In the summer of 1976, the U.S. Bicentennial was omnipresent, especially if you lived in or near Philadelphia. And if you were in high school in or near Philadelphia, it was inescapable.

To mark the 200th anniversary of our nation’s founding, the administration of Plymouth–Whitemarsh High School, whose mascot was the Colonial (a Revolutionary War soldier wearing a tricorn hat), renamed the driveway leading from the town’s main drag into the school “Bicentennial Lane.” That year, Bicentennial-themed posters were hung in the hallways, students attended Bicentennial-themed assemblies, and teachers assigned essays on Bicentennial-related topics in all our classes—including biology, in which we wrote papers on colonial-era scientists.

Along with another eager student, I was selected to declaim over the school’s loudspeaker, once a week, a 60-second snippet of American history called “Looking Back,” usually centered on some famous personage of 18th-century Philadelphia, to the annoyance of every kid and probably most teachers. The last thing that a half-asleep high school student wants to hear about at 7 a.m. is the story of Benjamin Rush, father of American psychiatry.

One morning, our class was dragooned into attending a Bicentennial assembly during which a local acting troupe offered up supposedly hilarious skits on American history and, at one point, selected unwilling students to participate onstage. Normally we’d be grateful for even the flimsiest excuse to miss a class, but after months of force-fed Bicentennial hoopla, we had had our fill. At one point during the skits, which were eliciting little enthusiasm, a frustrated actor called out to the crowd of bored students, “Hey! Would you rather be here or in class?”

“In CLASS!” yelled one brave kid. Thunderous applause rewarded his honesty.

Overall, it was hard not to get tired of, blasé about, or even annoyed by the Bicentennial. It so thoroughly wormed its way into my consciousness that the covers of my notebooks that year are covered with doodles of the official Bicentennial logo: a five-pointed star surrounded by a curvy red-white-and-blue ribbon.

But even the most jaded observers took notice when our local newspaper, Today’s Post, announced that the Bicentennial Wagon Train would be passing through my hometown, Plymouth Meeting, a Philadelphia suburb settled by the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly called Quakers, during the 17th century.

For our small town, the Bicentennial Wagon Train was a big deal. It would be a cavalcade of horse-drawn covered wagons originating in California, Washington, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, and other states where the wagon trains of old had ended their pioneering journeys.

In the summer of ’76 the Conestoga wagons would make a reverse trip to Pennsylvania, in a Bicentennial Pilgrimage. Its destination was nearby Valley Forge, and they would arrive on July 4.

I couldn’t believe my luck. They would drive (or whatever you call it when something is pulled by a team of horses) right up Ridge Pike, one of the main thoroughfares in town. It was like a celebrity coming to town, something that didn’t happen for real until a few months later when President Gerald Ford, campaigning for election, stopped by the Plymouth Meeting Mall. I was only a few feet away from him in a crowded atrium, just missing the chance to shake the Presidential Hand. But a friend reported that President Ford’s hand all but engulfed his own when he shook it. “That’s why he was such a good football player,” observed my dad, ever the sports fan.

I was also excited to see a real covered wagon: The only ones I had seen outside the movies were in Conestoga, a nearby suburb where the eponymous vehicles were built. A weathered replica was parked in front of the Conestoga Mill Restaurant & Bar, a favorite watering hole for some of my older cousins.

A celebratory brochure pasted in my scrapbook reads, “As an appropriate tribute to the Nation’s 200th anniversary, we will roll the wagons once more. Once more we’ll take to the wagon trails. But this time we’ll head Eastward. Back to the Cradle of Liberty. A pilgrimage to the birthplace of the nation.” (Note the italics, as if this were difficult to comprehend.)

More important for me, the wagon train would pass in front of the Ice Cream Inn, where I was working in the summer of ’76 as a 15-year-old busboy and dishwasher.

My big mistake

One day in July at the Ice Cream Inn was especially busy. I had worked every night that week and the weekend before. Late in the afternoon, I raced back and forth between the back room, where we washed the dishes, and the dining room, where we bussed the tables.

I couldn’t figure out why it was so crowded: Lunch was over, there were no high school sporting events since school was out for the summer, and there didn’t seem to be any groups celebrating some kid’s birthday, the most common reason for a large party.

Around 4 p.m., I emerged from the back room to discover a dining room utterly emptied of customers. Where did they go?

It seemed impossible for everyone to leave together, because they weren’t all in one party but several smaller ones that arrived at different times. But what did I know?

I laboriously cleared the six or seven tables. Oddly, the meals were half eaten, some not even touched. At the time my summer reading ran to stories of mysterious creatures like Bigfoot and aliens, so I briefly wondered whether all the customers had been sucked up into a spacecraft that had landed atop the Ice Cream Inn, piloted by aliens who were perhaps initially interested in sampling some rum raisin ice cream.

If I left dishes on the empty tables, George, the assistant manager, would notice, so rather than ask questions about the sudden disappearance of all our patrons, I hurried up and bussed. I filled a bussing tray with plates, glasses, and ice cream containers from three tables and was barely able to lug it to the back room. I placed it into the sink and started rinsing, shoved all the dishes into the dishwasher, and closed the door with a satisfying thunk. I returned to the still-empty dining room and bussed another few tables and took that second tray into the back room.

I was proud of bussing all those tables so quickly. Surely I would win plaudits from the management and, more important, the older kids.

Over the rushing noise of the dishwasher, I heard a commotion in the dining room.

