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My first part-time job paid $.76 an hour which I got because I could crank out collection letters on a manual typewriter mistake free at 85 wpm. No breaks when you worked all day Saturday except 20 minutes for lunch, no food or beverages at your desk, no talking on the phone or with your co-workers unless it was work related. And there was no acceptable reason for being late or absent. Was 1957, small town USA, part-time jobs were pretty scarce and I was so glad to have that one.

Not many 17 year olds would accept such a job now, regardless of the pay.

My first part-time job paid $.76 an hour which I got because I could crank out collection letters on a manual typewriter mistake free at 85 wpm.

That was three silver quarters an hour, the melt value of which today is about $28.70.

We don't need to fix the minimum wage, we need to fix the money.

My first Job(s) were cutting grass for so called neighbors. We lived in a rural area so people were few and far between. One of our customers(my brother and I teamed up)didn't believe in mowers, hand or power, but insisted we cut her grass with hand sickles. Her son, one of my classmates, evidently was to damn lazy to do it, so my brother and I got the job. Hard work for a flat rate of 3 bucks apiece, if we finished the job. Took us many hours to earn that 3 bucks.

Our other mowing jobs paid an average of .50 per hour. We did ok for that time period(early to late 50s).

My first real job was working with a contractor as a laborer on a house building job. A classmate of mine also was hired on. My brother turned the job down(can't remember why but I think it was because he had started taking girls out and he didn't want the job to eat into his time), my friend and I earned 90 bucks apiece(after taxes) working about 5 weeks in the hot summer sun. That was a fortune in 1957 for a high school kid.

The area also had many commercial chicken houses. We would get jobs for one night catching chickens and stuffing them in crates for shipping, the pay was a whopping 2 bucks an hour(an unheard of wage in those days for laborers) for a minimum of six hours work, sometimes it ran into eight hours or longer. Wow, what a soft touch, we thought.

That rate of pay would have been unimaginable for a seventeen year old part-timer in this part of the country in 1957. I worked on my dad’s farm then, I was only 13 but those I knew who had a part-time job were generally very happy if they got fifty cents an hour. Of course in real terms your $.76 cents was well over the current $7.25 per hour, at least it would have been in Carolina. You could have bought lunch for two here with that. You could have bough three gallons of gasoline with it and four during a gas war. You can’t buy two now with $7.25.