I went to work for my dad in the summer of 1987, between my sophomore and junior year in high school. Before then, the lumberyard was just a playground. I would run upstairs in the big 1930s barn to use it as a fort. I would watch the guys run plywood through the table saw, oak timbers through the planer.

When I was not yet 16 and in need of some real-life work ethics, my dad showed me the brick alley between the lumberyard office and the gas station next door. The bricks were red, but the alley was green. Weeds.

Sure, we could have blasted the area with some Roundup, but that takes the fun out of it.

I grabbed some cloth gloves and a machete and went to work cutting down the forest. Some of them were thick with prickers. It was hard, sweaty work for a tall, skinny teen (meaning I had no muscles). The fingers of the gloves were worn through by the end of the third day.

I don't have a love affair with weeds. Ragweed has given me hay fever since I was 13.

The other odd jobs were much easier that summer. I rode in the delivery truck. I filled bins with two-by-fours. I painted and swept floors.

Grandpa sold the yard four years ago. The business writer in me knows it was because margins got thinner, because Wal-Mart was taking away all the people hunting for bargains on power tools. Big-box lumber stores ate away the casual weekend warrior who could get the plywood and two-by-fours a little cheaper than at the local lumberyard.

When all that was left were building contractors, it was better off selling the yard to another small-town yard that was still growing despite having only builders, roofers and painters left.

If I had stayed with the family business and hadn't gone into journalism, I don't know what I'd be doing today.

The smell of a wood shop still takes me back to that place, though.

I used the money that I earned that summer to buy an ugly, square gray Panasonic boom box with a cassette player. It was $140 at Radio Shack.

My parents rewarded my summer of hard work by giving me $140 for my birthday, essentially making the boom box my present.

I replaced it a few years later with one of those newfangled CD players. The first CD that I purchase to try it out was Toto's greatest hits: I blessed the rains down in Africa ...

INC. LIST: The Web site for Inc. magazine has come out with its list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies. South Carolina's highly charged entrepreneurs are mostly in the Greenville and Charleston zones. Most of the entrants in Georgia are in the sea that is the Atlanta, Norcross and Alpharetta metro area.

There were two companies in Augusta that made the annual list:

- ESi Acquisition, at 2,534, grew from $4.1 million in revenue in 2004 to $10 million in 2007. The company on Broad Street makes software so that emergency managers can communicate during a disaster.

- MAU, at 3,937, is on the list because it had $64 million in revenue in 2004, and by 2007, it had $112 million. The staffing firm on Greene Street is making a name for itself by providing employees for BMW in Greenville, S.C.

PAINTED WINDOWS: Mayor Deke Copenhaver has been making the rounds to development organizations with an update to the proposed Reynolds Street baseball stadium. He's after letters of support from these organizations, such as the Development Authority of Richmond County, to provide to the governor in order to prove there is community support for a new stadium so that the governor will feel motivated to wheel and deal with the city about the state-owned land where the new GreenJackets home might go.

That community support might be more visible in coming weeks as downtown merchants paint their storefront windows to proclaim their desire for a stadium, especially the restaurants which could have streams of hungry people eating with them before games.

I've also heard tales of a Facebook page for the stadium that already has 80-plus members.

MARKETING: The Downtown Development Authority has 500 copies of its new downtown marketing materials to hand out. Included is a snazzy video that people will eventually be able to see on its Web site. I loved the Savage Garden background music.

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.