1971
Another busy summer before my sophomore year at MIT. As I did the summer before, I worked weekdays at KGW-TV and weekends at KKEY radio. I also kept busy writing the pretentiously titled Great American Novel (a thinly fictionalized version of my freshman year), the Twilight Dome (a radio show for Michael Wildermuth that he didn’t have time to do, converted into the New Eugene Oregon Show) and I wrote a letter every day to Sherry Grobstein, with whom I fell in love that summer. Turns out being the transmitter operator at KKEY amounted to eight hours a day with a typewriter, an ample supply of paper, and about 10 minutes of actual work an hour.
1972
WHDH-TV lost its TV license, so WBZ-TV picked up the Red Sox, so they needed studio technicians to free up baseball camera operators. A lovely summer of 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. shifts out on Soldier’s Field Road.
1973
My first relevant summer job, as an intern at Portland’s afternoon daily newspaper, The Oregon Journal. I spent my spare time at the paper writing a letter every day to my new love, Beth Karpf.
1974
The summer after my senior year marked my last summer job, as production manager of The Tech. I was reluctant to take the job, but the production shop was the paper’s major source of revenue, and I loved the paper, so there I was. In August I started with the AP, and ever since my summer job has just been my fallwinterspring job, but in the summertime.
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