My First Job

"Summers, in high school, I worked for my dad. He had three companies: road construction, a concrete batch plant and a limestone quarry in Waverly, Ohio.

"He first tried having me work for the construction company as a flagman-but in 1970, a young high school girl as a flagman caused more interference with traffic than I was able to help. Everybody knew me and stopped to talk. So then he put me in the office at the concrete plant. I learned how to calculate concrete yardage for small jobs. I weighed concrete trucks for billing customers, then I actually typed the billings and sent out invoices and prepared deposits. I also did things like fill the Coke machine-things nobody else wanted to do.

"And I cleaned. It was dirty and dusty, and I couldn't stand that-all the dust and the grit and the grime. You couldn't [keep it clean], the trucks barreled in and barreled out, and the roads were just lime rock.

"The best parts were getting the check and working with my dad. One thing I learned was the importance of accuracy. If you made a mistake in the weight of a truck-the amount of concrete-you could overbill. I learned that if the customer didn't catch it, it wasn't fair to them. And if it was caught, it was an embarrassment to the company.

"I also gained an understanding that people had value regardless of their position in life and what they did. Those truck drivers were marvelous; they treated me like a princess.

"I was the only woman in the office. A lot of girls would not even attempt that-and maybe that's why I became fearless in my job as a marine biologist and environmentalist. I could lead a survey crew into the deepest woods and not even think about it. I've always done jobs not typical for women. I've never been typical."

-Interview by Katie S. Betz