As I've mentioned before, my father grew up on a ranch. He was used to doing a lot of chores before and after school every day. It was a lot of hard work.
One day, he took Loyd and me to town and went to a location south of Main Street. He said, "Do you see this house? We own that! You see that building of apartments? We own that, too!" Loyd and I were bewildered as to why we needed to buy 14 residences. We did not get the concept of living in an apartment or a house that was rented. The ironic thing is that, at that time, we lived in a house that my parents rented from the school district.
What we were most unaware of is that this meant that we were going to have to learn how to work hard because my father was not about to hire people to maintain the properties. The apartments also included a swimming pool and a separate office building that was occupied by the local Office of Urban Renewal. (I still have no idea what they did.) For my father, spending all your time working was the life he grew up with and that's how he wanted to spend his spare time after school and on weekends. Loyd and I were about to get a big taste of what he went through growing up.
Basically, it meant that for the next several years, we were going to have to mow all the lawns, clean the pool, pick up the trash, do janitorial work in the office building, set up the air conditioners, re-shingle the roofs and clean up the apartments when the residents moved out, among other duties. Life as we knew it was over.
It's not like we did it for free. Dad paid us two dollars an hour, but that was still below the federal minimum wage at that time. Also, keep in mind that the going rate if you were doing that for a living at the time was likely $4 an hour. And we didn't get to keep all the money. Most of it was put in our savings accounts, which we had no access to. And I didn't know this at the time, but Dad got to write all those wages off as a tax deduction for the apartments.
One of the things that made it really rough the first year was that there was some sort of oil leak underneath the apartments that acted like a superfertilizer on the grass, and we would have to mow the lawns, even when there was snow on the ground.
I was relieved when I went to college because it meant I wouldn't have to work on those apartments any more. I even went to summer school after my Freshman year just to avoid it. However, I didn't go to summer school after my Sophomore year and spent the whole summer mowing lawns again and cleaning the office building, which now housed the Welfare office. A couple of years after that, Dad sold the apartments.
A few years later, there was something weird that happened that whoever bought the apartments defaulted on the payments and the ownership reverted back to my father. At this point, my parents had divorced and my father had gotten remarried to a woman I will refer to as Gred. Gred had a son (named Tad) from her previous marriage. She and my father already owned several other properties around town. My father told Loyd and me that he and Gred had written their wills so that, in the event that something happened to both of them, Loyd, Tad and I would have equal shares in the apartments. I told Dad it sounded like a good arrangement, but knew that the chances of us actually taking ownership were very small. However, Loyd called me on the phone and was very angry about it. "Tad did not spend years mowing all those lawns! He shouldn't get any of it!" Anyway, it became a moot point as my father and Gred wound up having to sell all the apartments as they got older.
The biggest impact this experience had on me is that I swore that I would never mow another yard again. I do not plan on owning my own home so I won't have to take care of the yard. Although, when I lived in Denver and could see the possiblity of buying a home, I did find one that I was interested in that did not have a lawn. However, I didn't continue to live in Denver or progress enough in my career and earnings to be able to purchase it.
UPDATE (07/11/17): I own my own home now, but I do not have a yard I have to mow.
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