first job: don’t sweat it
This is the fourth in our series on first jobs. For previous installments, see here and here and here. Remember your first job? What was it like? How much did you make? How old were you? Let us know by writing to us at writingaboutourgeneration@gmail.com.
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Funny you should ask (what my first job was). If only my memory were still working well enough to remember which of several came in first. Instead, I’ll briefly discuss several early gigs:
Don’t remember how it came about, but betwixt my sophomore and junior high school years I got a position as a volunteer at the Philadelphia Public Defender’s Office. Made me feel grown-up to take the Reading Railroad—yes, the one included in Monopoly between Income Tax and Oriental Avenue—from a station a few blocks from our suburban home to the railroad’s massive downtown terminal.
After the RR shut down, the site became the go-to venue in the metro area for all things food—fresh veggies, fruit, meat, sweets, a number of restaurants. No walls, just folks wandering the place, shopping and sitting. Jobwise, I was assigned to do all kinds of delivery tasks, the likes of which were serving folks and entities, not with food but with legal papers, and filing paperwork at City Hall a couple blocks away.
Betwixt junior and senior high school years, I had the same routine: training to Reading Terminal from the ‘burbs and reporting for duty at a legal entity in order to deliver stuff as needed, but this time the entity wasn’t a do-gooder org like the Public Defender. It was the office of my dad’s company’s legal firm, a well-established black coat gang in the tallest building downtown. Said building had a gigantic “PSFS” on it, informing the reader it was the home of Philly’s big-time Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, the first savings bank in the United States, founded in 1816.
Then, through some contact of my parents, between freshman and sophomore college years in Connecticut, I got a job as one of the two “cleaner-uppers” at an apartment complex in Philly. (Though my parents, my three younger siblings and I had moved to some place called Chapel Hill a week pre-college for me, I wanted to be near my high school sweetheart, who was home from college in Ohio, in our post-frosh summer. My parents’ Philly place hadn’t yet sold so I got to live there that summer.)
Mowed the grass, weeded stuff, emptied garbage, cleaned the place, etc. Good exercise, boring, but what kept things interesting was that the only other human with my job description at the complex was a dude who, like me, had graduated high school the year before, though he’d been a student at my school’s arch-rival (ask the web where Benjamin Netanyahu went to high school). I drove to and from work in the little Ford Cortina (I think the model only survived a few years) my ‘rents had bought me to allow me to drive as needed between NC and CT.
The work made one hot and sweaty, but at least my comrade and I got to discuss music et al. a lot (he, like me, was an aspiring musician).
The following summer (‘70), I spent my first hot spell in Chapel Hill. Did manual labor outside for a local guy who offered customers landscaping services. Taxing, sweaty. That’s when I decided I’d better get a desk job post-college or I’d collapse in a heap. Regardless, in my ‘73-’75 post-undergrad hippie years in CH, I worked blue-collar jobs and I kept sweating.