Your first job, what and what pay?

[Popeye]

You mean we were supposed to get paid? They told me it was a priviledge to work there.

[O'Dell]

My first job was at age eleven carrying papers after school. This was in 1955 and I had one hundred customers. The cost of the weekly delivery was 40 cents of which I made 11 cents profit or 11 dollars a week. I missed all my family's vacations for two years because I had to stay home and take care of the route. I went on to a job in a service station when I went to high school at 50 cents an hour. Since that paper route I have had at least one job continually for 57 years.

[TriggerMan]

I shouldn't be suprised, but I was a little, by so many of you starting so young and doing such physical work. It also seems to be a generational thing. You older guys kicked some ass. You didn't get paid much but you developed a work ethic many of our under 25 set has yet to learn.

[yqtszhj]

$2.30 an hr. washing dishes, 8 hours a day.

$120 every 2 weeks take home and I could still burn through it all in one weekend.

[HDoc]

Camp counselor at Camp Curtis S. Reed, Boy Scouts of America, near
Sarenac Lake North of Lake George, NY. $125 for the whole summer.
Probably came to about .15/hour. But I had a bolt action Savage .22lr rifle with my name on it and unlimited ammo at the range!

[Scoundrel]

Camp counselor at Camp Curtis S. Reed, Boy Scouts of America, near
Sarenac Lake North of Lake George, NY. $125 for the whole summer.
Probably came to about .15/hour. But I had a bolt action Savage .22lr rifle with my name on it and unlimited ammo at the range!

That's a hell of a perk!

[Ol'coot]

First real job when I was 15 was working weekends cleaning up floors at the local optometry lab (The General Manager was a family friend) where they ground the lens for prescription eyeglasses. It took the biggest part of both days to fully clean the office and shop area a good 14 to 16 hours of hard work sweeping first, then vacuuming to get up the remaining glass grinding dust then mopping the floor with strong cleaners to get up the dye spilled from the tinting process. And I was paid $50.00 cash a lot of money for a kid in 1969 so I worked my A$$ off to keep the job and keep them happy.

[Tinman507]

Camp counselor at Camp Curtis S. Reed, Boy Scouts of America, near
Sarenac Lake North of Lake George, NY. $125 for the whole summer.
Probably came to about .15/hour. But I had a bolt action Savage .22lr rifle with my name on it and unlimited ammo at the range!

It's about $3500/summer now and still comes to about .15/hour. Lotta hours in those 8 weeks.

[Ubaldo99]

Hey Trigger-Man, my wife is from Trenton, MI, just downstate from you. She says to say "hi". Anyway, I grew-up on a dirt farm in north Texas and so my first job was unpaid slave doing all kinds of grunt work around the farm. My first "real" (i.e. paying) job was working on the loading dock of a small truck refrigeration plant about 25 miles north of Dallas. So what did I do? All the dirty work from unloading deliveries to loading outgoing shipments to cleaning the restrooms, mopping floors, etc. What did it pay? $1.25/hour. Ah, those were the days!

[ltxi]

Skipping the paper route, caddie, etc. thing, my first Social Security paying job..thanks for that phrase Old Lincoln!...was after school selling shoes in a local store during my last year/year and a half of high school.

Needing a full time job after graduation, I hired on with our small town as a cop for $60/week. Kept my "motorized" rural paper route for awhile, too, for the extra money.

[Cokeman]

Skipping the paper route, caddie, etc. thing, my first Social Security paying job..thanks for that phrase Old Lincoln!...was after school selling shoes in a local store during my last year/year and a half of high school.

Needing a full time job after graduation, I hired on with our small town as a cop for $60/week. Kept my "motorized" rural paper route for awhile, too, for the extra money.

Al Bundy, is that you?

[ltxi]

Nope, I was was skinnier, had better hair, and my knees were more knobby.

But Al had it right in that shot. LE paid 50 cents more an hour, not counting unpaid overtime, you didn't have to deal politely with plus size women insisting their shoe size was 1/2 to a full size smaller than it was, and the department was issuing almost new Model 10 Smiths.

[Jeremiah/Az]

First job was a stock boy & floor sweeper in a hardware store for the crabbiest man I ever knew, 50 cents an hour. I had a paper route of 200 customers delivered on a bicycle before school too. Collecting was a b!tch! After college, I became an electrical lineman apprentice, $1.46 1/2 an hour, became a journeyman lineman. It was 1956.

[1radman]

'75-'77 my last 2 years of high school I dug holes and put up for sale signs for the local real estate company my mom worked for...$10 per sign I thought was good money. After that I worked every job known in the restaurant business. Bartending in my 20s was the best!

[JFootin]

Skipping the paper route, caddie, etc. thing, my first Social Security paying job..thanks for that phrase Old Lincoln!...was after school selling shoes in a local store during my last year/year and a half of high school.

Glad you didn't turn into Al Bundy!