“HEY!” said several voices at once. “Heyyyyy!”

Then, “Where’s our food?!”

I knew instantly that I had made a mistake. But what?

Before that day, whenever I read a novel that described a character “bursting” into a room, I found it faintly ridiculous. But George burst into the back room, throwing open the swinging wooden doors so hard that they slammed against the wall. I turned around so quickly that I nearly sprayed him with the big hose and nozzle we used to rinse off the dishes, which was still tightly gripped in my wet hand.

“Jimmy, what did you do?” he said.

“Nothing!” I said, my voice rising an octave, which mortified me. “I bussed the tables!”

This was the first of many times when I thought I had done a good deed, only to find I had screwed up. It’s always a shock to go from thinking, Didn’t I do a great job? to What did I do wrong? In a few seconds.

An elderly man barreled his way into the room, shouting, “Where’s my FOOD?”

“Uh,” I said, eloquently, as I stared into the sink, contemplating the half-eaten hamburgers and melting ice cream sundaes still in my bussing tray. I still didn’t know what I had done wrong, but it seemed to have something to do with taking his food, and everyone else’s, prematurely. But no one had been in the restaurant. Where had they gone? And why had they returned?

Speechless, I tried to puzzle out what I had done wrong after trying so hard to do right.

“They were watching the Wagon Train!” said the assistant manager.

Despite the endless coverage in the local papers, I had forgotten that today was Bicentennial Wagon Train Day! Upon seeing the long-awaited caravan through the half-curtained windows, every one of the customers had leapt from their tables, mid-meal, and bolted outside to stand under the eaves of the Ice Cream Inn and watch the Conestoga wagons and people in faux-Western garb making their stately way down Ridge Pike.

“Wow!” I said, momentarily forgetting the trouble I was in.

“The Bicentennial Wagon Train is here?”

“Where’s my goddamned FOOD?” shouted the customer.

At a loss, I reached into the tray in the sink and pulled out what I imagined was his sundae. Out it came. And I remember this as clearly as anything from that summer: sticking out of a modest scoop of our famous homemade vanilla ice cream, still in its frosty little silver cup, where a cherry might be, was a wet cigarette butt.

“Is this it?” I said as I held it up. I knew it seemed ridiculous, and borderline offensive, but I didn’t know what else to say or do. Heat raced to my cheeks as I flushed in shame.

“That’s not funny!” said the customer. “You idiot!”

“I was just bussing the tables! Everyone was gone! How was I supposed to know?”

This would be a pattern for many years. Rather than admitting a mistake, my first instinct was to defend myself. Of course, no one told me where everyone had gone. (It was early in the day so not many other employees were around, save the cooks, who probably didn’t notice what was going on at the tables.) Still, the more mature route simply would have been to say, “I’m sorry.”

But at age 15, I was unable to do that. It took a few years to realize that when you make a mistake (even one that you don’t think warrants the treatment you’re getting), you should probably just apologize. “I’m sorry” goes a long way. By the same token, the customer was being a jerk.

“We’ll refund it of course,” said George. “And make you a new meal right away.”

The customer approached me, red-faced, as I stood over the sink. “It better come outta his paycheck,” said the customer, jamming his meaty finger into my stained smock.

George nodded noncommittally. The customer smiled what I can only call an evil grin. He seemed to enjoy my being humiliated.

I thought, Why is he being so mean?

“Idiot!” he shouted, as he banged open the swinging doors and left the room.

I thought: When I grow up, I will never treat anyone like this.

Lessons Learned

Today I couldn’t imagine berating a 15-year-old dishwasher, or frankly a 15-year-old anyone or any sort of laborer. In an instant, I learned not to mistreat someone who has less power.

On the verge of tears, I felt that this was undue punishment for doing my job. But I was too upset to say anything articulate. I wanted to explain but was deathly afraid I’d cry, about the worst fate for a boy in those days. “Baby!” was the epithet used for boys who cried, or, even worse, “sissy” or “f—-t” or worst of all, “fairy.”

It was the first time I felt the sting of anger over being mistreated at work. It wouldn’t be the last. What I remember most was a feeling of powerlessness. At that age, it was impossible for me to respond. First, the two men scolding me were older, and I had been brought up to respect adults. I also understood that I had no real power. Working papers alone do not make a confident adult. Second, I was mortified that I had made a mistake and that others would hear about it.

After the customer left the back room, George, sympathetic, reassured me that I would not have to pay for it. (That would have taken a few weeks.) Fortunately, the Bicentennial Wagon Train was sufficiently long (there were a lot of wagons) that after my humiliation, I was still able to watch the Conestoga wagons roll by, with the rest of the staff. Men wearing cowboy hats and jeans and women in sunbonnets and gingham dresses waved cheerfully at us as the horses pulled their wagons down Ridge Pike.

As I stood there, one busboy nudged me and said, good-naturedly, “Man, did you really just f—k up like I heard you did?”

At midnight, after mopping the restaurant, I told my dad in the car what had happened. He sympathized and said something that he repeated often: “Work isn’t supposed to be fun. Why do you think they call it work? If it were fun, they’d call it play.” Decades later, a whiskey manufacturer sponsored a nationwide contest inviting readers to send in life lessons from their fathers. My sister submitted that quote and it made it into the full-page ad, which ran in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She framed the ad and gave it to him for his birthday. It hung in our recreation room until he died 25 years later.

This article is excerpted from Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Corporate Tool and Priest (HarperOne Books).