Welcome to Ellensburg - Now get to work!

As I mentioned in a prior post, Valerie and I spent about three years shortly after we were married living in Ellensburg, Washington where we attended Central Washington University. We lived there 1993-1996. We were poorer than poor struggling to make ends meet from month to month, we had no TV, no luxuries, a some-times working car and were about as happy as could be.

We look back fondly on our times in Ellensburg. As we drove through recently when stopping off on our way to Yakima, we passed through town and remembered all the places we used to work (sometimes 3 or 4 jobs at a time) and hang out and took a few pictures before things change too much there. I can’t believe the jobs we did all while both being full-time college students and also having Sarah as a little baby who joined our family while we lived there.

We counted off all the places we worked while we lived there and came up with this list:

Ellensburg Employer #1 – McDonald’s
Employee – Jeff and Valerie

The staple of the need-a-buck worker. Valerie and I both got jobs here together when it looked like we might not make our rent on our apartment one month. The free food seemed like a good idea at the time too. We worked there for just a couple of months until we had other things lined up.

When they wouldn’t let either of us off work on our birthdays which are just a week apart and happened to fall right in Ellensbug's Rodeo season (there really is one) we decided to take the days off anyhow.

I'm over it.

Ellensburg Employer #2 – Subway
Employee – Valerie




This was one of our primary jobs while in Ellensburg. I believe that Valerie worked here for a year or more. Valerie typically worked the night-shift which she normally did alone (that is kind of scary in retrospect) often not getting home until 3:30 AM or later. The best parts of this job were the tips that she brought home from the late-night drunkards that would show up when the bars in town had closed.

It was also great to always have a fully-stocked refrigerator at home with the Subway Sandwich of your choice. $5 foot-long is a poor deal by comparison. Somehow the pounds still didn't melt away like Jared. Probably because of...

Ellensburg Employer #3 – Super 1 Foods
Employee – Jeff



I worked here for a year or more in the bakery. I worked an exceedingly early shift which I believe ran from 3:30 AM until 8:00 AM in the bakery. My job title was “Donut Fryer”.

I worked this job at the same time Valerie worked at Subway which as you can see is not great as far as time-compatibility goes. She would get off work just as I was starting my shift. Other than the time of day, working in the bakery was a lot of fun actually. There were always tasty things to eat and invent and the pay here was pretty good too. I never did master the art of creating the perfect kruller though.

I got off work everyday just in time to head to classes at the University. I’m guessing this job is partly to blame for having trouble keeping my eyes open through Ancient German Literature discussions. I ended up taking a few days off here when I contracted bronchitis once. I enjoyed sleeping in so much that I never went back.


Ellensburg Employer #4 – Winegar’s Dairy
Employee – Valerie



Winegar’s Dairy used to have three locations in Ellensburg none of which is in existence any longer. The one pictured here has opened since we left. Valerie scooped ice-cream, sold dairy products and was a barista before being a barista was even cool. It is kind of funny to sell fancy coffee drinks when you never even taste them yourself but Valerie was a champ.

She worked in all three locations as the schedule would require and though her employers themselves were kind of turds sometimes. The job was pretty good while it lasted. The best product they sold were half gallons of milk that were in glass jars straight from the dairy like in the olden days. $1.30 for the half-gallon as I recal. It was really good stuff.

We are sad to learn that since we were there, the Winegars apparently sold the dairy operation with the actual cows and just do the ice-cream/coffee thing now.

Ellensburg Employer #5 – Day Labor/Cabinet Installer
Employee – Jeff



During the summers especially, it wasn’t uncommon for me to go to the local employment office's bullitin board and find any kind of day labor job that might be available. For example in the pictured condos, I worked on a mostly Hispanic crew of workers installing all the bathroom and kitchen cabinetry.

In retrospect I’m not sure this was all entirely legal and I’m not sure the crew I worked with was “documented” as I was paid in cash at the end of every day. I didn’t know any better at the time though and back then, any money was good money.

