Work builds character

My father’s first job was in 1945 just after War War II ended. He was 8 years old and he worked at his father’s bodega in Güines, Cuba. Abuelo Chito would put crates on the floor so that my father could reach the counter.

In Latin American countries a bodega is a small neighborhood market that sells everything from fresh produce to everyday grocery products.

His second job was at the age of 13 when he spent the summer working for the local milk man. At 6 a.m. every day my father would walk to the edge of town and wait for his boss to pick him up.

The milk was called La Purita (The Pure), because it came fresh from the milkman’s farm. The farmer had a great business but he didn’t know how to keep his books and so my father came up with a bookkeeping system for him.

Up to that point the farmer stored all his information in his head and it wasn’t unusual for him to forget who owed him money. By the end of the summer all of his customers were listed in a ledger with delivery dates, price of the items and amount owed.

Needless to say, when it was time for my father to go back to school his boss tried to convince him to work for him instead.

My husband’s first job was at the age of 11. He and his family had just arrived from Cuba and were living in Miami Beach.

The National Democratic convention was taking place and they were hiring individuals to put flyers on the windshield of cars.

His second job was working for his father in downtown McAllen. He was 15 and he wanted to go to New York. His parents told him he could go if he paid his own way. They assumed he would never raise the money.

My husband worked two jobs that summer. He would work from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the store and then head to a packing shed where he would work until 4 a.m.

The packing shed paid him more than the store so whenever they gave him overtime, he would stay until 6 a.m.

His job was to push boxes of produce down a shoot, but then he noticed that there were people who stapled boxes together. On his break he picked up a staple gun and showed the foreman he could do a better job than everyone else.

He would staple more boxes in one hour than the workers could fill so this gave him more time to rest.

At the end of summer he took off with a friend to New York for three weeks.

On Nov. 3, the Opray Winfrey show had a group of celebrities visiting the first job they ever held. Christy Alley worked as a housekeeper, Martina McBride worked at Dairy Queen and Suze Orman worked as a waitress and short order cook in a café.

Orman said something on the show that defines how I was raised. She said, “When you make average great, your dreams become a reality.”

What makes a person succeed isn’t so much where they start off in life, but it is how they treat others and the pride in which they do their job.

If you treat people bad and do a lousy job because you hate what you’re doing, you will never know how to treat people and do a good job when you get the job you want. In fact, the odds are you probably won’t even get there.

Individuals who succeed do their best and give it their all 24/7. Their attitude about work and their good will towards others is what makes them stand out.

Maria Luisa Salcines is a freelance writer, certified parent educator and corporate empowerment consultant with The International Network for Children and Families in Redirecting Children’s Behavior, Redirecting for a Cooperative Classroom, and Redirecting Corporate America. Contact her at her Web site at www.redirectingchildrenrgv.org.