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In this summer series, the National Post reporters and photographers bring us tales of that annual Canadian rite of passage for young people taking their first dip in the labour pool: The Summer Job.

In a story often passed around Liberal party circles, a 14-year-old Paul Martin was driving with his father, a minister in Louis St. Laurent’s cabinet, when, out the window, he spotted a crew of farm workers picking tobacco in the hot sun. “Thank God I don’t have to do that,” the boy said.

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Alarmed, Martin Sr. called around, and within 24 hours his son was on a relative’s farm, snipping tobacco leaves. “It was pretty clear to me that I was going to work every summer from them on, and I’d better pick my own job,” Mr. Martin said.

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Mr. Martin fished for bass and pickerel on Lake Erie, hauled crates at a cola bottling plant, checked gauges in the Alberta oil patch and worked as a cadet officer on a bauxite freighter. He helped construct an RCAF radar station outside Winisk, Ont., and later hitchhiked to Hay River to get a job on a Mackenzie River tugboat. “I never thought of it as physical toil … I loved boats, I loved the North and I really enjoyed those jobs,” he said.