Ellensburg Emplyer #6 - Kentucky Fried Chicken
Employee - Valerie


Another fast food themed employer here. Valerie kept us in the chicken with this job working whatever shift was necessary day or night in this greasy paradise. Thankfully this job came with all the hot wings you could eat.

Ellensburg Employer #7 – The Daily Record
Employee – Jeff and Valerie



Despite the other jobs we did, we still had some time available in the afternoons so we decided to get a paper route. We were in charge of delivering The Daily Record to the businesses in the downtown part of Ellensburg. We carried papers in those old canvas paper sacks that you wore over your shoulders, split the papers up each day and took off in our own directions to get things delivered very quickly.

I liked this job as you got to see the same people along the way every day and we had the route down to a science. Eventually though, we realized that the bane of this like any other paper route is that the Daily Record really was daily.

Anytime we wanted to leave town, we would have to find a sub for the route and that pain started to be more than the route money was worth.

Ellensburg Employer #8 – The Laundromat
Employee – Jeff and Valerie



We also managed to find occasional fill-in work at the laundromat in the strip mall next to our apartments. Hey, as long as we had to go wash clothes anyhow, we’d might as well be paid to be sitting there.

We didn’t work here very often but the demanding duties included such things as making change for a dollar hanging “out of order” signs as necessary.

Ellensburg Employer #9 – Movie Counter/Snitch
Employee – Jeff and Valerie



I don’t even remember how we found this job anymore. It was probably posted at the student employment center on campus or something like that. The job was that we would have to buy tickets to a movie at either of the two theaters in town. We were given a list of the movie and showing that we were supposed to attend.

We would need to sit at the back of the theater and count the number of people attending the show. We would then call that number in to a phone number we were given and they would I guess compare that to what the theater was reporting to see if the studios were being paid a fair share of ticket revenues. It was something like that at least.


Getting paid to watch a movie you ask? Sounds fun until you’ve gone to The Client 37 times. I can still recite large portions of the beginning of that movie from memory. The theater owners must have thought we were zealous Grisham fans.

Ellensburg Employer #10 – Ellensburg School District
Employee – Jeff and Valerie




We loved working this job together. We were in charge of unlocking school buildings and setting up equipment for various weekend activities. This included weekend basketball tournaments, conferences and whatever else might be using the building.


At the end of the event, we would then be in charge of cleaning the buildings, putting away whatever was taken out and locking the place back up again. We often found ourselves along with this as ticket takers and scoreboard operators for AAU basketball tournaments and things like that.


The best perks of this job included the fact that we got to carry around the “original” brick of a cell phone while we worked and we had a key ring with like 100 keys on it that would open any school building, room, gate and closet in the entire district. We had a lot of fun doing this job together.

Ellensburg Employer #11 – Twin City Foods
Employee – Jeff and Valerie



This was our briefest employer while in Ellensburg and in either of our lives. We had careers lasting a grand total of one day here.


This is a huge food processor in town where every year during the corn harvest the local farmers deliver their crop to be processed for sale to distributors. Valerie and I were quite literally the only English speaking employees on the factory floor.


My job was to monitor a huge sluice of ears of corn that came out of a shucking machine and to locate and identify any ears of corn that had not been properly shucked. I grabbed those ears and threw them back onto the belt leading in to the shucking machine. The ears of corn were not moving on a conveyor but instead were shaken down the line. By the end of my fist day there, I could hardly move as I had been leaning on this big shaking machine all day and was convinced that I had bruised all my ribs.

Valerie on the other hand worked a bit further down the line sitting at this table where individual kernels of corn would move by ready to be frozen. She would sit at the table on a barstood and hold this little vacuum hose and suck out anything that was coming by in a sea of corn that was not a kernel. You know, pieces of the ear, the husk and stuff like that. Apparently this was a nausea educing job and well, she just really wasn’t cut out for it. By the end of the day, Valerie’s poor eyes were almost glued shut by all the cornstarch on her face.

