These first appeared in March of 2012 and I’ve added a few memories to them . . .
My First Job
I got my first job the summer before I turned 16 and it was in the neighborhood grocery. My Dad happened to be the meat cutter so I had an in. It was Lambert’s Grocery on Highland Avenue just a half block north of Michigan Street — almost downtown (1200 block east). It was very small and had wooden floors. I made 75¢ an hour and my first Saturday was a ten hour day. I stocked shelves, which I really enjoyed, especially using the price ticket machine. I learned to run the old register that didn’t tell you how much change to give back. You had to count the money back to the customer. Customers could run a tab and pay at the end of the month. I had a register card that slid through an opening on the side of the register and printed their total.
I sold Thunderbird wine for 64¢ a quart to a lot of customers and I can remember fresh donuts were 69¢ a dozen.
Months later, when Mr. Lambert retired, it became “Stefan’s Grocery” run by a Polish Jewish man who had survived the concentration camps during WWII. He never wore a coat in the winter — he never got cold.
On Saturdays, I took phone orders from shut-ins who couldn’t get out. We had about a dozen customers and I took the order, filled their order in boxes and figured out the total. Stefan loaded up the pickup truck and dropped the groceries off at no extra charge. I got to know the customers by what they ordered, usually about the same stuff every week. It’s amazing that the older you get the more you want the cookies and candy of childhood. You can tell a lot about a person by what’s in their grocery cart. Even now I often glance over at other people’s carts and think — oh, a lot of cleaning products — a “Mrs. Clean” or nothing but frozen dinners (how sad) single, hasn’t cooked a meal in years.
I remember that with that first paycheck of $7.50 (10 hours on a Saturday) I bought a swimsuit for $6.95. I actually kept a log of what I made and what I spent it on. I soon opened a savings account at American Fletcher Bank down on the Circle and started saving a little bit every paycheck. Money was tight at home too, and I can remember paying to fill up the oil tank we used to heat the house — cost $16 and that seemed like a lot of money. My daughter spent her first paycheck on a new bicycle for her little brother. He was 6 years old and had learned on her bike and she didn’t want him to get teased so she bought him a boy’s bike.
I liked that first job and I can still hear the sound the old register made and the front door as it banged shut.
My Second Job
The fall of my senior year in high school, my art teacher at Tech, Miss Phemister said that Mrs. Schneider who ran the art department office knew of an art job I might be interested in. It turned out her daughter worked downtown at Service Engraving on North Delaware next to the Wheeler Mission. It was a job preparing artwork for the engravers to make zinc plates for printing newspaper ads. I had never done anything like this, but I was an art major and good with my hands so I quickly learned the job. We took the gray wash and line drawings that the illustrators at the department stores like Ayres and Blocks had created and prepared them for the engravers. The artist used a special solution which made the washes in their illustrations glow using a blacklight. We had a curtained booth with slanted table top. We covered the art with clear acetate taped along one side and using a masking ink covered the black lines of the illustration. Somehow the photoengraving camera would separate the wash (halftone) from the line and it could be reproduced for the newspaper. Sometimes color could be added to the art but we had to do it by using amber lythe which was acetate that had an orange film on it. We used a swivel headed X-acto knife to outline the color area and pull away the background – kind of like cutting a stencil. It was tedious. A printer reading this would say what the heck is she talking about, but I want to explain in layman terms – because the whole process to make the zinc plate was magic to me.
I did learn a lot at Service and we had an older artist who was an expert at airbrushing. He could take a photograph and take out all the background and make it look great. I learned airbrushing too and paste up of ads from a layout. It turned out to be great for my career and future. I made $1.40 per hour which was better than minimum wage, which I think was about $1.25 back then.
We also had a department that make rubber stamps with a person’s signature. I had to take acetate and tape over their signature and with a dip pen and black India ink trace their name — I got really good at forgery — good thing I’m not the criminal type.
I ended up working there my senior year and all 4 years of college. I got my sister and brother jobs there and also my best friend, Miki from college. My husband’s father, Bob Nicewanger was a photoengraver there, so I met my future husband, Steve in that masking department.
Next time my first teaching job.