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What kinds of jobs did you have growing up?
My first job was a "bagger" at a grocery store. I earned $1.71/hour which was more than minimum wage at the time. I also worked at a pet store selling fish, and birds, etc. I got a 7.5% commission on all sales there. That was a profitable job. Another job I had was when I worked for a realtor. Lots of times, families would move out and leave all their crap in the house rather than dispose of it, properly (and responsibly). I'd have to load all their junk and haul it to the dump. Then I'd set about patching walls, and painting, etc. I learned a great deal at that job. I also worked at a miniature golf course where they had trampolines built into pits in the ground. When there were no customers there, and I had my work caught up (cleaning and stocking the vending machines) I was permitted to use the tramps. I got pretty good at those. What about you?
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Worked in a store that sold Ties. Then a lumberyard. Liked working in the lumber yard,learned alot.
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I guess my first job was mowing lawns, and for awhile I had a paper route too. When I was 15 I had my own business installing CB radios for the various electronics retailers in town. The last job I had before I joined the Navy was working in a theater.
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I grew up on in the 50's on 50 acres........
I was the oldest of nine, 7 brothers, one sister.
I grew up working for the Family, working in the garden, hoeing tobacco. We had an care and a half of base. I grew up milking cows. We shipped grade B milk to Red 73. 1st job I got "payed for" was doing the neighbors milking when ever they needed help. A dollar an hour & I was tickled. Later I made money helping house hay or cutting an housing tobacco, for neighbors. That was good money for a teenager. |
My dad was in construction so when I was around 10-12 i would do demo clean-up, cut grass, and professional gopher in the summer. Also during the school year i would help strip tobacco after school in the winter.
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I baby sat & ironed for people, often both at the same time. Later worked at an answering service(way before cell phones of course), tended bar, delivered phone books, sold toilet bowl cleaners door to door, sold encyclopedias, waited tables, etc.
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I mowed and cleaned yards for people and hauled hay for .02 per bale. I shoveled corn onto an elevator for a farmer, that paid pretty good. I also worked at a hardware store until I went to college.
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Started milking cows by hand at the age of 8, parents hired us kids out to put up hay, and we picked up walnuts---finally got to keep the walnut money. Our high school paid us 25 cents an hour to do office work: type, file, answer the phone, etc. My first "real" job was typing at the local newspaper office: 75 cents an hour. Loved that job because they were so very nice to me. Of course, babysitting.
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I grew up on a ranch, no siblings, so I ended up being the "hired hand" doing whatever needed doing. I fed and watered chickens, gathered eggs, when I was six ... by 10 I was doing a lot of the riding/cattle work and by 12, doing some work in the fields. By the time I was a teenager I was doing 90% of the riding, everything that one rider could do, helping brand and out in hayfield.
I also helped in the house and garden when I was needed as well ... just a little of everything. I did a little babysitting during the winter months when we were living in an apartment in town so I could go to high school and mother taught, but not much because we tried to go home on the weekends unless the weather was too bad. They also had a class in high school you could take if you were taking secretarial courses ... typing, etc. ... and they had you work in the school office at various things, answering the telephone, writing letters, filing paperwork. That was the closest to an "outside job" as I had until I was out of high school. |
Before I could handle a lawn mower I picked up recyclables and sold them. I delivered papers and sold garden seed. I was a caddy on weekends and worked summers in a garage cleaning car parts then got a break and bagged groceries and finally moved into produce. Did homework for a fee for kids with money.
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Lawn mowing
Picking pickles (worst job I ever had!) Dish washing and busboy Janitor after school (sweep floors, empty trash etc - "best" job I ever had!) Carpet cleaning Then off to the Marines at the ripe old age of 18.... Turns out several of my previous jobs prepared me well for some of the lower parts of the Marine experience! Who'd a thunk it? |
My first "paid" job was picking potato bugs off the hundreds of potato plants that my dad grew. I was paid $.01 per bug which I collected in jar and counted as I picked. I fed them to the chickens after. It taught me how to keep count in the midst of distractions.
My next paid job was babysitting. When I was 16 my dad hired me to work in the woodworking shop doing clean up, planing, cutting small pieces on the band saw and sanding. I have the scars to prove it. :D Then I got a job at Burger King where I was shortly promoted to assistant manager and being able to count in the midst of distractions came in very handy because someone always tried to mess me up. Actually, I discovered I could accurately count the tills and hold 2 conversations at once. ETA I also had a paper route that I inherited from my older brother. (Thanks for reminding me agmantoo :) ) Just remembered that I also picked strawberries for a number of years and tomatoes for a year. Made some good money for my age for that. |
Bartender......
