Pizza advice

My preferred toppings are sau-

sage, mushrooms, and onions.

As I look back, two pieces of advice stand out as the most appreciated, in a lifetime of receiving advice. But, to diverge momentarily, why is it that advice comes in pieces, I wonder. Oh, and (SPOILER ALERT) title and graphics aside, this post has nothing whatsoever to do with pizza, other than as a play on the words, "piece of advice."

But, to return to the topic.

My first full-time job was in my early teens, during school summer holiday breaks in the mid '60s. I was a utility worker for an smallish outfit in Toledo, Ohio, called National Canvas Products. I worked at whatever job needed some extra help. Many of my co-workers were off-duty city firefighters. (Toledo's fire department worked a twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off, shift rotation.) And a fair portion of those firefighters were veterans of the various armed services during World War Two and the Korean conflict.

One summer, I fabricated and assembled canvas boat tops. They were one of several leisure activity-related products—tents, sleeping bags, boat covers, snowmobile windshields, ping-pong tables—the company turned out. Working on the boat tops, I performed various tasks, from bending the aluminum tubing frames on wooden templates, called jigs, to assembling and packing the shipping cartons.

Among those men I usually worked with was a fireman, Robert "Pat" Patterson. I suspect that his advice originated from time spent in the service.  I was standing at a fabrication table doing some small-piece hardware assembly job, when Pat came over with a stool and said to me:

"When you can do a job sitting down, sit down."

It was a good piece of advice, easily generalizable to various applications, all related to not making the work harder than it had to be. It served me well throughout my career, especially when I was a supervisor of other employees. Making workers' jobs easier almost always means that more work can get done.

    Mr. Majestyk was filmed largely

    on location in and around La Junta,

    including the community hospital's

    emergency room, with a couple of

    the nurses as extras.

The other piece of advice was offered about a decade later, while I was
working at the small community hospital in La Junta, Colorado. An older man, a retired business owner, was admitted to the hospital several times during my tenure as an orderly, a male nurse aide. He had a number of respiratory and circulatory problems that had a tendency to flare up and require brief periods of close medical supervision. Both of us being friendly type of guys, we developed an acquaintanceship.

One summer afternoon, my wife and I were riding our bikes around the shady residential streets when someone called out to us from the deep shadow of their front porch. Turned out to be my good acquaintance and his wife, who invited us to join them for some iced tea.

We enjoyed listening to their tales of an earlier and woolier La Junta and some of the trials of building a business there. But it was something he said, just before we went on our way, that stuck out. He'd lamented that the travel and activity plans they'd made for retirement were now impossible due to his maladies. He felt it was a mistake to have worked so hard during his life and to have deprived his wife of the enjoyments they'd both wanted. He said:

"Don't save up your good times for retirement; take them when you can."

I took this piece of advice to heart and followed it at every opportunity. And I am very, very glad I did.

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