The first job is a peculiar kind of memory. Decades later, people remember the exact wage, the smell of the place and the specific indignity, long after they have forgotten far more consequential things. Asked to recall the work that started them off, a second group of Mobile-area figures obliged.
The crab table
Barbara Drummond, then executive assistant to Mobile Mayor Sam Jones, offered the account with the sharpest point on it.
The commodity of choice on her first job was crab. She rose at dawn, piled into a Grand Bay cousin’s crowded old pickup truck and rode to Bayou La Batre, where a white apron, a cap and a crab picking device were waiting for her. The device, she said, quickly became her worst enemy.
For weeks she stood on her feet delicately removing crabmeat from shells. It was during those weeks, she said, that she made a vow to achieve the highest level of education she possibly could. Crab picking is an honorable profession. The wounds in her hands were evidence that it was not going to be hers.
The goal of that grueling summer was modest and entirely of its time: enough money for stylish clothes for the Fourth of July and a ticket to a James Brown concert. She got the clothes. Her mother vetoed the concert.
Sweeping the shop
Ken Stabler, the retired pro football quarterback, gave the shortest answer and one of the most evocative. His first work came at the Moyer Ford and J.M. Lee Chevrolet dealerships in the early 1960s, where his father worked as a mechanic. He cleaned parts, washed cars and swept the shop.
Greg Saad, a real estate executive, started even younger. At seven he inherited his brother’s job as a shoe shine boy at a barber shop on Michigan Avenue in Oakdale, shining shoes for 25 cents a pair, 35 cents for a spit shine, and no tips allowed. He swept hair and did as he was told. The proprietor and his partner were both deaf, so the shop was mostly quiet. They were, he said, very good to him.
Ben Brooks, the lawyer and state senator, cut lawns as a boy and saved enough one summer to buy a shortwave radio. He still has it.
The economics of a first paycheck
The wages in these accounts are worth preserving, because they are a better history of the American economy than most charts.
Businessman Tommy Fulton worked the concession stand at a drive-in theater for $5 a night, no matter how long the night ran, and remembers his boss deducting a quarter from each $5 for Social Security, an arrangement that strikes him in retrospect as somewhat fishy. His next job, with the family business, felt like an enormous promotion: a dollar an hour, a guaranteed 40 hours, and $1.50 an hour for any overtime he could get.
Real estate broker Dale Mims joined a survey crew for a Mobile engineering firm in the summer of 1968 or 1969, cutting bushes, pulling chains and, memorably, re-surveying a sewer outfall line through the north end of Wragg Swamp between Moffat Road and Highway 45. The work involved lifting manhole covers, sometimes climbing down into them to take a depth measurement, and wading through a swamp in July and August. He made $1.15 an hour and was happy to get it.
Mobile police captain Eddie Burrow threw a paper route at 14 for 75 cents per month per customer, with about 90 customers, and supplemented it by selling Grit door to door.
Lobbyist Taylor Harper’s entry required no elaboration: picking watermelons and cleaning around pecan trees.
The summer that got away
Attorney Preston Bolt supplied the fullest account, and the funniest. He spent a summer on the waterfront staff at a Boy Scout camp near Mentone in 1970, living in a tent with a wooden floor, teaching swimming and lifeguarding, and quietly concealing the fact that he could not himself pass the camp’s floating test, having never in his life managed to float on his back without his feet dragging him under. He took the test in shallow water.
His father, determined that his son should have a job requiring manual labor in the hot sun, subsequently arranged one on a construction crew building a K-Mart, and, the following summer, at a brass fittings foundry that hired college students for its hottest and dirtiest work. The plan collapsed when the payroll department needed an extra clerk and Bolt spent the summer in an air-conditioned office instead. A layoff before summer’s end sent all the college students home early.
What he remembers is not the work but the people, and how sheltered his own life had been by comparison. Digging a footing one day, a co-worker asked where he was going to school. Told it was Alabama, the man asked whether he would be playing football. When Bolt said no, the man asked why he was going at all.