As with most teenagers, I had a variety of afterschool
jobs. While I didn’t have my own car so
did not use the income to pay for the car, insurance, etc., they did provide me
with spending money and savings (which eventually went toward college
tuition).
My first paying job (at about age 10 or 12) was bagging
charcoal at the “charcoal pit” at the end of the road. A local neighbor, Mr. Seery, who owned the
land, would cut down some trees, put the logs in an enclosure, light it, then
seal the entrance so as it burned it would turn to charcoal. My cousin Dave and I would use a shovel,
minus handle, to scoop up the charcoal, fill sturdy paper bags and wrap a wire
twist tie around the neck. We got paid
so much a bag. It was dirty work, but
both Dave and I were hard workers and it was good pocket money. Not sure how my mother felt about how black I
got doing this, but it kept us out of trouble and taught us good work ethics.
My next paying job was working with my uncle on the state
forest fire crew that he ran. Most
paying jobs require you to be 16, but since he was the crew chief, I and my
cousin Dave started a few years before that.
We would ride with my uncle to the closest road access to the fire, don
heavy Indian Tanks and take either a rake or broom (not a garden rake and a
household broom, but ones designed for this job) as we trudged back into the
woods to fight the fire. I had a pair of
heavy red rubber boots that I wore for this.
The volunteer fire companies relied on these state crews for anything
that they could not reach with their trucks and hoses. We got paid the princely sum of $1/hour at
the beginning (later raised to $1.25).
If we missed meals, then either the Red Cross or the Salvation Army had
a food truck and would come out close to us so when we got out of the woods we
had sandwiches and cold drinks. (Because
of this, I have continued to make periodic donations to these organizations
that were so kind to me all those years ago).
One of the “benefits” was that if the fire was during the day we were
allowed to miss school to fight the fire.
One pair of fires is especially memorable to me. We were called out on a fire on a Thursday
night and didn’t get back home until early morning. While I could have missed school on Friday, I
had a teacher who didn’t believe in any excuses and if he gave you a make-up
test it was bound to be so hard as to be unpassable. So I went to school anyway. Just after getting home, there was yet
another fire and so I went out again.
This was a fairly big one and although we got all the flames out we had
to “baby sit” the fire location for several hours, putting out all the embers
under the stumps. I finally got home
late on Saturday – after having been awake for about 60 hours. I had a quick shower and went right to bed
where I slept around the clock plus. My
parents didn’t even wake me up for church the next morning.
I had several other part-time jobs that lasted anywhere from
a few months to over a year: driving a delivery van for the local radio/TV
store; working at the local PikWick grocery store where I was a stock clerk and
responsible for all the bottle returns; washing windows and cleaning up the
store at a Fanny Farmer candy shop. All
these taught me the value of work.
While all the above jobs were fine, none of them provided
the steady work that I needed to earn money to pay for college. After I graduated from high school, I found a
job working for a small business that sold and recapped tires (while they also
handled car tires, they mostly concentrated on truck tires). I was a skinny 17-year old who weighed
perhaps 155 pounds. The guys who worked
in the shop didn’t think that I’d last two weeks. But I continued not only the entire summer,
but came back the next summer as well.
It was 55 hours a week, nine hours a day and ten on Saturday – with
overtime that was 62.5 hours pay at $1.60/hour or a gross of $100/week.
Recapping truck tires is a tiring, tedious job. Step 1 – mount the tire on a buffer that
slowly turns the tire past a set of spinning blades that chew off all the outer
surface of the tire, even out any flat spots, etc. Step 2 – spray a temporary adhesive on the
buffed up surface, put the new raw rubber around the outside and stitch it down
(stitcher is like a thick pizza cutter but with a ribbed edge). Step 3 – put the tire on a spreader which has
one set of paddles holding each of the two tire beads, then use air pressure to
spread the beads apart which shrinks the overall diameter of the tire (don’t
stand in front of the tire as if the paddles slip they will kill you – there
was a hole in the cinder block wall at the opposite side of the building from
one such slippage!); put an aluminum band on the tire that has the new tread on
the inside. Step 4 – put on a heavy
metal rim, put the whole thing on a round table with another round table over
it, clamp it all together, inflate the inner tube, then run high-temperature
steam through the tubes around the outside of the band. Step 5 – “cook” for several hours, then
remove everything and you have a newly retreaded tire. It was generally 90% humidity and over 90 degrees,
so with the black rubber dust that you quickly get coated with, you sweat a lot
– making the black dust stick even more.
