Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is a close friend of the Butterscotch Sundae family. Rockford and I went to high school with Don, and now he and his family live less than 2 miles from us. Don is in a lot of our summer memories, but none of them involve quite as much cole slaw, grease and debauchery as the story you’re about to read.

It all started the day I decided to begin work during the summer of 1990 at the age of 13. It was a tough decision in June of that year. It also violated child labor laws.

You see, my friend James and his family had tickets to see an Atlanta Braves / San Diego Padres game in Atlanta. Me? I decided to skip the game and begin work at a restaurant in North Georgia. Getting paid cash under the table was not something I was familiar with, but it spent. And that was more important than baseball at the time, even though the Cubs were coming off a division championship.

I was the restaurant’s official Hall Boy — which I assumed at the time was some rite of passage that would pay dividends in the form of lots of chicks, a Grand Prix with a built-in CD player and subwoofer, a pair of Oakley’s and a Starter jacket, and enough cash to buy all the baseball cards and Grateful Dead bootlegs I wanted from the nearby Flea Market.

I wore a black Mark Grace t-shirt and a pair of jeans to work that first day. They were ruined.

As Hall Boy I regularly made 50 gallons of cole slaw and dished at least 300 small servings of apple butter in a sweltering kitchen with a slick tile floor and a fry cook who constantly had chewing tobacco in his mouth. I think I drank two gallons of sweet tea per day and downed at least a dozen yeast rolls per shift.

I’m certain I became the first Hall Boy in history to come home from Day 1 of official duties with bandages on all 10 of his fingers (at least until my friend Jason took on those same Hall Boy duties a couple years later; he also put his fist through a window panel after a frustrating, late-night catering gig).

Boy Scouts may have taught me to whittle, but it didn’t help with the urgent duties associated with chopping 50 pounds of cabbage while I was behind on filling the ice cream machine with a few more gallons of ice milk. On some Saturday nights, we would serve 2,000 people for dinner and I would cut and plate more than 1,600 slices of pie on Thanksgiving.

I was constantly nicked up, had my mandatory navy blue Duckheads covered in food stains, and smelled like rotten peaches marinated in vurp. A pair of shoes lasted about a month, as they disintegrated from all the grease and muck.

But the $50 a night, all singles, lining my pocket on a regular basis felt pretty damn good. It also helped finance my conversion to gangster rap music later in my high school years.

(I won’t name the restaurant, but you can rearrange some letters in its name to read: “Use a d*ld0,” as some teenagers did to the restaurant’s Hollywood-style letters on a hillside one Thanksgiving morning).

My last shift at the restaurant would come nearly eight years later when I was in college. I can say that the career motivation and life lessons from those days taught me more than any baseball game, pair of sunglasses or 25-minute live version of Franklin’s Tower from The Fillmore East ever could.

That motivation for something bigger in life came from the people I worked with, mainly weekday, day-shift workers.

They were a different breed, and that shone through during spring break and Christmas break when you realized they weren’t doing this for money on the side while pursuing a degree in college.

One older guy, Gene, took me out to his truck one cold winter morning to show me the owl he had shot the night before. Another guy, Dayton, was arrested for stealing coins from paper machines around town. Derrick made out with a customer in the ice machine room.

The dishwashing savant, Donnie, never fully recovered from a bad acid trip in Detroit in 1968. He regularly pulled out his partial dentures and rinsed them in a lug full of dirty silverware and dishwater. He ate fried chicken from plates that came from customers’ tables to be washed. He played a wicked air guitar and had a set of bongos.

We had to endure Gloria and her 30-minutes of smokers’ cough every morning before the breakfast shift would begin. Her daughter was hot, though.

The 350-pound “chef,” Pete, who lived on the property with his wife and kids, came to work there from the state prison in Alto. He constantly smelled of Ripple and was found cavorting in the freezer with a female kitchen staffer, Polly. She always had snuff in her mouth, as I’m sure she did during that moment of passion amongst the rock-hard puff pastry and catfish.

Richard, who did double-duty as a convenience store clerk and sold dirty magazines to underage co-workers, was asked by the dining room manager to shave his facial hair and returned the next day with a Hitler mustache. He was fired. But he still sold us dirty magazines when we stopped by to fill up at the Circle K.

Richard dated Kendra. She was fired on Halloween for coming to work in a skin-tight black full body leotard and cat ears, with whiskers painted on her face. She was almost three bills and the same number of sheets to the wind.

I wore a Cubs’ uniform that day and kept my job.

I had hours and hours of conversation with George, the other dishwashing lifer, about whether Jerry Garcia, Eric Clapton, Angus Young or Jimmy Page was the best guitarist ever. George walked with a limp from a motorcycle accident and wore a leather tam-o-shanter hat that would have made Brian Johnson proud.

He once asked me: “Wouldn’t it be great if the Cubs played the Braves in the World Series?” MLB should have made him Commissioner.

I met several celebrities and politicians during those eight years: Loni Anderson, Mel McDaniel, Sean Hannity, Waylon Jennings, Jimmy Carter, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Zell Miller, John Smoltz, James Best (Rosco from The Dukes of Hazzard), Newt Gingrich, Sam Nunn and Jake “The Snake” Roberts.

It’s where I also met my first love. I got my first promotion at the age of 15 and officially became part of the 1 percent — at least in the catering-management world. I wore a tie, everyday, with a white or light blue Oxford short-sleeve shirt. I looked like a Greyhound driver.

I met friends there who still remain close confidants and are like family to me. I still have lunch a couple times a year with Jill, the Hall Girl who also started working there at age 13 and now works for a local university.

I refuse to this day to wear navy blue pants or slacks and will never wear a tie with a short-sleeve shirt.

Looking back, I don’t regret missing the Braves/Padres game on that summer day in 1990 in order to start my working life. James’ dad accidentally put diesel fuel in their Ford station wagon on the way to Atlanta, and they missed most of the game.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to see more than a hundred Major League games and had two seasons to work as a sportswriter at Wrigley Field. I now own my own consulting company. I’m writing this on a flight to Alaska while listening to the Grateful Dead and Eazy-E on my iPod.

Life is good, and the nicks have healed.

Good thing, too, because the plight of the newspaper business makes petty larceny from vending machines much less lucrative than it used to be.