Jobs during Dental School

Milk Truck Driver

The summer after my freshman year, we didn't have to work in the clinic, so I got a job driving a truck for Spreckles Milk Company. My job was to deliver milk, cheese, butter to different places. I delivered products to many of the nice restaurants in San Francisco. I also had to deliver to the Navy Base on Treasure Island between San Francisco and Oakland. At that time the cars went on the top level of the Bay Bridge and the trucks went on the bottom. I turned off to the island and unloaded my milk. On the way back to the bridge, there was a stop sign and a notice above it which I didn't see that said, "If you are going to turn right, get in the left hand lane and if you are going to turn left, get in the right hand lane." I was turning left and was in the left hand lane. I started to pull out and a guard ran out of the guard shack blowing his whistle. He made me back up. Can't you read? I got in the right hand land to turn left and started to proceed. He ran out again and said, "I should take away your license, you are supposed to wait for me to come back out and signal you to turn left." Afterwards I told my boss I would never deliver milk on Treasure Island again.

I delivered a large load of milk to a big battleship in the harbor. I found if I brought along some cases of chocolate milk for the sailors, they would unload all the milk for me and be happy. The Milk dispatcher asked me to stop and have a drink with him after work. I was still in my white uniform and we both had too many drinks. He called a cab for me to go home in. He ended up in jail. I got home and Kaye was really mad at me because she didn't know where I had been. I laid down on the living room floor and Kaye said my eyes were going around in circles. She throw a bucket of cold water on me.

House Painter

That summer I started a house painting business. I hired several students to work for me. I went to a paint store and a customer and a paint representative were arguing in the store because the customers paint pooped of his stucco house because he hadn't prepared it properly. The paint representative finally agreed to pay for taking the paint off and give him new paint. They would pay for the new paint to be put back on the house. The paint representative turned around and asked me if I wanted a job. I said, "You bet." I hired Dennis Allen to work with me. It was a terrible job, we had to grind every bit of paint off that two story stucco house. I took us over two weeks getting paid $3 an hour. When we were through, the owner hired us to repaint the house. That was the beginning of my painting business. I just had the painting business that summer, but I got calls to paint houses the next three years.

By the end of the summer I had 3 more guys working for me. I took a job painting a Victorian House. A big mistake. We would paint and the owners would tear something up and we would have to repaint it. I finally had a mutiny on my hands, the guys sat down and refused to paint. We finally decided to hurry and finish before she kept making changes on us. Between my early morning milk truck job and painting houses, I was exhausted. I even fell asleep in the Barber's chair.

Working in Microbiology Department

Neil Rambo and I got a job working for Dr. Hamchi Lommeni. We were working on developing a vaccine for staph infections. We worked in the back part of the cafe building next to the school. We brought in all these rabbit cages full of rabbits. Our job was to inject the rabbits with certain amounts of staph infection and record how long it took them to die on different staph doses. Then we would take the dead rabbits into the dental school and put them in the autoclave to sterilize them and then put them in the garbage. We would take blood samples to check to coagulase C to see how to develop a vaccine for staph. This was my senior year.  Can you imagine how the Health Department and Humane Society would have had a field day with us? Since the rabbits were always scratching us, it's a wonder we didn't get staph.