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Pre-high school graduation jobs (1962- 1970).
Babysitting
I was cured from this form of making money when my mom volunteered me to babysit for the Knotts. I don’t know how many kids they had at the time but it was somewhere between ten and twelve. Those were the days of the cloth diapers and you had to wash the poop off of them in the toilet. What a dirty job.
Pop Bottles
In those days there was a deposit on pop bottles. I would go from door to door and ask people if they had any bottles they wanted to get rid of. I think we got two cents per bottle.
Yardwork
I was always mowing lawns, digging gardens and shoveling snow for money.
Construction
A friend’s dad built homes and sometimes he needed an extra hand.
Farm Work
I lived in Sleepy Hollow and there were plenty of barns to clean and hay to bale. Those were some pretty hot summers and I breathed in a lot of dust.
Housepainter
I painted many homes and barns. I hated that job because I can’t stand spiders and hornets.
Chicken Trainer
It’s a long story. I wrote about it in my short story “The Conductor of the Easter Town Rachmaninoffs”. It was actually Santa’s Village but I changed it to Easter town for the story.
Odd Jobs
My dad always knew someone who needed some help cleaning up old garages, basements or backyards. It was just another spider, hornet job and rat job.
Number 11
I was called a “Number 11” when I worked as a cart boy at Kmart 4097. When I wasn’t out getting carts I was restocking the end cap with pickled pig’s feet. The worst job was on Sunday when I had to clean the parking lot. You wouldn’t believe how many people tossed dirty diapers out of their cars.
Truck driver and electroplater
The week after I got my driver’s license (at 16) I got a job driving a light truck for deliveries and pickups in Chicago for an electro plating company. When I wasn’t making deliveries I was plating. My parents didn’t know I had that job. When I wanted to drive to Elgin to go to a party they said, “Oh no, you can’t – there’s too much traffic! They didn’t know I drove to Chicago several times a day.
College jobs
Molder
I made polymeric foam breakaways for helicopter missiles during the Vietnam war. It was a mind-numbing job. For eight hours a day I ran in circles filling molds and then popping out the finished product. I couldn’t stop for a moment or the molds would get cold and impossible to use.
Stockboy
I worked at Kmart’s new competitor, Zayre in Elgin, Illinois. They always called me when they needed to put a bunch of studs in winter tires because I was lightning fast.
Punch Press assistant
That was one of the most dismal jobs that I ever had – working for Terra Cotta steel in Crystal Lake. Not only was the place dark and dirty but they hired a lot of ex-cons, illegal aliens and people who were hiding from someone. I was lucky to get the job because there weren’t a lot of summer jobs that year but it was a dangerous job working with dangerous people.
Stockboy
I worked for Zayre’s in Gary Indiana one summer. I actually went there to find a summer job as a high tension wire climber but I would have had to work three months as a meter reader and I wasn’t going to do that. I would rather get shot at up on an electric pole than in someone’s basement. Gary Indiana was not safe at that time.
Railroad Construction
I laid railroad ties, drove spikes to hold the rails and shoveled a lot of gravel. I worked alongside the Mexicans but I couldn’t eat their peppers. They ate those hot peppers like they were peanuts. YOW!
The owner of the company told me that he killed a guy who stole from him. He said the guy took the money and ran off. A year or so later he came back and asked for his job back and the owner agreed. He told him to drive a flat-bed truck that was loaded with rails to a job site. Before the guy left, the boss loosened the straps that held the rails to the flatbed. He arranged for someone to pull out in front of him on some street somewhere causing him to slam on the brakes. The rails sheared off the cab and killed the guy. He told me that story after he beat the hell out of a little old guy who worked for him. He had given the little guy money to go to the track and bet on some horses. The owner lost a lot of races so the little guy stopped placing the bets. If the owner won, the little guy still had plenty of money to pay him off. One day the little guy couldn’t cover a large bet that the owner had won and that is when the guy beat the hell out of him. His face looked like ground beef.
Jobs after College
Technician and Specialist
I worked on the extended-care women’s ward at the Elgin State Mental Hospital. This was an unbelievable experience and I wrote a book about it called “The Man of the Ward”.
Brakeman and Conductor
I worked in the Proviso yards for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. I took many trips on freight trains to Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana and southern Illinois. That was an exciting job but it was also extremely dangerous.
One of my jobs was called “skateman”. I would wait at an empty track and they would let a car roll down the hump (big hill) into the empty track and I’d have to catch the car, crawl up on top and turn the brakewheel to stop it before it went out the other end and hit something. I had to work fast because there would be another car right behind it so I had to stop the car, get off and get out of the way of the impact. The car with the brake was supposed to stop the second car but sometimes the first car was empty and the second car was full so the first car couldn’t stop it and I’d have to crawl up and put a brake on that one too. We were supposed to use a skate to stop the cars but the tracks were in such bad shape they would derail when the skate hit a joint. Not only that, but if you were actually able to use a skate on some good track, the car might flick the 50 lb skate at you when the car hit it. Stopping a car with a skate was an art. Stopping a car with your body was a skill. When a car came barreling toward you, you are essentiall hit by the car as you jamb your foot into the oncoming boxcar. Then you snap your trailing foot behind you and it breaks the energy of the impact. It sounds crazy but it worked.
(Back to College for a degree in computer science)
(I kept my brakeman’s job for as long as I could).
Lab assistant
I liked helping fellow students with their programs so the school hired me to work in the computer lab. Occasionally I graded papers and tests.
Piece work assembly
I made lights and outlet strips. I was the fastest assembly person ever. I used my experience as a molder to devise an assembly process at break-neck speed. It was another mind-numbing job.
At this point my career in Information Technology began (1983).
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