Tell Us About Your First Job

blueunicorn6 | 9/6/2015 | blueunicorn6

[blueunicorn6]

In honor of Labor Day, tell us a little bit about your first job.

[cripplecreek]

Picking rocks from the fields.

[Larry Lucido]

Delivered the Detroit News in 1969 at age 13. Next real job was washing dishes at the King’s Arms restaurant in Southfield, Michigan at age 16. Minimum wage was $1.85. Ate for free,though.

[Semper Mark]

Swine nourishment supply engineer.

[knarf]

Talked ny father in to letting me quit school to be a busboy at a greasy spoon the local school (MY school that I had quit) patronized after school .. circa 63/64

I was 16

after about a month of the girls that USED to flirt with me but now longer did (never did figure out why that happened) I went back to school, with both Sophomore and Junior classes

.70 cent an hr.

Life never settled down after that until I met Jesus in '81

[digger48]

newspapers and baling hay.

First job with a W-2 was at age 14 for a farmer who raised cattle, sheep and hogs, and also was a local farm supply.

Occassionally, I’d be the one who got the dynamite for a customer out of the big wooden chest in the garage, which was about 30 ft from the gas pump, which was 20 feet from the burn barrel which was 20 feet from the house.

[Farmer Dean]

Started at age 12,driving a John Deere on the family farm.

[Ronald_Magnus]

[SnuffaBolshevik]

Working on a local farm for $1.10 an hour. (1973)

Wanna experience gross? Try forking the straw out of Holstein calf pens in July. What’s underneath would make Popeye spill his guts.

I managed to buy a 1969 Z/28 with my earnings, however.

[henkster]

My brother’s best friend painted warehouses for his dad who was a commercial developer, so I went to work for him painting warehouses. It was the summer after my senior year in high school.

I got a great tan.

[nascarnation]

Pumping gas at a Sinclair station.
It was about 4 blocks from home, I rode my bike.

We used to check under the hood and sometimes check the tire pressures.
Most of the transactions were cash, but we did have a brand specific charge card with the old carbon copies.

The guy who ran the place had an old Ford flathead V8 stock car he raced. After business was done for the day we would work on it.

[Conan the Librarian]

I was a Page for the local Library system.

Jump ahead 28 years and I took over running the same branch that I worked in. There was one particular person working there that use to harass me a lot. I told her that one day I was going to come back and be her Boss, and I was.

[50sDad]

I worked at Kings Island, a local amusement park. Coney Island (Cincinnati, not NY) was the park I remember as a kid, but that park, though going back on the same site for seventy years, flooded most springs, and so the owners passed the rides and much of the history to Taft Broadcasting, and THEY built Kings Island, a theme park in Kings Mills, Ohio. I was 16, and was GLAD to be making $2.15 an hour..and AMAZED when State Law made it $2.35. Of course...records cost $4.95 then...but we felt like rich men for just having a job. They taught me "if you have time enough to lean, you have time enough to CLEAN." I learned that you were paid to work...and the camaraderie and the good times were a by-product of that work. KI would hire you when no body else would. Recently, I stumbled across some old yearbooks from those days, and did a Kings Island Years video. To those days, to the friends at the Chicken Pit, to all the long walks back to the locker room...I salute you.

[Charles Henrickson]

1967, 14 years old, pushing a big newspaper cart up and down the streets of Chicago early in the morning, throwing newspapers onto front porches. I wanted to go to Expo ‘67 in Montreal, and the deal was, I had to earn money before we would go.

[ArmyTeach]

My first job, as a 17 going on 18 year old, was nursing assistant in a local convalescent hospital. I worked from 5 pm to 10 pm, making beds and serving dinners, getting patients comfortable for sleep and so forth.

[JoeProBono]

[Hetty_Fauxvert]

I was 16, had just graduated HS, and got my first paying job as a nurse’s aide at the local nursing home (which was not a bad place at all). Had the joy of cleaning up human poopy diapers and trying to give showers to combative old women who outweighed me by 100 lbs at least. OTOH, we got a free lunch and those cafeteria ladies knew how to cook! ;o) Lasted three months, through summer vacation, before I went off to college. Not a bad first gig.

[HomerBohn]

Delivering papers and shining shoes.

[sportutegrl]

Dairy Queen: How did you get those perfect stacked loops in the soft serve cone?

[Zuriel]

**seeing a cows head in a bucket.**

One of my best friends parents owned a small town grocery. he learned meat cutting early.

I was raised on a small farm in IL (they nearly all were small back then). Us kids took care of some livestock chores before we were old enough to go to school. I was driving tractors in the field, unsupervised, when just 7 yrs old.

One time, when we had a steer butchered on the farm by a local meatcutter, I remember the guy’s young son (prolly about 5) sitting on the skinned head, and poking at the eyeballs. I was prone to doing gross stuff, as an 8 yr old, but that topped most of my antics.

[Semper Mark]

Those were the days, huh, Joe?!

You don’t see that much any more, not with those modern round balers these days.

Many a boy was made a man working the hay field.