At age 12, I, like my four brothers, became an indentured servant at the weekly newspaper published by our father.

Dad told us we needed to learn the meaning of work. We dutifully headed to the office on our bikes after school. There, in the back shop of the newspaper, in the shadow of grizzled printers, we became Printer's Devils.

We would drag a heavy five-gallon can filled with short strips of lettered, lead type, called 'slugs,' to the small back room where there was a gas-fired 'pot' into which we would load the inky slugs for reuse (early recycling).

The pot was about three feet tall and two feet around. It was the color of dried oatmeal and always gave off an aroma of natural gas. The slugs would slowly melt in the bowl at the top of the pot and after awhile, there was a luminescent silver soup of molten lead.

Our job was to take a large ladle and scoop out enough molten lead to fill a 'pig.' The pig was a cast iron, rectangular trough two feet long and four inches wide. It was blunted like a used pencil on one end and had a handle on the other end.

When the lead ingot cooled, it was removed from the pig and hung by a thin chain over a small pot on an incredible contraption known as the Linotype machine.

The Linotype was a huge mix of levers and noisy clickers used to make printed type for the newspaper. Lead boils at 621.77 degrees Fahrenheit.

When you are 12 and hoisting a ladle the size of a salad bowl filled with molten lead, sometimes a drop or two would spill. In fact, the floor around the base of the stove was a mess of splattered, annealed lead, stuck to ragged plywood.

Our footwear in those days was those black and white canvas tennis shoes. A drop of hot lead would burn right through the canvas. Dad figured it was part of the learning process. We figured it was where the term "hot foot" was invented.

Once we mastered the art of lead melting, we moved on to other tasks at the paper. Once a week, for example, we got to cut out all the ads in the paper and with a bottle of rubber cement, affix an "As Advertised" sticker on what is known as a 'tear sheet.'

Once the tear sheets were assembled, we would deliver them to the merchants who had placed the ads. We did this for a couple of years, while other kids were on school sports teams or taking part in intramural activities. As a consequence, many of our friends were adult merchants in the district.

We were pretty good kids and only strayed once. Rubber cement simply was too attractive to be used only for gluing ads to paper. We covered our hands liberally with this wonderful stuff. As it dried, we'd rub our hands together to make something akin to a bouncy ball. We could toss it across the room and have it come zinging back.

A side benefit was how it cleaned our hands of printer's ink. Mom always loved that. Dad wondered why he ran out of glue so fast.

Sometimes we would get to develop film in the darkroom. This little narrow room with the black walls and red light was a fascinating place for a kid. We learned a lot and in fact developed a deep interest in photography because of it. There was a mixture of magic and science in that hot little closet.

We all had paper routes, of course, and delivered the papers rain or shine. Later, when we learned to drive, Dad had us delivering bundles to the younger carriers. After that, but while we were still in high school, we worked selling advertising.

Dad taught us all these things. He taught us how to work, how to value community, how to give back and how to appreciate having something to do with our time in the community.

I forgive him for making me do work that melted my P.F. Flyers. You'll thank me some day, he would tell us when we walked into his office where he could see our toes through the canvas and knew we needed new shoes... thanks Dad.