The next morning, as we were getting ready to go to work, Valerie said, “I’m not going back there!”. I told her if she wasn’t going, neither was I and we didn’t… except to pick up our checks for one day's salary.

Ellensburg Employer #12 – Youth Conservation Corps
Employee – Jeff



I think I covered this one already elsewhere in the blog but for this job I caught a van every morning that took me from Ellensburg all the way up to the abandoned Snoqualmie train tunnel at the top of Snoqualmie Pass where I worked in pitch darkness and chilling cold doing back-breaking work shoveling gravel, mud and creosote for minimum wage.

The object was to make the tunnel usable and safe for recreational bikers and hikers. As if, the stifling darkness wasn’t enough, they had us work with inmates from the women’s penitentiary in Purdy in the darkness all day too. Never have I felt more like a prisoner in a job than when I was working with actual prisoners.

I did this for an entire summer and came home cold, wet and filthy each and every day. This was by far the worst job I have ever done and hopefully (knock on wood) will ever do.

Ellensburg Employer #13 – The Observer
Employee – Jeff and Valerie



I LOVED this job. Valerie and I each did stints as the Production Manager for the weekly college newspaper, The Observer.

This was actually a paid position where we were in charge of the layout/design of the paper and created all of the advertising that appeared in the newspaper as well. We spent A LOT of time at the newspaper offices as this was a very busy daily job.

We spent so much time here in fact that we moved Sarah’s baby swing right into the newspaper offices there and she was there with us. She was kind of a newspaper mascot as everyone working there knew her and helped us with her. We stayed with each issue of the paper’s creation and helped proofread the final copy and brought the final templates to the printer to be printed even. I’m guessing this is probably all done electronically now.

We liked the paper so much that we even picked up a second job working there as deliverers, bringing the huge bundles of papers all over campus delivering them to the various buildings for distribution. We had one of those big college vans with Sarah’s car seat in the back as we drove everywhere dropping the papers off. We had our newspaper jobs right up until the time we left Ellensburg permanently.

This place was a blast. We were paid well for a college town and we got to work with and meet all kinds of fun people.

Ellensburg Employer #14 – Payless Drug Store (Now Rite-Aid)
Employee – Jeff



I was working at this job for quite some time too. I did everything there was to do in a drug store. I cashiered, I worked the photo counter and one night every week, I stocked shelves when the truckload of freight came in.

In fact on the night Sarah was born in 1995, Valerie had been in labor for quite some time and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I left her in the hospital with her mother to go try to get at least a few hours of work in. While I was there, they called me and had me rush back to the hospital. I arrived just before she was born.

I enjoyed working at payless but eventually the late nights doing freight turned into ALL night doing freight and I was working from like 10 PM until 8 the next morning. That was just too much before going to classes and I had to let that job go.

Ellensburg Employer #15 – Store Sample Hander-Outer
Employee – Jeff and Valerie



I’m not even sure what this job is called. We did it infrequently but occasionally Valerie and I would set up one of those tables you see in a supermarket and hand out free samples.

Most memorably we spent a day in the Ellensburg Albertson’s trying to get people to enjoy the rich taste of Clamato which is mixture of tomato and clam juice. Blech! Nobody would try our samples let alone buy the stuff. I couldn’t blame them as we didn’t even want to taste it.

Another time I walked around in a giant Mr. Peanut costume with a basket of peanuts handing out the samples while Valerie held my arm since I couldn’t see assuring that my giant shell wouldn’t knock product off of the shelves. I enjoyed the anonymity of that job.

I think that is about it for Ellensburg although I may remember more later. I know we did have some jobs at that time that we did separately over winter break on the west side of the state. Valerie once helped deliver packages for UPS and I once spent days stripping wires that were used to mount lights to tractor trailers or some crud like that. That job kinda sucked too.

All this was done so we could live happily in our grand apartment which was a dump then and still sits now frozen in time just how we left it 12 long years ago...


These were good times! I'm very glad they’re done.