WASHINGTON — All these years later, Mike Huckabee still avoids touching the glass when he opens a door. He remembers a thankless task at J.C. Penney’s as a teenager, scrubbing away fingerprints only to have customers smudge the glass all over again.
Mitt Romney worked in a sewage pipe on an Idaho ranch when the effluent was still flowing. In Alaska as a post-grad, Hillary Rodham Clinton spooned the guts out of fish.
Let it not be said of the presidential candidates that they’ve never done an honest day’s work. The Associated Press asked them to talk about their worst jobs:
“Backbreaking work,” Democrat Bill Richardson said of his summer of laying sod on Cape Cod. A banker’s son and Tufts University sophomore, he worked for a meager wage to cover room and board while pitching in the Cape Cod Baseball League in 1967.
Republican Fred Thompson, son of a used-car salesman, said, “I’ve worked in a factory, I was a bouncer at my uncle’s drag strip, I worked at the post office, I sold children’s shoes, I sold men’s clothing, I was a night clerk at a motel.
“I can’t think of a job that I had that I wasn’t thankful for at the time.”
Romney never went begging for dollars — his dad was head of American Motors and governor of Michigan. But the Republican presidential candidate got up close and personal with sewage while spending time at his uncle’s spread, doing chores at age 15.
He said he spent a week on his assigned task of cutting the sewage pipe.
Middle-class in her youth, Hillary Clinton spent the summer of 1969 working her way across Alaska. She washed dishes in Mount McKinley National Park, the better of two brief menial jobs that financed her travels.
“My worst job was sliming fish in a fish cannery in Valdez,” she said without hesitation.
In Hope, Ark., another presidential aspirant worked two jobs at age 14. Huckabee remembers his gig at a radio station with fondness; his department store stint, not so much.
“When I worked for J.C. Penney, it was a great job and it was a great company but they worked me hard,” Huckabee said. “Just as I’d get all the fingerprints wiped off the door, somebody would come and they’d put their hands all over the glass.
“To this day, I’m still very sensitive about never touching the glass.”
Democrat John Edwards had awful cleaning duties earlier at the textile mill where he worked summers and part time during school.
“I cleaned out overhead in the weave room, which is where all the (stuff) goes,” he said. “And I’d be up there climbing around, knocking the stuff down. And it would go down on the looms. The weavers would be, uh, not happy with me for that.”
Republican John McCain, son of an admiral, had post-grad employment unlike most — war. The Navy pilot landed in a vicious Hanoi prison and has no complaints about other circumstances of his youth: “I’ve never really had a bad job.”
Democrat Barack Obama cleared a construction site for a summer on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while attending Columbia University.
But he says his worst job was scooping ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins because he ate too much of it.
Republican Rudy Giuliani weighed the priesthood and medicine before pursuing law.
Democrat Chris Dodd did construction work for the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. He counts his job selling clothes in a haberdashery as his worst job.
“It was boring,” he said.
