Employment History
Might just be the Son-of-a-Boomer in me, but I’m floored when I meet a young person and they don’t have a job. I know it’s a different generation and all, but employment was a BIG step forward in my growing up. It was community. It was being part of something bigger than yourself. Those first wobbly steps of responsibility outside of home, you know? And most importantly, a place to be.
I got my first official job at Crusted Creations Pizza in Traverse City in the fall of 1987. I was 13. I remember that first night clearly: Climbing into a gray Crusted t-shirt and hat and being led over to the dish pit to tear into the night’s dough trays and sauce buckets. Spent the next four years there.
What that first job instilled in me was the blunt awareness that you had to work to earn your keep. Skateboard decks, records, gas for the tank, concert tickets, car insurance and lift tickets. I remember Dad laying it out for me, “If you want this stuff, you gotta work for it.” Just as simple as that. And I dug in.
Every kid in the Midwest had a job in high school. It was currency and part of being a kid and becoming an adult.
To this day, my favorite job was being a pizza delivery guy for Crusted Creations. The nights would go by so fast, driving around listening to tunes! And you’d get tips! I miss those days.
Present Day
Draplin Design Co.
North America, Portland, Ore.
Sole Proprietor
1995 to Present
2008-2018
Wilderness Office
Portland, Ore.
Partnering with John Phemister and David Nakamoto.
February 2008 to 2018
Strength in numbers. After working in my basement from 2004-2009, Goo, Dave and I checked out a space in the newly-refurbished Olympic Mills Building down on lower Stark Street and Southeast Third. Just a block away from Produce Row, two blocks from Sheridan’s Market. In that big, yellow building. Up on the fifth floor, overlooking the city to the north.
2002–2004
Cinco Design Office
Portland, Ore.
Senior Designer
April 2002 to August 2004
Our first “big time” studio gig. I worked primarily on Nixon watches, Gravis footwear and Helly Hansen outerwear. Gigantic thanks to John “Goo” Phemister and Kirk James for believing in me, as well as to the colleagues I did battle with day to day: David Nakamoto, Dean Gross, Chris Soli, Ben Munson, Josh Nelson, Edgar “Little Hands/Shredgar” Morales, Kristin Denight, Gary Vossenkemper, and Sunny Burch.
2000-2002
Snowboarder Magazine
San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
Art Director
April 2000 to April 2002
What started with a loose-lipped phone call from Mark Sullivan promising fame, riches and an upgrade on my tan turned into 22 months of making pages, being hot, sitting in traffic, paying way too much for way too little and the occasional wearing of flip-flops. Very proud of my time with the fellas down there on the beach.
Much love to Pat “the eYe” Bridges, Evan Rose, Jeff Baker, Mark Sullivan,
Mike “Chief” Nusenow, Ruth, Randy, Marty and even Ricky.
1999
Charles Spencer Anderson Design
Minneapolis, Minn.
Scanning Technician / MCAD Internship
Fall 1999
We scanned, scanned and did some scanning. Just happy to help out. I owe this connection to fellow MCAD student PJ “Hoss” Chmiel for dragging my ass in there to show my portfolio to Todd Piper-Hauswirth. Hoss got my foot in the door of my Minneapolis design hero. Forever appreciative.
1996, 1997, 1998 & 1999
Princess Tours
Anchorage, Alas.
Dishwasher/Cook
Summers 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
“Wash To Live, Live To Wash,” and, “Don’t Take Any Shit From Those Servers,” respectively. Another quote we were famous for during those “summers on the rail” went something like this: “We’re not here to make friends.” For the record, Fred Green, I hated the train more than you.
1995
Nickel Ads
Bend, Ore.
Layer-Outer, Pagemaker Wizard and Pagination Magician.
Winter 1995
My first “design gig” and almost last due to “Nickel-gate,” or, the informal launch of the Bend-famous “Volcano Magazine.”
1995
High Cascade Snowboard Camp
Government Camp, Ore.
Hospital Shuttle Driver
Summer 1995
Due to my “non drinking” status, I got the “hospital driver” gig for the summer up at Mt. Hood. Would transport the kids with glacier-burnt lips, broken wrists and bruised egos down to Gresham for treatment. Once the kids were dropped off and getting fixed, I’d rip into Portland to hit the record store or art supply store to load up on goods to take back up to Hood. Was broke all summer long.
1995–2004
Draplindustries Design Co., North America
Sole Proprietor
December 1995 to 2004
And so it all began, in a shit-ass rental house just off Century Drive in Bend, Ore.
