A well-developed work ethic
Ihave a couple of old photos I dearly love. One is of my mother, Annie Sue Mason. It sits behind my desk.
If you knew my mother, it was just Sue Mason. She couldn’t stand being called a Southern Annie Sue. As most of our friends know, Sue Mason had a great career as the uncrowned fashion queen of south Arkansas as the ladies ready-to-wear buyer for Samples and El Dorado House department stores. During that time she was Donna Axum’s chaperone to the Miss America pageant and several years later opened a ladies’ boutique, Sue Mason’s.
However, the picture I cherish is not the one with Donna flying off to Atlantic City, but one taken years earlier.
When I was 8 years old we moved into a small white wood-frame farmhouse about a mile out of Norphlet. Times were tough during those years. We were renting, and to help pay the rent our family took care of the owners’ blind father. Mother managed to save $40 from her egg money and used it to buy a milk cow we called Old Jersey. Old Jersey helped us get by. I hand-churned the clabbered milk to get butter and buttermilk.
A year or two later my father added a couple of hogs to the farm lot, and Mother took them in as if they were part of the family. The picture I have shows her slopping the hogs. She is standing there with a slop bucket, and one of the largest pigs I’ve ever seen is eating from the bucket she is holding.
But this country girl from Rose Bud was a whole lot more than a farm hand, and a few years later, by the time I started my senior year at Norphlet High School, she had over several years moved from a part-time switchboard operator for Samples Department Store to sales clerk and then to buyer.
She never made comments such as, “Do you want to attend college?” It was always, “You are going to college.” I was one of the first Masons in several generations to graduate from the university. She had to scrape by to send me, even though I worked all of the summers at a refinery.
Things got even tougher for her when I was a sophomore. My dad was killed in a car wreck, and I had to pick up 100 percent of my college expenses. My younger brother, William, was still in high school, but our determined mother was going to make sure he also went to college. He’s Dr. Mason now. My mother considered working important, right next to being godly.
But a hard-working mother is only half of my early life with my parents. It seems I was born into a family where everything revolved around work. My father, Jack Mason, was six feet tall and 180 pounds, and he set the example. The photo I have of my dad was taken with him sitting on the back steps with a lunch pail at his feet and a resolute steely expression that says it all. The title of the picture is Graveyard Shift.
The story about how he got his first job will give you a good insight into his work ethic. It was 1933 in the middle of the Great Depression. My parents were newlyweds and were living in Malvern with my dad’s family when my dad heard some of the refineries in south Arkansas might be hiring. He took my mother to El Dorado and decided to apply at Macmillan Petroleum Company, a new refinery in Norphlet. The next morning, after finding where the refinery superintendent lived and his name, he stood in the driveway by the superintendent’s back door, waiting on him to leave for the refinery.
“Mr. Powell, I’m Jack Mason. Do you need another good man today?” he asked the superintendent as he stepped out of his house.
“No, Jack, we’re not hiring right now,” was the reply.
“Thank you sir, just please keep me in mind.”
“Yes, I will,” he replied.
The next morning when Mr. Powell opened his back door my dad was standing there again.
“Mr. Powell, do you need another good man today?”
The reply was “Sorry, no, I don’t.” The next day and for the next two weeks my dad stood by the superintendent’s back door until he was told, “Jack, I can put you on for a week in the gang as a roustabout to help clean the cracking tower, but it will be just a week.”
“Thank you, Mr. Powell. My work clothes are in the car. Can I start today?”
My mother passed on the story to me, and said the gang foreman told Mr. Powell my dad worked harder than any two men he had on the crew. He worked at Macmillan for 27 years.
Life is sure a lot more than hard work, but without the work ethic that my mother and dad had, along with millions of other Americans, this country wouldn’t have the quality of life that the rest of the world seeks.
If my dad could get a job in the height of the Depression, then today, with over 6.5 million jobs open, everyone who has a pulse can get one. With that many jobs available, every economist will tell you we have a labor shortage, and we don’t need new jobs, we need more workers.
That begs the question: If we have a labor shortage, and the facts tell us we do, then why are we trying to send back the 12 million employed workers who were brought to this country as children? Warren Buffett, in his annual report to his stockholders, remarked that “in one form or another, every company we own has job openings.”
What if the government actually managed to send the 12 million employed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals workers back? These DACA folks, who have spent almost all their lives in America, aren’t sitting around waiting on their government checks. They are nearly 100 percent employed in every type of job imaginable. If they were deported it would cause a labor shortage of an unsustainable 18 million job openings and force the closing of numerous companies. The repercussions would drastically lower the gross domestic product of the United States and probably trigger a stock market crash that would make the Great Depression look like a Sunday School picnic.
This country was made great based on several factors, and without a doubt our work ethic and productivity contributes heavily to our success as a great nation. Let’s don’t, for the sake of rhetoric, actually do something destructive and deport 12 million workers. They are essential components of the American workforce.