Snow Cones, Paper Routes And Governors-To-Be

- A reporter’s notebook -

Gov. Deval Patrick speaks to a panel of journalists, including WBUR's Curt Nickisch, near, during a jobs forum at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston on Tuesday. (Kirk Carapezza for WBUR)

What do a snow cone, a paper route and guitar lessons have in common?

They’re some of the first jobs of Massachusetts’ gubernatorial candidates.

Yesterday, I was part of a panel of journalists posing questions to Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, Republican Charlie Baker, independent Tim Cahill and the Green-Rainbow Party’s Jill Stein at Bunker Hill CC. The workforce development nonprofit SkillWorks organized the forum to hear the candidates’ ideas for job and skills training and stronger pathways to post-secondary education.

The candidates did a fine job of explaining their respective positions and differences. But one highlight of the forum was hearing about their shared labor heritage — long before they became politicians — of “the first job you ever had.”

Stein gave guitar lessons for cash. Baker had a paper route (an afternoon paper like The Herald Traveler, much to the chagrin of fellow panelist Shirley Leung, of The Boston Globe). Cahill put himself through college as a landscaper, though he says he learned the most about the nature of work when he later started his own sandwich shop in Quincy.

Patrick worked lathe in a machine shop and as a busboy, but his first job was helping the snow cone salesman, Mr. Ward, who lived two doors down and ran the snow cone machine off of his old Jeep.

Patrick remembers the hot and sticky work, and how he got paid in coins sticky with the sugary syrup. “So I had to go home and rinse off my salary,” Patrick told the laughing audience.

(A side note: as soon as the governor mentioned “snow cone,” Adam Carroll’s tune, “Sno Cone Man,” popped into my head).

Both Patrick and Baker said they learned the same key lesson from their first work experiences. Baker started doing the paper route so he could pay his way to go to hockey camp. (Another side note: I once reported on the strong correlation between paper routes and entrepreneurship.)

Baker, like Patrick, remembers the most important thing he learned: that his customers, his boss and others depended on him.

“A job is fundamentally, and most of all, about living up to or exceeding people’s expectations,” Baker summed up for the hundreds in the audience.

How fitting that each of these candidates is applying for (or asking to keep) a job by spending months coming to terms with people’s expectations.