Every summer produces the same anxious ritual. College graduates begin or hunt for their first real job, high school students scramble for part-time work and a little spending money, and everyone older watches with a mixture of sympathy and amusement.
Plenty have gone before them. A number of Mobile-area figures were asked to recall the work that started them off, and the answers said as much about the century they grew up in as about the jobs themselves.
Behind the microphone at seventeen
Public relations professional Amy Greer Thompson spent her high school summers at her father’s bank in East Texas, first working the safe deposit box desk as a new accounts representative, later moving up to the teller line. In her second summer she was promoted to demonstrating the automatic teller machine, no small event in a town of 2,300 with not so much as a traffic light at its center.
That was the day job. At night she worked at a tiny AM country station where records still spun on a 1960s turntable, Patsy Cline and Barbara Mandrell and Ronnie Milsap, and where her duties included shutting down the transmitter and playing the national anthem off a cartridge at midnight. She ripped weather and headlines off an old wire service teletype.
The highlight, and the moment she credits with infecting her permanently with the news bug, was interviewing George Strait when he came by to talk about a new album. She was about 17. She suspects the interview was terrible. She is certain it mattered.
The paper route generation
The single most common first job in the group was throwing a newspaper, and the accounts converge on the same details: an alarm before dawn, a route measured in miles, and the unwelcome education of collecting money from people who do not want to pay.
A Mobile chiropractor delivered the Des Moines Register in the early 1960s, walking a three-mile route from 4:30 to 6 a.m., and did it for four years. He had money in the bank, a good bicycle, a car and a Gibson Firebird III with a large amplifier to show for it. He also learned to collect from customers, a skill he half-jokingly wishes he had mastered better, noting that 43 years later plenty of people still owed him money.
A Mobile attorney rose at 4:30 as a 12-year-old to prepare and deliver about 200 papers before 7 a.m., in time for school; his brother carried the same load. A retired Navy man reported a route that paid 85 cents a week, followed by a promotion to picking strawberries at $1.50 a day, and observed that any survey of first jobs ought to come with an age limit.
Hard summers, on purpose
Several of the recollections describe fathers who deliberately arranged unpleasant work for their sons, on the theory that the experience would prove instructive. It generally did.
A Baldwin County real estate executive got his oldest son a job spraying varnish on a furniture assembly line and refused to let him quit when he wanted to. The boy came home coated in varnish each day and finished the summer as the senior member of the line. His grades, his father noted with satisfaction, improved considerably thereafter.
An attorney and former juvenile court judge began with babysitting at 50 cents an hour, snacks included, and moved up to a telephone answering service, running a PBX switchboard for roughly $30 a week the summer she was 17, walking the six blocks to work and back without a second thought, which she noted she would not permit today.
A retired newspaperman, whose first work was unpaid farm labor, took a job in the summer of 1948 at an ice cream plant in Albany, Georgia. It was dreary toil, permanently altering his feelings about ice cream, and it paid what was probably the 50-cent minimum wage. His purpose was specific: to accumulate $47 for a tuxedo, plus another $10 for shirt and clip-on bow tie, so that he could attend fraternity and sorority dances on returning to the University of Georgia.
Shipyards, buffets and federal judges
George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, spent the summer of 1959 as an assistant in the pattern shop at the Avondale Shipyards foundry outside New Orleans, which meant sweeping wood shavings and holding the other end of the board. What he remembers is the craftsmanship: pattern makers building ship propellers one blade at a time from stacks of fanned one-by-fours, driving every nail with a single hammer stroke, then carving the stack with a hand router to the exact curvature specified on the naval architect’s drawings. Promoted to timekeeper at the end of the summer, he hated it.
A Mobile lawyer’s first real job after law school was clerking in 1973 for Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., the formidable federal judge in Montgomery. No one had told him what time to report. He arrived at 7:45 a.m. and was greeted by the judge’s secretary with the news that His Honor had been looking everywhere for him. He never let the judge beat him to work again.
And retired pro football player and restaurateur Bob Baumhower, who at 14 bused tables at a buffet, offered the shortest entry in the collection, and the best: “Is what I do now poetic justice?”