High School

I attended East Clinton Local High School located in Lees Creek, Ohio. This school was located in a farm community and was across the street from a hog farm. When it was hot outside you could smell the fumes from the manure from the hogs through the open classroom windows. Nothing like "fresh country air" as the farmers would say.

I was happy when Laurel Oaks Joint Vocational School opened up at the old Wilmington Air Force Base located just outside of Wilmington because they offerred additional curriculum that was not available at East Clinton. I took the Distributive Education course at Laurel Oaks to prep for a business career after high school. The only thing similar to this at East Clinton was Vocational Agriculture provided for the farm community.

Both of my brothers had taken Distributive Education during high school when we lived in Wilmington, Ohio and Columbus, Ohio. I had followed in my older brother's footsteps and became the Distributive Education Class President at Laurel Oaks during the first year the school was opened.

The curriculum for my senior year in the Distributive Education class included opening up a school store. This included everything from identifying local warehouses to buy goods from for inventory to marketing the store to the students and faculty at the school, and keeping track of the books in order to determine how much profit/loss the store was producing. We also studied the feasability of starting up a movie theater for the students/faculty who lived in the dorms of the vocational school. We had students bused up from Cincinnati and surrounding areas that went to the school, so some lived there during the week and went home for the weekends.

Another part of the Distributive Education curriculum was co-operative education, for students to get a job in a marketing environment and learn first hand how the process of marketing and selling goods was achieved. My first co-op job was with a grocery store called Albers, a branch of what was known as Colonial Food Stores out of Atlanta, Georgia. The store was located in Wilmington, Ohio. I worked a couple of positions throughout the store, including stock and produce clerk and of course helped bag groceries, pull in shopping carts, and the usual janitorial work that goes along with most jobs of this type.

After high school I had taken a full time job at Krogers in Washington Court House, Ohio doing the same type of work, but mostly did night stock. I worked this job throughout the summer and then joined the Air Force in the fall of my high school graduating year. I worked for Krogers one other time as a part time employee while serving in the Air Force in Charleston, South Carolina. I helped to set up and configure the Krogers store there when it was new and opened for the first time.