Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022
I was only 14 years old when my father moved us from Seoul, South Korea to the most remote, smallest and truly American farming town called Walters, Oklahoma. This town only had two grocery stores and few convenient stores along with a Dairy Queen and a small dive of a drive-in hamburger joint. As soon as I got there, my life changed to an exciting and lively one. In Seoul, there is no way a 14 year-old can get a job. In America there are plenty of jobs available for a teenager. Immediately my father told me to get a job. Once I got the green light to go to work and make my own spending money, I was like a moth on a lit bulb. I barely spoke any English, but an old lady in our neighborhood needed someone to fill her driveway with gravels. She had all the tools needed. She had a wheelbarrow, gravels and shovel. She pointed out what she wanted me do with hand gestures and few choice words including some rough swear words because I was not doing my job exactly as she told me. I suppose I did OK. After about an hour worth of work, she gave me a five dollar bill. It was my very first job. Since that day I found that there was an opening at a variety store called Armstrong’s General Store. It was a mini version of today’s Target. They had everything. They had different departments such as toy section, lady’s fabric department, bicycles, books, clothes, bedding, Kitchen appliances, etc. I was hired to clean their large back stock room, which was never organized or cleaned for a very long time. I cleaned one shelf at a time and took me probably several weeks until some semblance of organized looks came to the hundreds of back room. The boss liked what I did, so he gave me another job of assembling a display toy bicycles. I had no idea how to do it. I began to read the instructions of how to assemble the plastic and metal bicycle for a kid. It took me two weeks to finish one small tricycle assembly. I learned a great deal of reading a manual.
I began a cycle of cleaning all of the bathrooms for the store, sweeping the entire store every afternoon. Eventually I became so adept at doing all kinds of handy jobs and increased efficiency, the boss, Ron Minton began to send to the second store that his family owned across the street. It was called Minton’s Men’s Store. This was an upscale clothing store for Men as I recall. I had to clean their bathrooms, sweep and vacuum the entire store everyday. My efficiency grew to the point that I was cleaning their windows, bathrooms, entire backrooms and office of both stores everyday after school. I was starting to notice how the saleswomen and salesmen were getting paid so much more hourly wage than I was getting. They were talking about how much they were getting paid and mostly they were stocking the shelves or standing around talking to people. They were not doing much of anything. I asked my boss to give me a raise from $1.35 per hour to $1.50. He reluctantly gave in after I mentioned it several times after one year of working there. I did not like the job at all. It was meaningless and beneath my dignity to clean the bathrooms. So I started to look for another job in the small farming town. I applied as a bag boy and stock boy at a local family owned grocery store at IG&A. I got a raise. I had to work harder and faster. The boss was quite scary. He was demanding and at times very harsh with his words and impatience. I took my job very seriously. The job duty was to answer the overhead page by a cashiers for a bag boy and one of the four stock boys had to run up and start sacking the groceries into a brown bag. You had to be fast to put the right types of groceries into a brown bag, separating cans and dry goods in one bag and putting meats and produces in another. You also had to be careful not to bag too little or too much and sometimes put double bags for some shoppers. Entire time that I worked for them I was very responsive. Eventually all of the cashiers were saying how I was the only boy that responded to their calls for bag boy consistently. I worked five hours every afternoon from 3 p.m. till 8 p.m. and Saturday all day. Eventually I became quite good at what I did. I started doing more of stocking boy and less of a sack boy. I found out that most of the grocery workers were underpaid and uneducated. The coworkers were crude and had nasty habit of being cruel to co-workers. I began to realize that my $1.75 per hour pay just wasn’t enough for what I did. I also asked for a raise with trepidation due to the boss’s intimidating demeanors. However, I did ask for a raise after six months of working there. After a year of working there, my father needed me to work for him at his gas station. I had to quit my job and started working for my dad before I went to school at 6 o’clock in the morning until 7:30 a.m. and then after school from 3 to 7 in the afternoon. The work at gas station was another hardship. I had to pump gas, wash windows, fix tires, fix cars. I also had to study to get a state inspector license. It was a hard work. My hands were covered with grease while changing car oils and fixing tires. I never really got paid from my father. It was a family business and never complained. The customers were quite nice but some of them were not very happy with service at times. I actually did more car washing during Saturday work hours. There were some nasty cars with dirt, oil that I had to take to a local car wash and use coins to wash out all nasty muddy oil caked in undersurface and bring back and use the vacuum to clean the inside of the car for $5. It was a back-breaking work. During the sweltering summer it was hot as hell and during the winter it was so cold in Oklahoma and the work kept our family afloat.