.....at an A&W Root Beer stand (8th grade, age 14) |
I grew up on a 121 acre farm. We grew tobacco, corn and soybeans. We had 50+ Holstein and Jersey dairy, and raised pigs for butchering and sale. We had an orchard and large garden. Dad had a big shop where he did welding and farm machinery repair on the farm. Some years, he'd work during the week in Louisville at the Ford plant and live there except for weekends. In 1962 mom hired on at the sewing factory in Lebanon which was 40 miles one way from the farm. She drove it daily and never missed a day of work. There was me, the oldest, and my younger brother and sister to help keep the farm going. We worked before and after school and during school breaks in all areas of the farm until we graduated from high school. We each went to college on government loans and work study programs. We each became teachers in improverished areas to pay back our loans.
My senior year of high school, I got a weekend job at Kings Department Store in Lebanon selling and altering men's clothing. I used the money for college. In the summer I graduated I got a job at the sewing factory and rode to work with mom everyday. I did all the odd jobs from warehousing and packing to serging and setting sleeves. I used this money for college and worked every summer during college at the sewing factory. During my college work study program, I was an office tech each of the four years with the Physical Education Department. Back then that involved running copies, doing typing, answering phones and taking messages. In the summer after graduating college I hired on at Standard Products in Lexington as a clip machine operator. I did this until I found a teaching job here in my home county and moved back to Lebanon. I taught primary grades until 1981 and then I got a job with Head Start as a combination primary teacher/Head Start teacher and did that until 1992. Then I became a Head Start Resource and Training Specialist and did adult training and worked at the State level with collaboration projects that involved Head Start. During some of my years teaching, I'd still work at a local sewing factory during summer breaks to earn extra money. I also worked a summer at the local Kroger store as a relief person for employees taking summer vacations. I mostly worked in the meat department, but also trained and worked as a cashier. |
I lived in the boonies, so about the only work available was agricultural based.
Summers, we went to the hayfields, (we called it hay camp), in the sandhills. I spent a few years as a scatter raker, but the last couple, I got to run a sweep which was dirty work but a lot more fun. (If you don't know what a scatter raker or sweep is, then you missed out. :D) I also took a few turns at straight raking and mowing but running the stacker was for the grown ups. We worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week putting up thousands of acres of hay. The most I ever made doing that was $300 a month and found. My brother and I also raised potatoes, usually about an acre. That acre of potatoes would generally buy our clothes and school supplies for the following school year and some left over for fun stuff. Of course we always helped with brandings if we weren't at hay camp, and we scooped feed bunks in the winter and joined local hay crews when we were finished in the hills. One year in high school I worked in a factory packing big cables in crates. |
I picked a whole lot of cotton. When we moved, I pulled a whole lot of tobacco. When I turned 16, I went to work in the cotton mill. It was a piece of cake compared to working in the tobacco, or cotton field. I finished high school working second shift in the cotton mill.
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Walked beans for my grandpa (great money). Got my worker's permit at 14 and was a waitress at Steak n Shake. Waitressed at an old fashioned diner too (that beauty was actually torn down). There was a guy who always tipped $1. We would fight over who got to wait on him. Been a nurse since 1974 and a nurse anesthetist since '96.
I'm pretty intolerant of lazy. I have a 19 y/o nephew who told me once that he'd "never flip burgers". I can't stand it and if I were his mom, I'd never give him a cent! |
Dad farmed over 1500 acres of land in total, cotton, grain sorghum, wheat, hay, about half of that land was in pasture, so working beef cattle was a big part of the job as well. I started putting in full days the summer I was 10, and did that after school, on weekends and summers until I started teaching. Still came up on weekends and vacations to help him as needed. I enjoyed working the stock the most, hated hoeing the cotton the most. Well, maybe i hated hauling baled grain sorghum during poor hay years more than hoeing. Those bales continued to dry after baling and had a tendancy to fall apart just as you got them over your head and would shower you with chaff that drove you half crazy with itching.
Ed |
My first job was at A&W. Hey cabin fever I was making .65 cents per hour plus tips..what were you making
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...............Selling Southern Maid donuts out of a large basket hung around my neck.......our boss would drop us off about 4 blocks apart and we'd go door to door ringing bells.....like some fresh donuts mam ?
...............Sacking groceries........ ...............mowing lawns......... ...............Driving a delivery vehicle delivering broasted Chicken , we had an old dirt road on the edge of town and we'd have races going around in circles ....... , fordy:eek: |
hoed pumpkins,worked in a small grocery (bagging, unload trucks, stock shelves mop floors for 90 cents/hours) road construction labor and heavy equipment, switchboard operator at college, referree, bar tender,picked apricots and cherries
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Hedlund Pickle Picker
In areas where there is a lot of commercial pickling of cucumbers the cucumbers are referred to as pickles and the related machinery is pickling machinery. If memory serves correctly the machine in the photo was made in Wisconsin.
