When I was 15, I got the perfect summer job. The fact that it involved driving cars should surprise no one.

Having had the good fortune to enter my teens just as America was hitting the crest of its love affair with the automobile (and given my prolonged exposure to near-toxic levels of chromium, futuristic design excesses and jet propelled marketing hype) I really had no choice other than to become a “car guy.”

That summer I was a couple of years shy of the minimum age to obtain a Maine driver’s permit; a fact that did nothing to dampen my automotive ardor.  

Like the fictional Mr. Toad, I was consumed by one devilishly simple goal: to get behind the wheel of a car, any car, as soon and as often as humanly possible.

Back then, my dad owned a shipyard. In hopes of instilling a healthy work ethic, I was pretty much required to spend a portion of my school vacation punching a time clock in the family business. Fortunately, my job description didn’t require any particular mechanical aptitude beyond those skills needed to keep the restrooms scrubbed, sweep the docks and bail out the occasional skiff.

Looking back I can see that my dad was motivated by a sincere belief that a few hours of hard work each day would go a long way toward offsetting the natural tendency of adolescent boys to “get into mischief.”

Although he meant well, he couldn’t possibly have known that the shipyard job itself would end up providing me with a golden opportunity to fulfill my dream of joining the ranks of Maine’s unlicensed drivers.

In those innocent pre-EPA days, pretty much all of the considerable garbage generated each week at the shipyard was indiscriminately tossed into 55 gallons drums. When they were full it was time to make a “dump run.” That involved loading all the trash barrels into the bed of a battered old pick up truck and hauling them off to the town dump.  

Since dump runs required approximately the same skill set as dock sweeping and toilet cleaning, I almost always got to participate.

While riding shotgun in the truck’s cab one sunny afternoon it dawned on me that I was exactly where I had been longing to be, in a vehicle, only a couple of feet from the steering wheel, one small ignition key-turn from being the driver. How hard could it be to cajole a “co-worker” into letting me take a turn behind the wheel, just for fun?

Not hard at all as it turned out. Since the dump run didn’t require highly trained workers, most of the drivers were “new guys,” barely out of their teens themselves; it didn’t take a whole lot of convincing to get them to go along with some harmless youthful hijinks.

So, if you happened to be walking along Townsend Ave that particular summer and you noticed an overloaded pick up truck, proceeding somewhat erratically toward Boothbay Center driven by one highly excited 15-year-old boy, well, that would have been me.

How I avoided running into (literally or figuratively) the local constabulary, or worse yet some innocent tourist from Duluth, remains a mystery. Nevertheless I managed to make several such drives without incident.

Needless to say, these brief road trips to the dump only served to increase my behind-the-wheel confidence thereby whetting my appetite for more of the same.

Which brings me to that perfect summer job. My friend Luigi, a little older and if it were possible, even more car crazy than I, not only had a driver’s license, he had his own car!

He also had a summer job charging tourists a buck an hour to let him park their shiny new Ford Galaxies and Chevy Impalas in his uncle’s vacant lot. In just a few weeks he’d already taken in several hundred dollars. So, when he offered me 50 percent of the daily cash income simply for the privilege of running the operation on weekends while he took in the drag races at Beech Ridge Speedway, I jumped at the chance.

I was actually going to get paid to drive other people’s cars! It was the perfect summer job. At least that’s what I thought until someone pointed out that Luigi had the real perfect summer job.

“Whaddaya mean?” I protested. “He’s not even working this weekend. He’s off at the drag races.”

Which was, of course, the point. Luigi spent every weekend that summer sipping cold sodas and watching drag races while collecting half the money I earned working at his uncle’s parking lot. And that, my friends, is the perfect summer job!