1994
Sunflower Productions
East Jordan, Mich.
Carny, in the Pizza Wagon.
Summer of 1994
Step right up! Read all about! You in the Billy Ray Cyrus t-shirt! Win yer girlfren a Bart Simpson mirror!”
Please check out our “My Summer As A Carny” below for the FULL run-down of this one.
1992
Cherryland Electric
Traverse City, Mich.
Tree Trimmer, Chainsaw Sharpener, Brush Humper
Summer 1992
Talk about Henry Hustead…
1991 & 1992
Mt. Holiday Ski Resort
Traverse City, Mich.
Lift Operator, Tow-Rope Button Starter-n-Stopper, Rentals.
Winters 1991-1992, 1992-1993.
We owned that place. “Butchie Straps,” forever.
1991
China Fair
Traverse City, Mich.
Dishwasher
Fall 1991-Spring 1992
That, by far, was the dirtiest walk-in cooler I have ever had to “clean.”
1987–1991
Crusted Creations Pizza, Traverse City, Mich.
Pizza Maker
Fall 1987 to Fall 1991.
My first proper job. Started when I was 13 in ninth grade, all the way through high school. An infamous lawsuit—which we won, goddammit—soured the business relationship. Had three-and-a-half good years there, making many friends and a million pizzas. It has come to my attention that there is some “ill will” felt towards me regarding this tiny lawsuit. As direct as I can be on the subject: When someone hires you to design a logo, tells you they are going to pay for a logo, use it in an application, then don’t pay for it, well, ya gotta pay up. I defended myself in court after being told to take a hike. I stood up to the owner and manager, was paid for my time eventually, and, some 15 years later, I am very proud of that.
1985
Second Chance Body Armor, Central Lake, Mich.
Brass Rat
A couple weeks in the Summer of 1985.
On a big stretch of land a couple miles outside of the town I grew up in was the estate of the local businessman, Richard Davis. He ran a body armor business in town manufacturing Kevlar bulletproof vests. The motherfucker would even go as far as shooting himself in the chest wearing one, hit the deck and then jump up to shoot some bowling pins, or, crooks dead. Those were days of insanity.
Well, each summer they held an event called the “Second Chance Shoot” complete with shoot ‘em up competitions where cops, swat fucks and sketch-ass Vets would shoot up bowling pins for prizes. It was VERY intense and for a couple weeks this one summer, I was a brass rat.
In between these animals shooting shit up, I’d run and pick up the shells for a local recycler. Hence the term, “Brass Rat.” It was an exotic event. Cops and crazies from all over were attracted to it, and there was this sense of lawlessness and chaos lingering everywhere.
I remember having a pocketful of firecrackers and knives and a lighter and matches and well, just all sorts of rogue shit a 11-year-old shouldn’t have in his pocket.
I’ll never forget walking up to a picnic table of vice cops laughing at a scrapbook. When I got closer and on my tippie-toes, I could see the center of their guffaws. A crime scene photographer from the Chicago Police Dept. was showing off some of his prized “scenes.” I remember a picture of this little girl…bloody, crumpled up in some barbed wire after being murdered…and this guy making some joke about her guts being spilled or something. And all these big, bulry mustached cop guys were busting up about it. Freaked me out and that was my first and last time being a brass rat.
EXTRA CREDIT: Please see the documentary, 2nd Chance for the wild ride that was Richard Davis.
Working the Pizza Wagon with Chad
A true life story from the summer of 1994.
We were coming off our first winter out west. I came back to Michigan in early May. My buddy Chad Smith finally made it back from Bend a couple weeks later, and, like me, was seeking gainful employment. After a long winter of making pizzas, little did we know we’d be “doing I-talian” again all summer long.
Mom and Dad ran into some old friends from Central Lake: Ray and Rose. Ray was a barrel-chested, fast-talkin’ rabble-rouser; sorta famous for tearin’ the hell out of that little town and making all the concerned fathers’ shit lists. Rose straightened Ray out, and they were slowly growing their amusement business.
They had a couple food carts and rented out some space in a small, mid-Michgan-based traveling carnival. They were looking for a couple of nice young bucks to man their pizza wagon across the way from their lemonade/corn dog wagon.
I spoke with Ray and we agreed on $250 cash per weekend. That sounded really good the first time I heard it, thinking, $250 bucks for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Under the table, too. Michigan- wide adventures. Carny chicks. Not bad, and I’d get a truck to drive for the summer. I accepted, and got Chad hired on, too.