Here is an image of a Hedlund Pickle Picker. Two worker/pickers were prone on the machine which was moved through the field of pickle (pickling cucumber) vines. A conveyor would drop the pickling cucumbers into a container for transport. http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t...rakaPicKar.jpg Other than occasionally mowing for my grandmother's neighbor when her grass got taller than her electric mower would cut my first job was helping a hardware store owner to assemble grain bins. I was inside the nice toasty warm bin to put nuts on bolts as they were put through the aligned holes. When the owner was waiting on customers I would then tighten all of the ones we had done. Few child labor laws back then and I expect I was probably age 12. A year or two later I worked for the same hardware store assembling farm machinery. Another year later and I stocked shelves, priced items, cut glass, cleaned, and even candled eggs for the grocery store owned by the couple. Wage would have been 50¢ an hour. At times I also worked for the local grain elevator. Cleaning the dangerous grain dust from the pits and from the headhouse to prevent explosion was some of the work. Other work for them was coopering railroad boxcars which meant installing cardboard doors to ready them for filling with grain. Also there was the unloading of sacked feed from boxcars and the occasional truck. The sacks of feed were either 50 pounds or 100 pounds depending upon contents. Always ready for noon or the end of the day. I think I received 75¢ per hour since it was harder work. There was the occasional tractor jockey work for neighbors when they fell behind and needed to run a second tractor. When in high school I hauled bales one summer. I was hired on at ½ cent per bale when it went on the truck and I received another ½ cent when it went into the stack. When the custom haulers saw that I was capable and worked hard they raised my pay from day one to 1¢ per each operation meaning 2¢ per bale. We worked long and hard and fast and moved about 1400 to 1600 to as many as 2000 bales per day. That was a lot of money for a kid in the 1960s. After high school my first full time job was working for the Chicago Tribune as an office boy for $75 per week. My job was to place all 7 or 9 editions (depending upon the day) of each days papers into book like bindings so that every page could be easily accessed. The dept. took complaints for classified and display ads. I also filed the complaints after they had been written. Ran errands, and each day as the presses produced the first copies I brought 25 to the complaint phone operators. Later I was moved to the executive floor and was the office boy there. I made tea daily for a few of the executives and secretaries, but I mainly made sure the conference room was always at the ready, all cigarette lighters would work on the first or second try, pencils were sharpened, and ran any errands that needed done. That included returning jewelry on approval to stores, getting cash for travel, picking up airline tickets, and even carrying Dick Tracy artwork between publisher and in-house artist Chester Gould. In 1966 I had finished night school but continued working for the Tribune. In early spring Uncle Sam beckoned me with a call to report for a pre-induction physical. Shortly thereafter I went from making $85 per week at the Tribune to $78 or so PER MONTH in the U.S. Army. Do people really wonder why veterans don't like draft dodgers? |
Mine were
paper girl pet shop employee (hired to clean critter and dog cages) video store dog/cat kennel (like for people on vacation) picking vegetables deli/bakery Chinese restaurant (kitchen work followed by waitressing) Friendly's as an ice cream scooper (hated working there) babysitting All of this is before age 17...And I took care of my brothers (mom worked nights, parents divorced) and the house. We all had to work, no money. the bonus is I learned quite a bit in the process :) |
I baled hay for 1.85 an hour, walked beans, and detasseled hundreds of acres of corn.
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1. Babysitter
2. Kitchen Porter (AKA Washup). 3. Supermarket Supervisor 4. Warehouse Order Picker 5. Farm Manager 6. Waiting on something. And I'm 22 :-) |
Started delivering newspapers (bicycle route) while in the 4th grade. Graduated to grocery store bagger on Saturdays (no Sunday sales) a couple of years later. Somewhere in there I started mowing lawns and hauling hay for about 2¢/bale during the summer.
Dad started taking me with him to do electrical work when I was 14 or 15. I had my own service truck by the time I graduated from high school. The reason I got my own service truck was because when the farmers went out to do milking at 4:00 AM in the gosh awful, and the electric didn't come on.....Guess who got the service call?? |
The first real work was rolling large bales of hay, pulling Tansy, helping Grandma weed her large garden, and also assist her in making butter, putting up food, canning, etc...
