A dollar an hour here, $15 an hour there, it all adds up fast

I'm not sure what to make of the efforts to increase the minimum wage in such large chunks.

$15 an hour seems to be the target for most folks. Why?

I could make a case that $15 an hour is no better than the dollar an hour I made when I first started working. I lived on a dollar an hour. A lot of folks today say they can't live on $15 an hour.

Of course, if you want to live like a doctor, you need to set your sights much higher than $15 an hour. You need to buckle down and make top grades in all your high school classes, particularly all the sciences. And you need to burn the midnight oil and the candle at both ends to rank near the top of your college courses, majoring in pre-med. And you need to forget sleep once you start your internship and residency. Finally, when you are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, you can start practicing medicine and living like a doctor.

That's all it takes to do better than $15 an hour.

My first job was working for my uncle during summer hay season. My uncle owned the only baler around Greenwood and Killough valleys in the Ozarks over yonder. In addition to baling the hay on his own farm, he jobbed out to all the other farmers around. He drove the tractor that pulled the baler. He hired three workers, one to drive the tractor pulling the hay wagon and one to throw the bales onto the wagon and one to stack the bales on the wagon.

When we had a wagonload of bales, we would head for the barn, where the bales were unloaded and stacked. This also was an opportunity to get a drink of cold water and maybe sit in the shade for a few minutes. Dude Shaver, who was an old man to the teenagers on the hay crew, never drank cold water. He always wanted hot coffee. Said the heat of the coffee made the heat of a scalding sun out in the fields more bearable. I never tried it.

One thing we workers always looked forward to when hauling hay was the noon meal. The wife of whichever farmer we were working for would prepare a huge spread of food. Fried chicken. Ham, Green beans. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Pickles. Cooked cabbage. Sliced tomatoes. Gooseberry pie. Rhubarb pie. Cornbread. Biscuits.

After dinner (the evening meal would be supper) we would have to sit or lie down under the elm trees in the yard. Going straight back to work would have been fatal, more than likely.

Once all they bales were out of the field and in the barn, we would hang around my uncle's tractor until he got paid by the farmer he was working for. He would have already calculated how many hours we had worked. We had too. Want to know the best way to learn math? Work by the hour.

When I went to college and needed a job to help cover expenses, I was hired as the operator for the college switchboard. It was the old-fashioned switchboard with cords that had to be plugged in to connect callers. I had to keep track of every long-distance call that was made. Students could not call long-distance.

The switchboard operated until 9 p.m. except on Sundays. Most nights there weren't that many calls, and I could prop up my textbooks on the switchboard and study while waiting for the next buzz.

I made 85 cents an hour.

After college I got a job as a reporter at the weekly newspaper in the town where I went to college. This was a full-time job. I don't recall that there were any benefits. No health coverage. The good news: most of what I made went into my paycheck. Not a whole lot of deductions in those days.

I made $1 an hour.

Someone had decided that reporting the news for a weekly newspaper was worth the same as bucking bales. Only there was no noon spread.

When I went to work for The Kansas City Star, I made a whopping $75 a week. This is, according to my math, almost double what bale buckers made.

Shortly after my wife and I were married, I learned that her older brother, who worked for an airline, had reached the $1,000-a-month level of pay. I thought to myself that if I ever made that much money, I would be set for life. My brother-in-law worked for that airline for many years and retired as president. He made more than $1,000 a month.

Could I live on $15 an hour today?

The simple answer is "yes." I have always had in the back of my mind what I would do if my circumstances changed so radically that I would be forced to make do on very little.

I don't want to be a doctor. But I think I could, even in my dotage, find a way to eat and have a roof over my head.

Here's another thing: If I had it to do all over, I wouldn't change a thing. In particular, I wouldn't trade one of those hay-harvesting noon meals for every nickel made by any doctor I know.

You just can't say enough good things about fresh sliced tomatoes on a July day with a dripping-with-butter hunk of cornbread.

Who needs $15 an hour?

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.