The first couple gigs were in the Detroit area. So that meant we had to drive down the night before with the wagon in tow. That added an extra day to the “three-day weekend.” There was a lot of jockeying of equipment, moving from event to event. Ray and Rose had a fifth wheel they slept in, so they’d drive down separately, with Rose towing the lemonade wagon and Ray towing their summer home on wheels. It took a couple days just to get all the gear to the site and up-n-running. The final piece to show up was the fifth wheel Chad and I slept in. It was hot and musty, the bathroom smelled of piss and the shower more or less peed lukewarm water on you. But these were “luxury accommodations,” considering the shady and sheisty sleeping quarters offered up for the ragtag roster of carnies. We’ll get to them in a couple paragraphs.
Our day in the wagon consisted of waking up at about nine a.m. to prep the dough, sauce and toppings. Thawing the goods was a crucial step. We’d make sure the soda pop was flowing like a river, too. The crowds would show up around ten a.m., with the first couple slices hittin’ the gums at about eleven. Chad and I would stagger the slow time, offering relief to each other every hour. There would be a dinner rush around seven p.m., lasting a couple hours into the night, with the lights going down around midnight.
In no time, we were six weeks into the season and humming along. Man, we hit some ugly little towns. Clare, Irons (home of the annual, Michigan-famous Flea Roast and Ox Market festival), Ironwood, Iron Mountain and the Coleman Junefest were some of the colorful destinations. Our downtime on the road was spent reading, drawing, junkin’ in between ports and sweating the nights out in the fifth wheel. Things weren’t so bad, and hell, if anything, the constant traveling was dirty, kinda reckless and fun.
The carnival’s family hierarchy is broken down systematically. At the top of the food chain you have the owners. They own the equipment, book the shows and cut the checks. The main guy had this perpetual look of disgust and exhaustion on his face and his wife had big blond hair and lots of gold dangling off her buxom chest. Oh yeah, and a couple of spoiled, shit-ass little kids running around getting into everything. Moving right along, the next step down is the food court. The court vendors rent space from the owners. If they are lucky, they’ll build a little empire of elephant ears and corn dogs and have a whole row of wagons set up at any given event. Ray and Rose were responsible people, with a nice house in some little town somewhere, a couple big trucks and lots of determination to succeed. For all I knew, they took the winters off, due to the riches from their summer. Chad and I—somewhat reluctantly—were a part of the food court caste.
But our hearts, well, they were pumping carny blood.
The carnies. Oh man, what a wild lot. Rough around the edges, oddly enigmatic, stereotypically undereducated, dirty, colorful, loyal, sunburnt, simple, repressed and “kinda lost” are descriptions that come to mind. It’s been over twenty years since that fateful summer, so the names are fuzzy, but the faces and their hearty personalities are ingrained in me forever.
There was this older lady named Alice, who’d lie like a rug. One day she’d claim to have six kids, the next day, seven. Her husband, “Bob,” was this hefty bruiser some twenty years her junior with no front teeth, deep-set eyes, a dangling smoke and a big smile to share with everyone. He’d just nod along with her lies.
There was a guy with green, rotting teeth who’d get a big “Dew” from us each morning. After some time he and I got to know each other. He’d ask me about living out west. I’d ask him about living in Saginaw. One time I asked him if he ever planned to fix his teeth. With a toothy grin and a poetic delivery he said, “Hurts too much to brush ’em, so I’m just waitin’ for ’em to fall out! Ta-ha-haaaaa!” And that was that.
Carny life is a tough go. First of all, they don’t get paid shit and are expected to work long, long hours. Set the shit up, run it all day, tear it down and travel to the next gig. And that’s their summer. Each night after this crew shut the fair down, they were allowed a “draw” on their earnings. Now, if I remember correctly, the cash was dispersed in an envelope, carefully recorded and doled out to the eager workers. Their money often went to smokes, trashy food and beer. And, man, the whole draw thing was one more way for the owners to keep the carnies under their thumb and eating out of their hands. Because when payday would hit, well, they would be taxed for the whole amount and would have tiny paychecks. Plus, they had to rent their sleeping quarters. The deck was stacked against them in every way. The work, the hours, the safety issues, the food options offered…nothing was in their favor.
So I took matters into my own hands. After seeing how much the wagon made, and how fast it made it, I started to “give back” to the people who I felt were taken advantage of. The carnies had to pay for the food, which, considering how they were treated overall, was complete bullshit. So, say a guy would come up to get his daily fifty-ouncer of Mountain Dew. It was three bucks. He’d give me a five-dollar bill, I’d give him the wink and then give him seven dollars in change. And so on. I took it upon myself to give these guys a break, and in the process, won them over.
