Shoeshine Kits, Snow Shovels and a Projector: Mobile Remembers the First Job

Every June, two waves of job seekers hit the same shore. College graduates go looking for the first real position, the one with a title.

High schoolers go looking for anything that pays. Both crowds are following a path already worn smooth.

Asked to recall their own first jobs, a group of Mobile-area writers, physicians, lawyers and legislators produced a set of memories that doubled as an economic history of the Gulf Coast and the wider South — and a reminder of just how young people used to start.

Ten cents an hour, and worth every minute

Novelist Carolyn Haines, whose books include Fever Moon and Penumbra, began at seven with her father’s shoeshine kit.

“I’d waylay any male relative who came to visit, forcing them to give up their shoes so I could polish them for a dime,” she recalled. “Now this was paste polish, not that liquid mess. Even at seven, I put a very nice buff on a wing-tip.” The arrangement had one drawback: her uncles and cousins spent their visits sitting in the living room in their socks. She went on to mow lawns with her brother, water plants and tie bows for funeral wreaths at a florist, clerk at a pharmacy, and, as a high school senior, work as a cub reporter for the George County Times in Lucedale, Mississippi, while also serving as a disc jockey at the local AM station.

Her verdict on herself: “I was a fair reporter and a terrible DJ. I was very shy and didn’t like to talk. I played a lot of records.”

Dr. Keith Peevy, a neonatologist at the University of South Alabama Children’s and Women’s Hospital, grew up on 140 acres northeast of Baton Rouge, where his father, an LSU agronomy professor, ran a wholesale flower nursery to supplement a professor’s salary.

Peevy started at nine or ten for ten cents an hour, weeding cans in the lath houses. His favorite work happened in the potting shed, out of the sun, alongside Steve and Celeste Washington, an older couple who had worked for his father for more than a decade.

“I viewed them as wise, parental roles in my life,” he said, “and they did have a wisdom that comes from working hard and observing life over many decades.” He closed with an observation about his career. “I suppose it’s ironic that I have always worked in nurseries on young and dependent parts of God’s Creation. I just moved from plants to newborn babies.”

The eighth-grader who ran the movie house

Ed Kennedy, retired from International Paper, worked up the nerve in the fifth grade to ask the owner of the Jackson Theater in Flomaton for a job. He got it.

The pay was free admission to every movie, in exchange for distributing bulletins announcing coming attractions. He graduated to ushering, then the concession stand, then tickets.

Then the war took the staff. “This was during World War II and both projectionists and even the owner of the theater had been drafted,” Kennedy said.

“This left me, an eighth grader, to receive the films, do the splicing of the ads, operate the projectors, and prepare the films for shipment.” When the owner came home from the Army, Kennedy was made assistant manager, a post he held until he graduated and entered the Air Force.

A raise, and a grievance

Bill Tunnell, executive director of USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park, went to work at sixteen at the A&P grocery in Andalusia, starting at $1 an hour and thrilled to collect a nickel raise every six months.

Then Congress intervened. “I remember being really disgusted when the minimum wage went up in 1964 and they hired people at $1.25,” he said — five cents more than he was making with three years of experience.

The park Tunnell directs, USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park, opened on Mobile Bay in January 1965. It was built around the World War II battleship, which Alabamians raised money to bring home after the Navy decommissioned it.

Criminal defense attorney Dom Soto learned a different lesson on the streets of Jersey City. After shining shoes in bars and running newspaper routes, he took a job as a Western Union bicycle messenger, forty hours a week, at nearly $9 an hour with time-and-a-half and double time on weekends.

“I learned the value of unions at that job,” he said. It was good money, and he earned it: deadlines, traffic, dogs and bottles thrown from doorways.

He quit the day he came back downstairs from delivering a telegram and found his bicycle frozen solid to the pavement.

Tobacco, garbage and a future mayor

Mike Dow, the former mayor of Mobile, hired out at $5 a day as a field hand for a sharecropper working the excess lands of a South Georgia plantation.

He cropped and strung tobacco from dawn until mid-afternoon, then hung it in barns in heat above 110 degrees. He sacked peanuts off the side of a combine, baled hay, picked cotton and pulled corn.

“When I got to drive the tractor in year three,” Dow said, “I felt like I did when I received my MBA at the University of South Alabama.” The job made his after-school shift at Winn-Dixie feel white-collar by comparison. As for what came later: “My last full time job was picking up the City of Mobile’s trash and garbage. I continue to progress.”

State Rep. Jim Barton’s first paid work was cutting grass, followed in college by a run of jobs that shaped a career: runner for a law firm, doorman at a Mobile bar and stock boy at a mall clothing store.

The law firm work, he said, “probably had a lot to do with sparking my political interests.”

And attorney Bob Campbell, who grew up outside Philadelphia, described a paper route of 100 customers that began at 3 a.m., a sled for snow days, and a shovel that earned a dollar a sidewalk and five dollars a driveway. Total monthly take: about $30, plus Christmas tips.

“Those were the days, my friend,” he said. “I thought they would never end.”