The summer before I graduated from Laurel High School, the opportunity arose to become a partner in a painting company. Three classmates, Tracy Miiller, Ben Wunn, and Mike Stineman, bought out an area painter, the summer before, including all equipment and a 1949 Chevy pickup and continued the business.
Mike Stineman was selected to attend the Air Force Academy and so Ben and Tracy asked me to take Mike's position. The name was Mulsten Painting Company, taking parts from each of their names.
My plans were to attend Marshalltown Junior College the following year, but, the experience and knowledge that I absorbed that summer was worth at least a semester in any college. First of all, the initial lesson was that hard work usually pays off. We generally started at 6:00 a.m. and worked most days until 6:p.m. or so. A few times we rolled into Laurel after the two gas stations had closed. (No. There weren't any 24 hour quick trips handy.) We then had to wait until they opened in the morning to gas up.
We painted everything and generally houses and buildings that no halfway intelligent normal painter wanted to touch. We painted farm buildings, three story houses of college professors in Grinnell and the interior of the Gilman Methodist Church just to name a few. We painted everything by brush-no spray painting.
By the end of that summer, our hard work had paid off. For just a summer, six days a week generally, and 10-12 hour days, we made really good money for the early 1960's and gained some valuable business experience. I do remember bidding one house wrong and making around 25 cents an hour, but, if there was a situation we didn't really want, we would bid it high. If we got it more power to us.
Our reward at the end of the summer was driving up to Clear Lake and Lake Okoboji for the weekend. The real reward or treat was attending the Miss Iowa pageant at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. No better reward than hard work then viewing up close lots of pretty girls!
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