Yall are lucky. My teen years, I was working for my father in his auto shop, basically for room and board and the learning experience. I never saw $1 of wages from all the thousands of hours I spent working on other people's vehicles and by the time I was 16, I was pretty good at it. My brother and sister's the same deal. My sister could and did run the valve grinding/seat grinding machine as good as any man could.
I could work part time in the summers hauling hay or working for a local construction project but still had to put in my time in the auto shop. My only 'pay' from that mechanic work was dad bought both my brother and I a car when we got our full driver's lic. 1964 surplus Houston police patrol car, with a gazillion miles on them, a wore out 6 cyl 2 bbl, with the HPD emblem just scraped off with a razor knife before they left the aution, and auto transmission and they could barely get out of their own way. He paid $325 for one and $350 for the other at the auction, after 6 years of working in the shop, plus the time spent working on the farm.. mostly fencing then crossfencing 124 acres which involved me getting hit by lightning, & the whole place was filled with a billion thousand seed ticks. Ropin cows on open ground and learned real quick to get the rope run around the nearest tree before the cow got to you and snub her off tight so you brandor drench or whatever you had to do, then hope she just walked off when you let her up instead of trying to kill you for all the trouble. Creosoting posts with a homemade pressure tank that one day the pressure gage quit working and it got so hot it blew the door off and the creosote erupted in a big ball of fire as soon as the air hit it. Whee doggies!
I was finally 'allowed' to get a full time job when I was 17, in one of the refineries as labor, but then had to pay my mother $35/week 'room and board'.
(Some years later, I hadn't been back from Vietnam 6 months when my dad had bought an old 50s something long stake bed winch truck on the other side of Houston and I went with him to get it. Didn't run, the driver's door wouldn't open, had been welded shut, it barely had brakes and he pulled it back thru houston with a chain on 610 loop at 60 mph with me behind the wheel of the pos stake bed truck. They had just finished the tall Sidney Sherman bridge over the Houston ship channel, a tall 10 lane curved bridge and he sped up before getting there to be able to get over the top and we were still flyin when we reached the top. Going down, we picked up speed, the old front wheels were wobbling back and forth in suicide motion & I wanted out of that thing bad but was too scared to jump out onto the traffic. I was standing on the brakes trying to keep slack out of the chain and slow him down, but he was going faster trying to keep ahead of me and barely had any effect till we reached the flat roadway on the other side. Brakes were still smoking when we pulled into the yard 20 miles later, when I swung the passenger door open to get out, it fell off onto the ground.)
What a friggin life.
Thats the evil bridge in the distance..