Now if anyone messed with Chad or me, the carnies would come to our rescue. I remember some drunk frat fucks messing with us somewhere in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and having one of the carnies come over to police the wagon’s canopy area. Backup. Brothers. And it’s not like Ray and Rose lost very much from my benevolence that summer. Maybe a couple hundred bucks, which I’d gladly pay back. It put smiles on the carnies’ faces, and maybe, just maybe, made ’em feel like someone gave a shit about their plight.
The highlight of the weekend was “going AWOL” long enough to hit a thrift store or a local restaurant. That, and when friends would visit. I can only wonder how we looked inside that cockpit.
Now, things were rolling along just fine, and some ten weeks into it, a meltdown changed everything.
It was a late night in Norway, on the west end of the Upper Peninsula. We were busy right up until closing, and, being hungry after a long day, we shut the rig down and left without cleaning up, in order to get into town before all the restaurants closed. So we go and eat, hitting a Subway or something. (I remember that felt “premium” after spending a whole summer around corn dogs and shit.) When we rolled back into the site—to do our nightly cleanup and then hit the sack—we noticed the wagon’s back door was open and the light was on, with some movement inside.
We walked up to find Rose feverishly cleaning up. “Rose, we’ll get that,” I said. “We just wanted to go into town to grab something before everything closed.” She didn’t reply, visibly miffed, scrubbing away.
And that’s when Ray showed up and went nuts. Accusing us of “making Rose clean up after us”—which was bullshit; we always cleaned the place up, like we were supposed to—and of “not caring anymore.” He was getting close on the latter, as our paycheck stayed the same with the days on the job being more and more each weekend. For instance, he never told us about the fairs that were Thursday to Sunday, which meant driving out on Wednesday night and back on Monday morning, in turn becoming six days all together. But we still made it and honored our pact.
I remember him specifically bringing up an incident about the panty hose. At the end of the night, we were “trained” to put a panty-hose on the release drain, and then release the waste-water into the grass or dirt, catching all the crud in the panty-hose, and then remove it and cap the drain back up. This was against the law, as we were supposed to drain the waste water into a state-sanctioned receptacle. So this one night, we forgot to remove the panty-hose. We crashed out, and as we were walking up to the wagon the next morning, we were greeted by an official from the Michigan State Health Department. Well, Ray got a big fine for that one, and was pretty bummed at us. Thanks for the good training, boss.
Then he started to talk about how “he oughta fire us,” when I interrupted him and said, “Nah, you won’t have to do that. I quit.” Or something to that effect. And, man, it stopped him in his tracks. He went double nuts at that point. I think I said something about how pathetic his “career” was as a fucking corndog huckster. I just remember Chad cautioning me as I unloaded a summer’s worth of disgust on the guy. And I let it all out.
We worked hard for him and Rose and never lost a sale or turned people away. We made them a ton of loot and were always on time. And this one time we broke protocol in the name of getting somewhat of a square meal and he loses it and freaks out on us.
So I quit on the spot, and, man, it felt good. I had saved all my summer loot, so my western nest egg was secure. Then they asked Chad what he was gonna do. I remember him saying, “Nah, I’m outta here. I’m not gonna listen to you talk shit about Aaron for the rest of the summer.” My brother had my back. I remember being outside the owners’ fifth wheel and hearing that little snake-tongued wife say something along the lines of “I wouldn’t give them a thing. Get ’em out of here, then” as Ray sought guidance on how to handle our leaving. And that was it. We were free.
It was two a.m., in the middle of the U.P., and we were done. Ray paid us for the weekend and gave us a hundred bucks for Greyhound tickets back to Traverse City. Then he recruited this guy with spotty hearing and one eye with Coke-bottle glasses to drive us off the premises and to the next little town, where we’d wait the night out until the next bus came through.
Once we were on the road, we bought the guy some smokes or a big Dew or something and he drove us all the way to Escanaba, down on the Lake Michigan coast. He dropped us off at a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, where we caught up on laundry and watched the sun rise.
Luckily, Mom and Dad came to our rescue the next morning, and drove us back down to Traverse City.
Two weeks later, after an amazing Ryder truck road trip back to Bend, we were settling into our second winter in Oregon.
–Aaron James Draplin, Summer of 1994
(This account was first published our original draplin.com web site, then was tuned up and put into our book “Pretty Much Everything,” which came out in May 17, 2016 on Abram Books.)
