Common Wealth, Common Wisdom

Sharing Canton Farmers' Market peanut butter cookies and coffee, the CWCW crew sits in a circle, as if around a campfire. We begin at the roots of our own entrepreneurial lives by sharing our first memory earning a dollar. Roger Huntley leans forward with a grin and asks, "Maybe these two elderly ladies remember a Reverend Charles McVay of Crary Mills?" At this Ruth Garner and Mickey Williams erupt into a fit of laughter. "Yea…I thought maybe," Roger says. His first job weed-whacking the Reverend’s lawn earned him ten cents, and with his money Roger walked a mile and a half to the Crary Mills grocery store to buy a candy bar. "I put my ten cents on the counter and he gave it right back to me; it was a Canadian!"

Intern Chelsea Ross remembers building her first lemonade stand with a friend. "I'm not sure if we really did make money," she begins with a laugh. After Chelsea and her friend put in the designated man-hours brewing lemonade for profit she admits, "We actually didn’t have a lot of people and then when the mailman or any sort of person working went by we gave them free lemonade because they were working - we felt bad for them."

As I wonder if any of our stories will result in actual profits, Bill Cullen tells the group about his first job as a very un-ambitious paperboy. "With my bicycle I peddled around and delivered papers every day. My job, on top of delivering more papers, was to get more customers." In Bill’s eyes I see a hint of resentment toward his long lost part-time profession. And the task of getting more customers? "I could not get one," Bill exclaims, "I was no salesman, it was terrible. So, sooner or later they sent another representative of the [Watertown] Times to get more customers. They went right at the job and got them of course so I had more people to deliver papers to."

Our stories are exchanged freely and are surprisingly similar to one another. Despite our different ages, all our stories easily could belong to any member of the group. As youth we all enjoyed working and being rewarded for that work, now the value of that labor is dwarfed by a complicated financial mess among banks, hedge funds, and financial groups. If we were to revert back to the spirit of our first work effort, and combine that simplicity with the technology of the future, would we prevent future depressions and recessions?

Labels: Crary Mills, economy, Jennifer, jobs, paperboy, Reverend Charles McVay, Watertown Daily Times