Some Early Jobs

My first paying job, one of the hardest with the lowest pay for the hours I worked, was delivering the morning newspaper. I worked three to four hours every morning, then on Thursday and Friday afternoons I worked 4 to 5 hours each day collecting payments. On Saturday morning I retraced my route another 4 hours to collect from customers who were not at home on my earlier visits. All this work earned me about $7 a week, a pitifully small amount of money. But when you’re 13 and 14 years old, your choice of jobs is limited. I delivered the morning paper for two years.

The only job I was fired from was drugstore delivery driver. I was 16. To this day I remember the delivery car, a rear-wheel drive Renault Dauphine with a badly worn clutch. With my foot off the gas pedal I could let out the clutch quickly without stalling the engine – that’s how much the clutch slipped. One dark night I was driving on a narrow country road when I realized I needed to be going in the opposite direction. While attempting to turn the car around I got a rear wheel off the pavement and there wasn’t enough clutch left to pull the car back onto the road. I left the car in gear with the engine running and got out to look at the rear wheels. I figured one wheel would be spinning and maybe I could do something to increase the traction. But, although the car was in gear and running, neither rear wheel was turning. The clutch had finally given out. Because I was driving the Renault when the clutch failed, it was deemed to be my fault, so I was let go.

The shortest job I’ve ever had was selling encyclopedias door to door when I was 17. (This was back when a set of encyclopedias consisted of twenty slick, beautifully made books.) I was terrible at it. After a week I quit and immediately started my second hardest job.

My second hardest job was as a “yard man” at a chemical factory. It was a summer job (I was still 17), and I got all the crappy tasks. I wasn’t union so any task too hard or too dirty or that required lifting something too heavy for the union employees became my job. Tasks such as: loading steel drums onto (and off) a flatbed truck, transferring drums from truck to warehouse and vice versa, stacking drums in the warehouse – all done “by hand”, no forklift or machinery involved – mowing acres of grass with a regular lawn mower (not a riding mower), cutting tall weeds along a railroad track with a swing blade. All the work was done under a hot summer sun or in a hot warehouse or railroad car. Did I mention scrubbing chemical tankers inside and out?

My next summer job was as technician at a company called Fairchild-Hiller in Bladensburg, Maryland. I lived in College Park, Maryland, in a fraternity house without electricity. Every day I showered in cold water, and when the sun went down it was literally “lights out.”

Later that summer, I was transferred to a plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I lived in a boarding house and rented a room on the top floor. The house had no air conditioning and the top floor baked under a metal roof during the day; at night the room was sweltering hot. I tried to sleep by lying on top of the sheet wearing only shorts, but I would just lie there awake and perspire. I had a roommate: another boarder. Every room had two boarders. All the rooms on the floor had access to a single bathroom on the floor. The meals were truly outstanding: southern farm-fresh country cooking prepared by the elderly woman who owned the house and her helper. She not only fed the boarders, she sold meal tickets and anyone could eat there. At dinner I often found myself seated with strangers who didn’t live at the house but who ate there. There were usually two or three kinds of meat to choose from, such as fried chicken and country ham, and several vegetables, and then several desserts to choose from. To participate in all this bounty, you only had to purchase a meal ticket for 95 cents. Because I rented a room there, my three meals a day were included in the $15 per week I paid for room and board. Yeah, it was a long time ago, but even then it was a bargain!

My next summer job was at a company in Charlottesville, Virginia, called Automated Specialties. I was an e-tech (electronics technician). I lived 12 miles away in a cottage at a small summer resort at Lake Albemarle. It was in horse country and there were miles of meadows, pastureland, and white fences. There was just one thing that made that summer job memorable. At the lake resort there was a pretty female lifeguard about a year younger than I. Her name was Dolores. With short blonde hair, blue eyes, a pretty face, and a swimmer’s body, she was a knockout. We dated that summer. I don’t have a photo of her – all I have is a sketch I drew one day in that long-ago summer. I was no artist and it’s fair to say she was a lot prettier than a sketch can show.