vintage snapshot from Dave Gelinas’ collection
I was fifteen in the fall of 1968 and heard that the older brother of my friend was quitting his Saturday job at the Sunoco station on York Road in Towson because he was drafted. I walked there to talk to the owner, who also had a small fleet of taxis (Adams Cab) that he parked and serviced there. I told him I wanted the job. He looked me over and said, “OK, be here on Saturday morning at seven”. I’m quite certain he never asked how old I was (I was tall for my age).
My job was to open the station on Saturday mornings, and I was the only employee there all day. The owner dropped by on some Saturdays for a couple of minutes the first few weeks. I pumped gas, checked oil, air and water. I was responsible for the till and closing up at night; in other words, I was managing this station by myself on Saturdays. In between customers, I sat in the office listening to “Crimson and Clover” (over and over) on the radio, because it was only an AM unit and couldn’t get the new underground FM station I preferred. Kids would come by on their bikes to get air. And the two brothers who worked there during the week would drop by with their ’57 Chevy 2-door sedan hot rod, to tweak the engine a bit.
This was not a popular station, and I’d get maybe 15-25 customers all day.
Because it was a Sunoco station that sold the super-high octane 260 gas, a disproportionate number of customers drove high performance cars. I got a close-up and personal look at quite a few hemis and high-performance Corvettes, whose engines were typically crackling-hot as I checked the oil. One fuel-injected Corvette driver tipped me a five dollar bill after I carefully attended to his steed. That was as much as I made in several hours of wages.
Although I was fifteen, I would actually get up extra early to be there a half hour early. Why? I would take out one of the Dodge Coronet taxis sitting in back for a little exercise run around Towson so as to keep up my illicit driving skills. There were several tired ’65s with the slant six, but there was a ’67 with the new LA 318 V8. That became my early morning steed of choice, and I became convinced that the new LA 318 was noticeably peppier than the old “poly” 318 in our ’65 Coronet wagon. I had plenty of opportunity on those early saturday mornings before opening the station to reinforce that impression.
So what was your first job?
My first paid job was digging a trench alongside a railway outside a big farm machinery factory in Güstrow, then-East Germany (VEB Landmaschinenbau Güstrow), during a week in the summer of 1984. I was 16 and got paid 180 Ostmark. Never thought of it before but, yes, my first salary ever was in Commie money. At least the local cars were fun to look at (Trabants galore, 3-cylinder Wartburgs, old Skodas and mysterious rolling objects from Poland).
Later at 18 I sold sandwiches in Boston’s Prudential Center. First and last time I ever sat down in an Oldsmobile Cutlass. I can still hear the friendly rumble of its big V8. I still have the many National Geographic maps I bought at a second-hand bookstore outside Harvard. Oh, and that was the first time I got fired. Live and learn, as they say.
My first summer job at age 16 was at a local Panera Bread. They said I was too young to be on the cash register, so I cleaned tables, washed dishes, made coffee, mopped floors, took out the trash, and worst of all cleaned the bathrooms.
It taught me honest hard work but I absolutely hated it. It was then that I told myself that when I became and adult, I’d do everything I could to find a job/career I liked and one I could support myself with. Oh, and I also developed a severe aversion to food from Panera. 🙂
My first job started when I was 16 (gads! nearly 50 years ago!) and I became the assistant organist at our church. In an arrangement with the Catholic high school I attended, that paid my tuition there. Eventually I became the regular organist, and went on to various organist positions over the years. I went from playing a Hammond Concert Model (its big distinction was having a 32-note pedalboard, like real organs) to now playing a 59-rank pipe organ that does almost everything I could wish for.
One church I played for had a delightful small pipe organ in just the right size room, with just the right acoustics. It sounded wonderful. Years later, that church closed, and we were in the right place at the right time to get that little organ. It sits in our living room now, just the right size for the room, and not too loud. I can do a lot of practicing without having to go to the church!
Nothing connected with cars, although I think pipe organs rival cars in their complexity!
There are few things as thrilling as a big pipe organ in the hands (and feet?) of someone who can really open her up and let her sing.
+1! Ideally playing J S Bach’s “The Really Loud Parts”
Aside from delivering the Sunday ad circular “newspaper” and cutting lawns…
I worked in the warehouse of the area beer and wine distributor. My uncle, who’s only 4 years older than I am and practically a brother, worked there when he was in high school and put in the good word for me. So, the summer before I turned 16, my mom signed the forms that said I could work and I started packing orders to go out, loading/unloading trucks, the weekly cleaning of the trucks and warehouse, and helping deliver and stock for our bigger clients.
What this meant was that from the time I turned 16, I got a lot of seat time and parallel parking experience with large Chevy cargo vans and box trucks. Legally, I wasn’t meant to drive them if they were loaded with product, nor was I meant to deliver (I was only there as a helper), but it worked out plenty of times where I was tasked with loading up a supplemental order and delivering it, especially for our grocery store clients around Christmas.
