The final installment of these recollections produced the strangest jobs of the collection, and the ones that most vividly date the century that produced them.
Delivering the mail to West Mobile’s edge
Attorney Donald Stewart counted as his first job three college summers spent as a temporary substitute mail carrier for the Post Office, assigned to the Cottage Hill Branch.
That branch then served an area of West Mobile that has since been absorbed into what people now casually call midtown. At the time, Stewart says, it was the certified End of the World.
The job offered what he calls high adventure and great skills development: driving mail trucks with the steering wheel on the wrong side, repelling dogs with pepper spray, and being constantly schooled by the regular carriers on the critical importance of not showing them up by running their routes faster than they did. Career mail carriers, he observes, pioneered the principle that the work of delivering a route’s mail will always expand to fill the paid time available for its completion.
Among his favorite assignments was the Tillman’s Corner route, which included a widely reputed and brightly painted establishment on Highway 90 just outside the city limit. Normally the mail went in the roadside box, with care taken not to leave the neighboring church’s mail there by mistake.
On one occasion, however, a COD package required him to go inside for payment and a signature. He builds the suspense expertly and then punctures it himself: a lady in a bathrobe signed for the parcel and tipped him 18 cents, being short of the exact amount and telling him to keep the change. Something lurid and astonishing might have happened, he insists, and no one will ever convince him otherwise.
The DDT truck
Retired dentist Harry Coker spent a summer driving the DDT truck for the city of Demopolis, back when the pesticide was the standard tool of municipal mosquito control. The truck carried a tank and a sprayer, dispensing the chemical as he drove through town, with a hose attached for more targeted application.
In many of the poorer neighborhoods, he recalls, residents would invite him inside to spray their beds for bedbugs, and a thorough soaking of the bedding was the usual treatment. He has wondered since how their health was affected by sleeping in a pool of what would later be classified as a dangerous chemical.
Having breathed DDT non-stop for an entire summer without a mask or protective gear, he says he did not lose much sleep over it. He offers the standard defense of his generation, delivered deadpan: they teethed on lead paint, wore flammable clothing, survived without antibiotics, rode bicycles without helmets and traveled in the open beds of pickup trucks. Why should a little toxic chemical be a problem?
Ambushed in the shoe department
David L. Thomas, who directs adult education and economic development at Bishop State Community College, was hired at 16 as part of the initial employee group at a new mall department store, before it had even opened.
He was, he freely admits, thrilled. A 16-year-old boy working a department store during a grand opening expected to meet a great many girls. His excitement only grew when he was assigned to the women’s shoe department.
The store opened at 9 a.m. during one of the worst torrential downpours in Mobile’s history. As the ceremonies concluded he heard the faint sound of women’s voices from the front of the store, growing steadily louder as they approached.
What arrived was a line of blue- and gray-haired ladies with soggy feet, stretching, by his account, all the way to Airport Boulevard, in pursuit of a buy-one-get-one-free offer on thick rubber-soled orthopedic shoes. He spent the day, he says, basking in the glow of coupon-carrying geriatric shopaholics. Just what every 16-year-old boy dreams of.
Two who were looked after
Rose Johnson, director of the Mobile County office of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, began as a mother’s helper at 16, working for a young mother of two, soon to be three. The family took her with them to Canada for a wedding, where she watched the boys in a hotel room. It was her first trip outside the country and felt, she says, exotic. They were a large and close Armenian family, and it was an enlarging experience in more ways than one.
John Gavin, a community activist and Mobile Area Crime Stoppers board member, delivered a New Jersey paper in 1950. His father drove him through the route in the evenings beforehand so he would know his customers, then got up at 5 a.m. to help fold the papers and drove him around on the first day. His mother made breakfast. His younger sisters got up to cheer.
The enthusiasm of the household, he reports, lasted about two weeks. Then everyone went back to bed, and his parents bought him a brand-new Schwinn bicycle with a basket, a horn and lights, which he suspects was less an investment in his work ethic than a purchase of their own sleep.