the next.
So I went back to the Perkins every weekend, a 16-year-old kid shocked awake by the 6:30 a.m. alarm each morning, and somehow making the 10-minute drive in 6 minutes.
So it was a surprise when my Perkins manager pulled me aside to say I’d done well the first two months and was getting an increase to $4.50 an hour.
In retrospect, I must’ve been on some 2-month probationary period which culminated in my 25¢ an hour raise. But I didn’t know that.
To me, at that time, getting a raise felt like all the magic in the world.
I couldn’t believe that anybody thought I was good enough at anything to get paid more money to keep doing it. It was a world-opening experience.
For me, it wasn’t just an assistant restaurant manager in the upstate outpost of a national restaurant franchise signing off on a routine compensation increase. It was validation from the world that I could be productive and earn money in it. It honestly changed my conception of who I was.
What I take away from this memory is the power and importance of work in our lives.
My manager at Perkins, Larry, had no idea that his conversation with a kid three decades ago would stay with that kid forever. That the recognition was extraordinarily meaningful, and a permanent positive change in that line cook’s life.
As conservatives, we are often unfairly painted as uncaring by a short-sighted and ignorant press. Of course, it’s not true.
We know that giving people what they think they want - candy before dinner, handouts instead of working, government making decisions instead of people making decisions - leads to failure. Failed people, failed politics, failed country.
We know that work leads to self-respect.
That self-respect leads to self-reliance.
And that self-reliance leads to a free people, capable of governing themselves, without elites or experts dictating our lives.
On your 87th birthday, thanks so much Dad, for teaching me this, and everything else that I must pass on to my own children.
Keep writing, Marc. America needs to hear what you have to say
Funny this came into my inbox today after I had just reviewed a string of employees and increased their wages. This article reminded me that what is important to me in order to compensate them fairly and justly, might just be life-changing to them. And that's a lesson for all of us - As your story suggests, non-routine moments in the lives of others often come from routine actions in our own lives. There are no throw-away lines. Everything counts.