Besides learning to parallel park giant vans with delivery bulkheads preventing any rear view aside from the side mirrors, I also picked up some bad driving habits from my bosses. They both always drove like they had somewhere to be, especially the one that had lost some of his feet from diabetes. He’d often have me drive for Saturday deliveries, especially if they were in the next county, and he’d bitch at me for wasting time and going too slow if I was observing the speed limit.
Driving a fully-loaded box truck 20 over the limit on the highway at age 16 gave me a healthy respect for paying attention to what I was doing!
Some of you had such cool first jobs.
At the end of grade 9 my buddy whose family owned a busy and profitable brickyard, needed grunt work to chip mortar off bricks. The use of old bricks in exterior house trim was becoming a thing. They paid $20 a pallet and I don’t recall how many layers of bricks a pallet had, but if the mortar chipped off easily a skinny kid like me could make a pallet in a day.
For the first few days my wrists ached from swinging that hammer. But I made good money for a 14 year old and lived the life of luxury that summer!
My first measurement task was collecting landing fees and administering the flying school at Cambridge Airport (UK), and asking the Chairman of Rolls-Royce Aeroengines to pay up when his HS125 dropped him off and flew off without coming into the office.
Happy days
My first job was as a dishwasher at a family-owned restaurant in our town. I remember riding in the owner’s Dodge A-100 van (can’t remember the exact year, but it was one of the 1964-70 generation) to pick up supplies for the restaurant.
As a teenager, I used to do odd jobs for neighbors, some of which was car related – washing, errands, simple repairs. I remember polishing a ’72 Buick Electra, delivering a ’75 Nova from Niagara Falls to Brooklyn and replacing a broken grille on a ’73 Dart.
Ace hardware at the Happy Canyon shopping center in southeast suburban Denver, when I was about 14 or so. I was a junior scutworker. That was no official job title or anything, I’m just using it now to mean I got to stock shelves and tidy up after customers, break down boxes and lug them out to the dumpster, assemble lawnmowers and barbecues, clean the bathroom (and clean it again after the sadistic-jerk owner went in there to smoke cigarettes and make as big a mess of it as he possibly could, deliberately right after I’d finished cleaning it), help customers find things, and do other menial tasks, but wasn’t allowed to touch the cash register. Rode to work on my Raleigh. Got fired for ugly reasons.
Then came a stint as a pressman’s assistant in a print shop, then as a cater-waiter.
And then came the wrecking yard job.
Every so often I’m rewarded for lollygagging at work on a Friday afternoon. I’da probably never gotten back to re-reading that Wrecking Yard post had I not been scrolling back a few days worth of CC posts this afternoon out of sheer desperation for anything other than work-related drivel. Great post. Fun stories. I’m sure I read it when it was originally posted, but somehow never acknowledged it. One of my CC favorites now.
»doffs cap« Thankya, sir!
The first paying job I had was a very part-time one on Saturdays at the Schwinn bicycle store in Findlay, Ohio. My dad’s business partner Jim Richards paid me 50 cents per new bicycle I put together from the shipping box. The year was 1964. I was 8.
After that, I did the same kind of thing at my dad’s store when it opened in 1965.
I had my first job when I was 13 years old. For two summers I had what would be described today as a “mobile car detailing” business. I went out into the neighborhood, scouted out luxury cars and offered the owners weekly exterior and interior cleaning. They had to supply water and a vacuum cleaner, and I supplied everything else (basically everything I could carry while riding my bike). The two cars I can remember off-hand were a dark green 1968 Olds 98 4-door and a white 1967 Cadillac Eldorado.
Pizza Pete’s in Glendale, Ca. Lasted about 9 months, wrecked my first car (1966 Beetle) while on company time picking up a 50 lb sack of flower from another store. Both car parts and flower were all over the street afterwards. Lost job when my car insurance went after the Pizza stores owner. Didn’t miss those hot brick ovens in August one bit. Did miss the free Dagwood style sandwiches!
I worked at Delp’s Gulf gas station on the Austin Highway across the street from the Frontier Drive-In in San Antonio in the early 60’s. After school and weekends it was a great place for a car nut to work. I learned a lot from SGT Delp (he was a retired military motor pool sergeant) from adjusting drum brakes, changing rear pinion seals, adjusting points and general tuneups. And I got paid for doing this! There I was putting expensive Cadillacs on the lift for oil changes and lubes. I never thought it as work, jst having fun with cars.
My first job was at a car wash in 1967. I was to clean the interior windows as the car exited (or should I say bolted, depending on the car) from the wash. It lasted two weekends.
Then I got a job in a shop repairing TVs. Much easier on the body. And better pay, too.
I lied on my age, said I was 13, so I could start deliver newspapers, as a summer temp for people going on vacations. Had many different routes.
They didnt discover it until end of summer when it was paytime, i purposefully “forgot” to deliver the income tax card for the first monthly pay period. I was only 11.
Paul,
1963 at the Gino’s in Towson…I remember the Sunoco station!