It was hot, hard work, but I came to appreciate this experience over the
coming years.
After my second year of college I decided to try something
in my field of study. A family friend
from church was a computer analyst for Uniroyal in their Eastern Management
Information Center. They never had hired
a summer college student, but he convinced them to give me a try. My interview included taking the IBM
Programming Aptitude Test – a kind of mini-SAT geared to the thinking skills
needed in this new technological field.
It was in several sections and all were timed. The manager’s secretary set me up in a vacant
office down the hall, gave me one section, and said she would be back when my
time was up. I was done so fast that I
was back at her desk before she even got much chance to sit down – ready for
the next section. Totally blew everyone
away, got a higher score than any of their current employees, and was so fast
that they had trouble believing it. The
manager, Roy Peterson, then interviewed me.
He had originally wanted me to do some conversion of some old Autocoder
programs to RPG. But since I had done so
well he instead gave me a project that he had planned on doing himself – as he
didn’t think the other programmers in the department had the necessary skills
to do it. (Note that in those days few
people had actual degrees or even college backgrounds in the field (Roy had a
BS in Math). So most of the department
had no college background but had come out of one of the other departments –
areas like payroll or production scheduling).
The program I had assigned to me was for the production
scheduling of all their footwear (one of the divisions of Uniroyal was US
Rubber, maker of US Keds). Had to take
the inventory of “lasts” (the metal foot-shaped forms that shoes are formed
around), spread the initial production schedule over the available lasts, round
down to the nearest dozen/half-dozen pairs, then take the unused lasts and
re-spread the unsatisfied production over the residual lasts. All this was done for each shoe size, noting
that often a men’s size X was built on the same last as the women’s size
Y. This process used so much CPU time
that it would read in the schedule and inventory for one style from tape, then
be CPU-bound for a while before it spit out the results on another tape. The computer had a “wait light” that went out
when the CPU was busy – usually indicating that the program had gotten stuck in
a loop. So I had to put a note on my run
deck that said, “This will shut off the wait light, do not cancel the program
when it does.” At the end of the summer
they gave me a sarcastic “glad to see you going” party and a Cross pen and
pencil set – one that I carried with me for a couple of decades before they
finally wore out.
The following summer I worked for them again, this time on a
corporate funding model. The program had
an income statement, balance sheet, and source and use of funds sheet for each
country that the corporation did business in.
Using several years of history and a sales forecast it forecast the sales,
etc. for several years in the future and made assumptions about where excess
cash could be used, where borrowing or repayment of debt was appropriate, all
while keeping cash from flowing back to the US (where it would be taxed). These days that would all be done on a
multi-sheet spreadsheet, but doing it by computer back in 1969 was long before
PC’s existed. At the end of the summer I
presented the results to the corporate finance folks and the VP of Uniroyal
International at their offices in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. When they realized that I had done what had
been taking them many days of calculations on paper spreadsheets, they got very
excited.
These jobs paid for my tuition. But during the school year, I had a few other
odd jobs to earn spending money. These
included: (1) cleaning the apartment for an older couple each Saturday –
vacuuming, changing bedding, mopping floors and cleaning the toilet, etc. (She was blind and he was disabled and I
enjoyed working for them.); (2) shoveling snow for a business complex on the
next block; (3) tutoring in mathematics for a middle-school student; (3)
reading textbooks for a blind graduate student while she took notes in
Braille. A variety of jobs and all very
different from each other.
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