At age 10, my siblings & I were out collecting newspapers, bottles, and cans. That is where we got our spending $. By 11, I was mowing lawns, raking them, weeding for neighbors, and babysitting. At 12, my first "employment" was working at a burger stand. That was short lived. Then, at a Drug store, as a clerk & working at the soda counter. This was the old fashioned type serving malts, shakes, etc... The Drug store owner faced financial problems, closing, and a move took us to WY. There, I worked as a waitress until I was offered a job at a BBQ place. I worked full time in the summers and also almost full time during the school year, moving out at the age of 16, living in an apt close to the High School. Then, I worked 40 hours/week, walked to school/work, and graduated early (worked hard, earning a scholarship). The longest I worked at one place, prior to 18, was at a privately owned Italian Sub & Deli (33 kinds, had to memorize them, and can still whip out a lot of food quickly- worked there 2 yrs). What followed were a lot of jobs and in different States. After 18, I could write a book, so I'll stop there. In my family, you achieved high standards for your work (no option to do otherwise), and working HARD was expected. The guys and gals were both expected to dig holes and do all the same work. The only reason I wasn't tossing bales of hay? They weighed what I did, being one of the smaller girls. On self motivation? I believe you are born with it, but it may not emerge until later. Any one can work hard, but not every one can be left alone, and work hard all day without supervision... |
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This was in 1966. |
Ah yes I was a "Soda Jerk" at a year round A & W.
And also worked at a are you ready for this, A "Carwash" Yes that is correct. The 2 jobs one thinks about and even in "movies", and what memories we have and what we did back in the mid 1960's. While going to high school and things to earn some kind of paycheck. |
paper route
mowing lawns shovling snow various helper jobs pet care haying painting ,carpentry,plumbing,drywall,roofing art projects for got about collecting cans (10 cent deposit here) had a mile strech of expressway could make 20 bucks on that walk everyweek. I think I made better money as a kid to be honest. |
Wow, a lot of jobs Americans wouldn't do.
I don't know ANY kids today that have jobs like these. I had a paper route and I was also slave labor for the family business/junk yard. I threw a lot of metal and shingles (clean ups) before I was 12. |
I mowed lawns. I averaged $10 an hour, and could mow all my lawns in a single day. I had 12 lawns total. That was pretty good money for a high schooler when the minimum wage was $3.35 an hour.
I picked up a ton of hay work on my off days. I knew how to work, and work hard. I was paid $8 an hour then. The phones would ring off the hook during haying times. There was one farmer I loved working for. Pay was great, and they treated their hired help very, very well. In college, I worked on construction crews, and learned alot about the construction trades. |
Just the jobs growing up. I started with doing manual labour stacking bales, but I was kinda small for that so they put me on a loader tractor. Loaded wagons and raked hay, and eventually got to do all sorts of feild work cuttign hay baling hay (did that as a custom job too) most tillage work using 150 hp+ tractors including my own. Sold sweet corn, planted strawberry plants for about an hour (guy was a completely disorganised goof) Milked cows, did herd health on a beef farm with PB Angus. Set up a few dog shows, (show of champions here in Ottawa) rings mats tables and gets etc. Baby sat for neighbors (not there's a thankless horrible job) Probably a few others too but I guess they were forgetable.
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And the very first "job" I had went I went to Tech School taking up "Auto mechanics, was, are you ready for this? I worked at a "Mink Ranch", I was the "Dead Animal" pickup person. Yet another job that is no longer for Americans. But just the Illegal ones. Then another job was making "dog food" out of chicken by-products. Yet another ones of "those". And after a year of dumping 55 gallon barrels of blood into a cooker I decided to "Go Back to school and continue my auto mechanic trade and even was in 1/4 on the honor roll. And oh yes i worked for several years as a head auto mechanic in our town before the owner decided to sell the station. |
By the time I was 18 I had:
I've continued the trend of doing all kinds of work since then and have a LOT of different skills that come in handy all the time, but sometimes I'm envious of people that picked something early on and built a solid resume and skill set in a single industry. Seems like those are the people that are getting the jobs, these days! |
Some of ya'll made some big money. I got 4 cents a pound for picking cotton. In a really long day, I could pick a hundred pounds. When I graduated to pulling tobacco, I got 50 cents an hour. Still 4 dollars a day, but only 8 hours. Both were in the blazing sun.
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I started at about 12 or 13 picking blue berries and straw berries then just worked the various seasons. Cut and loaded Christmas trees, hauled irrigation pipe, got my license at 15 and started working at a stockyard mucking out stalls and graduated to being a-driver hauling cattle all over Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The head wrangler was an old crippled up cowboy with a severe drinking problem and I learned to drive a tractor trailer out of necessity....never got caught but it was scary stuff looking back on it. He signed as my guardian to join the Marine Corps on my 17th Birthday (he wasnt legally my guardian and to this day I am not sure how that worked). I also had a part time job working at a Shell station pumping gas and changing oil and doing minor repairs. We had a uniform consisting of brown overalls and a white hat.
I made good money for the time (I remember I was taking home about $1000 a month) and had a hopped up 67 Firebird and a pickup. |
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