I also had a side job during Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon of mowing lawns for $5. I was able to save enough money to buy a riding mower and a cheap pushing mower. Eventually I had developed enough customers who liked my work for $5 for any sized lawns, that my business grew enough to hire another classmate. I had him to do push mower job for each lawn and paid $1 per hour. He was very happy.
Nevertheless, the multiple jobs that I did during my early school days taught me some valuable lessons that I will never forget. It taught me a lot about what I would never want to do. It taught me mostly what I should never strive to become. I was never going to own and operate a retail store, be a stock boy, salesman, lawn mower man, grocer, gas station attendant, handy man, mechanic, state car inspector, instead I learned to make money with my higher education and skills.
I was exposed various co-workers and customers and employers and employees. The close-up look from the perspective of working for someone, being hired to do a job, getting money from the customers all showed me how hard it was to make a living being an uneducated, laborer doing mindless, meaningless tasks that anyone with low IQ can perform. I learned that I was unhappy working for someone else. I hated working for crude, rude bosses including my own father. I slowly learned a painful lesson in life by working as a teenager in all of these situations.
I never stopped working for any lengthy periods in my life. As I entered the University of Oklahoma as a Presidential Scholar, since I was lucky enough to get a full scholarship to cover for the tuition and books for the undergraduate and medical school, I got a job to work as a medical assistant at the OU infirmary for three years and also worked as an assistant manager at the student store. I also hated working for the nurses and also a manager for a student store. It was busy four years until I became a medical student.
As a medical student I worked for my family again when they had a fledgling donut shop and a dry cleaner. I had to help my parents run a donut shop that was filled with smokers, coffee drinkers and very little profit for long hours of baking unhealthy donuts deep fried in lard and icing. My family eventually sold it to buy a much more demanding but somewhat profitable dry cleaner with shirts laundry business that was going out of business. I had to manage two dry cleaning stores during my medical school years and made some spending money by cleaning shirts for my classmates. I had done a lot of different jobs as a 14 year old Korean boy until I grew up to be a surgeon.
The valuable and unforgettable lesson from all of the labors that I did as a boy was deeply etched in my psyche as I began to mature in my decision making for my career. I began to realize that earning a dollar as a laborer was very hard. The class of people that work in that environment, mainly service industry or manufacturing industry are not very happy and usually uneducated. I saw what I did not want to become. To me that was a great lesson for a young man. It taught me so many, many things. I met a very few great and inspiring and friendly people among many co-workers over the years. However, it led me to pick a career that I would be extremely happy and rewarding. I navigated through many things thanks to my family and mainly my industrious father who came to this country with nothing and built a great life for many of us. By sheer example of hardest working person that I know, he helped me to realize that American Dream.
Now looking back I would never change anything that I had ever done. I am very proud of being a stock boy, bathroom cleaning boy, grocery bagboy, gas station fill’er up boy, greasy car washboy, lawnboy, store clerkboy, medical assistant boy and occasionally church cleaning boy. But all through my boyhood jobs, I knew I will never be called a Boy again. If you have a child or children that you love, please, for their own good, put them to work in all of menial jobs that boy or girl can handle starting at young age.
I encouraged all of my children to start working while they were going through their highschool years. Even though all of my children had piano, clarinet, cello, violin, SAT prep, Korean classes to attend, I insisted that they work at nearby ice cream and Mochi shops. I insisted that they help out at home and do the chores. I believe in the priceless lessons that you learn by working for others in these small jobs. The experience that your children will learn from dealing with other people in the work environment will be more valuable than anything that they will learn from just a school alone. I strongly feel this way. I don’t know about you, but only one way that you can stop this tidal wave of producing “Entitled Babies” that I see all the time. The rich kids syndrome that I am sick of seeing in this country. The real epidemic of unhappy, unappreciative kids who absolutely have no desire to be successful in life, wasting the time with mindless computer internet games, blaming their failures to their parents and other factors other than their laziness, must be put to work in these smaller jobs first. I strongly recommend it.
Authored Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022
Francis S. Lee, M.D.
My Philosophy 