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13 - worked for a travelling circus when they were in town. Picked strawberries. Picked apples. Picked up returnable bottles and cans, dug through old dumps for antique bottles to sell to antique stores.
14- Picked apples and pumpkins, did some mowing. Sold flavored toothpicks. Made and sold explosives.
15 Burger chef back line.
16. Mowed township graveyards. Picked apples. Put up hay, detassled corn.
17. Mowed graveyards, operated the neighbors apple orchard, Re-sold illegal fireworks. Professional clowning.
18. Mowed graveyards, ran a rotor tilling business, assistant manager at a boat rental facility/ice rink, captain of an excursion boat professional clowning. Put up hay. Picked pumpkins.
19 Excursion boat captain, manager of an ice rink, rotor tilling, clowning, worked as a janitor (two places), delivered pizza, professional clowning.
20. Excursion boat captain, managed the ice rink. Fall/Winter maintenance crew at a park. Debate coach at the local high school (and illegally taught debate class), clowning, janitor, pizza delivery, mowed one graveyard, rotor tilling.
21. Excursion boat captain. Clown. Debate coach/teacher. Ice rink manager. Delivered Pizza. Political door to door calling for PIRGM, did some work for ACLU.
22. First "real" job - law clerk/summer intern.
At 16 I worked 2 hours a day at a print shop and still worked mowing yards and picking string beans for 2 cent a pound. Could make $3 to $4 a day picking beans but this was about 1962 when $4 was equivalent to $32 today but it was in cash and I could pick what days and hours I wanted to work. When I wanted off work I simply took my bag to the truck, got it weighed, picked up my cash and left. Most days I worked about 5 hours.
Of course in 1960 San Jose had a population of 204,196 where today it has an estimated population of 1,000,536 so they had to put the buildings somewhere. But then I remember we purchased a four bedroom 2 bath house on Dundee Drive in Santa Clara for $29,900.
I didn't last long there and pay was under $1/hour and seeing as how I could make more in the bean fields, plus pick my own hours and days, I didn't last long there. Fact is I lasted one night but it was my first W-2 job.
First full time W-2 job was at the print shop from the time I graduated high school and got drafted into the army... About 9 months.
I miss my California, just came back from visiting relatives, but I can never go back because my California no longer exists. What a mess.
I was born in Redwood City, as were both my parents in the 1920's, when the population of the state was less than 10 million and today it is 40 million.
15 - sales clerk
16 - pizza parlor food prep
17- A&W rootbeer stand fry grill
18 to 24 - US Navy
25 - journeyman stone mason
26 to 27 - pizza prep
28 to 42 - US Navy
14. I was an "island girl" at my local coney island. I worked the station in the middle of the restaurant making drinks and desserts for the waitresses and cutting hot dogs LOL. For $4.25 an hour.
At age 18, I worked at a canning factory for 5 weeks then got laid off. I was later told this place was known for laying off people right before they could join the union. Then I worked as an office clerk at an insurance company for horrible wages due to Nixon's wage freezes.
At age 16, I worked as a sales clerk in a department store jewelry section. This was after school hours.
At age 12-16, I did babysitting and house cleaning for neighbors.
21 (and now I'm 62 and still working , but not for long).
I took a one-year sabbatical (to go back to studying , I could rattle up a small grant )at 23
And between 17 and 21, each summer I did "student jobs" (including during my sabbatical because my grant was hardly enough to survive)
I have actually bad memories of that period (before I started earning enough money to have a decent, if modest lifestyle, not before much later in life). To tell the truth, I was quite broke.But the my main preoccupation back then was ....girls, much more than work . But as I wasn't a "party man" (never has been), it was not an easy task to meet dates. I managed it reasonably well, though (I met the mother of my son when I was 26 and starting to have a stable, if relatively low-paid job).
I started mowing and watering lawns for neighbors and feeding their pets while they vacationed, at age 7. I began catching nightcrawlers and selling them to fishermen at age 8. At age 12, I began working full time in the summer picking crops on farms. A 13, I was enrolled in Social Security. That year, I also worked after school once or twice a week for a home-builder, carrying materials into houses after the crew had left, getting paid under the table in cash.
When I was age 16 to 18, I picked up hay bales and grain sacks in fields and hauled them to barns, the first really hard job I had, that paid a full wage. Then after a year of college, I put in an enlistment in the Army and became a teenage cop.
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