Sporting memories: Getting a job in a college football stadium as a kid

This was a long time ago and the process itself is probably illegal because things have changed a lot since the 80's. My family life was a good one and I had/have fantastic and caring parents that I am truly grateful for. We were encouraged from a young age to be self-sufficient and as far back as I have memories I recall always having a job. We were given very little for doing nothing when we were kids despite the relative affluence of my family. My father and mother wanted us to learn at a young age that nothing is free in life and that if you want things, you have to work for them.

I had a paper route shortly after I had the ability to walk and some of my earliest memories are of waking up extremely early on freezing Sunday mornings and delivering the heaviest paper of the week before the sun even came up. This was a lot of work for a little kid and I don't think the profession is even a thing anymore because nobody actually buys newspapers anymore.

One day my dad somehow managed to get a sweet gig for me and my older sister working concessions at the local college football stadium during home games.

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The University of Nebraska football stadium is enormous, especially when you consider the fact that Lincoln, Nebraska is not a very heavily populated city. I don't know how many people live there but there are stories about how when Nebraska has a home game, there are more people in the stadium than there are people that live in all but two cities in the entire state.

This was kind of a daunting task for me and my sister because while I do not remember exactly how old I was, we were probably somewhere around 10 and 12 years old. We were lead by staff to the employee room where we were given very basic instruction on what we were to do. Basically, they gave us a little bit of change to give to customers and then sent us out the door. For me, the box of boxes of popcorn was about as big as I was. Thankfully popcorn is not very heavy. My sister sold peanuts and her load was quite a lot smaller than my own.

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They were something like this and if memory serves me right we charged 50 cents per box. It was left entirely up to me which part of the stadium I was going to go to but even at 10 years old I realized that it would be wise to not be in the same section as someone else who was also selling popcorn. I would sometimes travel with my sister and sometimes go off on my own. People who wanted popcorn would raise up their hands and I would pass the box down the aisle and the people watching the game in the same row would pass the money back to me. A lot of the time, they would just let me keep the change and I think this was because they thought it was cute that someone as young as me would be selling concessions at a football stadium.

The way it worked was once I sold all of the boxes of popcorn that was in my stash, I would return to one of the many concession areas to "reload." I wasn't allowed to change what I was selling, so it was just popcorn all the time. I do not recall whether or not they would take the money off of me at each "reload" but they basically just let little kids run around a stadium with 80,000 mostly adults with a bunch of money in a hip pack of sorts. Nebraska was a very safe place at the time in history, so I never felt like anyone was ever going to rob me or anything like that.

I don't know how it happened, but one game I met up with a guy who sold beer and he gave me an insider tip that going to the cheap seats in the upper deck is where you are going to sell the fastest because those folks are much further away from the concession stands than the other people in the crowd. Also, he told me that if we worked as a team, I would probably sell more popcorn because people might think we are related to one another and that I was his kid. I have no idea who this kind man was and don't even remember what he looked like but he was definitely right.

There is a staff elevator that customers are not allowed to use and this got us up to the top decks pretty fast. I was selling popcorn a lot faster than I did in the lower decks, just like the man suggested.

He also let me in on another tip and that was for us to join forces with others at certain positions at halftime. We had Coke, peanuts, popcorn, and beer all arranged just across from the concession stands at halftime. The lines for the "real" concessions were very long during this time of the game so sure enough, a lot of the customers opted to come and buy from us rather than wait in the long lines.

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_{this is not the stadium in question, but you get the idea}

We would always sell out at halftime and then headed back to the room to reload on gear once again and do the whole thing over and over again. It never even occurred to me to watch the games while I was there because even though I was a Cornhusker fan, I liked making money a lot more than I liked getting essentially a free ticket to a game.

We were given 10% of the overall take on all the popcorn, peanuts, or whatever we were selling at the games. If you made mistakes in charging customers they didn't take it easy on you just because you were a kid. They kept records on exactly how much popcorn they had given me and at the end, I was expected to pay up. I don't think I ever made any mistakes though and this was another life lesson that my parents ended up teaching me. You have to look out for your own finances and this is an important lesson even for a 10 year old.

At the end of each game I would normally have made something like 50-60 dollars and this was an unbelievable amount of money for a 10 year old in the 80's. According to an inflation calculator this is nearly $170 in today's money. So needless to say, I was a very happy boy at the end of each game.

To nail home the importance of saving money, my father would always take 50% of the money that we made and put it into a bank account for us that we would not have access to until we graduated high school. This was true with all of the part-time jobs I had when I was a kid and while I resented him for it at the time, I had thousands of dollars in that bank account by the time I graduated high school. That was when I realized that like with most things, my father was correct. Had he left me to my own devices I likely would have spent all the money on candy and video games and other things that have no lasting value.

This practice of having little kids working concessions at stadiums is likely illegal now because it seems like almost everything is illegal now and that is just a shame. I learned a lot from those days and learning to make my own money was a big lesson in life. To this day it is one of the favorite jobs I ever had and I looked forward to the home games every time they happened!