School Starts WHEN!?

When did school begin fall classes in August? EARLY August? It used to start the day after Labor Day and run until about 5th of June. Beginning about Memorial Day weekend, kids would start to pound the pavement to look for summer jobs. Growing up in Philadelphia, most kids would head "down the shore" anywhere from Cape May to Long Beach Island, NJ. New York area kids would hit everything from Tom's River and Seaside Heights, northward. You just knew if you landed a job (and most did) that you would have a good ten weeks of paychecks to get you into the following school year.

I was big for my age, so I could pass for older. I had a job working the kitchen and pulling the dumbwaiters in a summer residential hotel, I cooked and beat fudge (starting at 4:30 AM each day), I crewed as a first or second mate on a charter fishing boat, and my last three summers before Penn State, I worked as a line boy at the Ocean City, New Jersey, municipal airport. In each case, I knew I could work from mid-June until Labor Day. In some cases I was asked back for several weekends, as my family commuted between Ocean City and Philadelphia on the weekends, not wanting to give up the great south Jersey weather.

Point is, now kids barely have 5 weeks off, if that. Who is going to hire summer help for five weeks? They are barely trained in a job, and they have to leave to go back to school. It's like military pilots who do their contract time, then leave the service to look for airline work. [Not so much TODAY, but the airline jobs will come back. Really they will.]

I bring this all up because we (Showline Promotional Products) are being swamped with back-to-school promotional specials. Every time one arrives, I shake my head. For a kid, summer vacation was part of growing up. Now there is very little summer vacation. In my opinion kids are being robbed, at least short-changed, of part of their youth. At Penn State, I elected to go through summer terms to get my BA in June of 1965. I had spent ten months on the road performing with a hot band, and I wanted to get my degree on time. In college, you grow up pretty quickly. But come on, NOT in school.