It was the summer after fourth grade so I guess I was almost nine years old. It was 1951 and I had my first job! We lived on Miami Beach, between the intercoastal waterway and the Atlantic Ocean. A couple blocks away a hotel needed a kid to rake the seaweed off the beach. Tourists and beachgoers do not like seaweed. It can be a lot worse than this:


For you people that live in non-coastal places, the tide brings in the seaweed and then, as it retreats, deposits big clumps of the stuff on the sand, destroying the pristine quality the hotels prefer to maintain.
I wish that I could remember the name of the hotel. But I do remember what my pay was for getting rid of the seaweed: all the Nehi and RC Cola I could drink. My favorite was the Nehi Orange, the best orange flavored soda I ever had. They had good grape too.


It never occurred to me (nor, apparently, my mother) that some child labor law might be at issue here. Perhaps I ought to have held out for a better salary, say, soda AND sandwiches. It was a great summer, after which we moved back to Miami proper and I entered the fifth grade sporting a fine tan.