As "A Retired Canadian-Australian Teacher" I write the following:
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THE LAST DAY
Beginning perhaps as early as 1953, I found ways of making money: collecting pop bottles, selling newspapers, doing the occasional odd-job but, in July 1960, I landed my first formal job with the A and W Root Beer Company in Ontario. It only lasted several weeks because, since my father was receiving unemployment benefits at the time as a retired man of 65, I was not allowed to make any money. What I did earn I had to give back: all of it. The next summer, in July or August of 1961, I began my first job with the Shell Oil Company in Hamilton Ontario. This time I could keep the money. From then until today I have been working at jobs, hunting for jobs and/or going to school. About the same time of year as now, exactly forty years ago in 1961, I began negotiating for that Shell Oil job. Today the hunting process came to an end. I had been accepted onto a Disability Support Pension eight weeks before my 57th birthday. I would continue to be a volunteer occasionally, presenting radio programs or teaching senior citizens but, it appeared for now, that paid employment and looking for it had finally ceased. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 May 2001.
There were times in those forty years
when schools and jobs
were not on the agenda,
when I was zonked right out
in a hospital somewhere,
or travelling to this place of refuge
in this little town at the mouth of a river
on a small bay where I watched the boats go by
and the waters of this estuary
criss-cross in many directions,
as life continued to flow to the sea.
Those times might add up to a year,
making a net of thirty-nine years
on the jobs-school circuit;
and those thirty nine years of travelling,
and teaching in schools:
they too were a landmark
as I enter these winter months
and a world beyond those forty years.
Ron Price
Tasmania
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THE LAST DAY
Beginning perhaps as early as 1953, I found ways of making money: collecting pop bottles, selling newspapers, doing the occasional odd-job but, in July 1960, I landed my first formal job with the A and W Root Beer Company in Ontario. It only lasted several weeks because, since my father was receiving unemployment benefits at the time as a retired man of 65, I was not allowed to make any money. What I did earn I had to give back: all of it. The next summer, in July or August of 1961, I began my first job with the Shell Oil Company in Hamilton Ontario. This time I could keep the money. From then until today I have been working at jobs, hunting for jobs and/or going to school. About the same time of year as now, exactly forty years ago in 1961, I began negotiating for that Shell Oil job. Today the hunting process came to an end. I had been accepted onto a Disability Support Pension eight weeks before my 57th birthday. I would continue to be a volunteer occasionally, presenting radio programs or teaching senior citizens but, it appeared for now, that paid employment and looking for it had finally ceased. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 May 2001.
There were times in those forty years
when schools and jobs
were not on the agenda,
when I was zonked right out
in a hospital somewhere,
or travelling to this place of refuge
in this little town at the mouth of a river
on a small bay where I watched the boats go by
and the waters of this estuary
criss-cross in many directions,
as life continued to flow to the sea.
Those times might add up to a year,
making a net of thirty-nine years
on the jobs-school circuit;
and those thirty nine years of travelling,
and teaching in schools:
they too were a landmark
as I enter these winter months
and a world beyond those forty years.
Ron Price
Tasmania