Working Class Corner/Jobs

Russell Scott Day

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Work, the Spiritual Quest for the Material Necessities.

At age 11 in 1963 I started my paper route.   That business was run till I was 13 or 15?.   Summers of when I was a Boy Scout I was a Camp Counslor, and Assistant Commisary Director.

When away working at camp my younger brother and mother delivered the papers.

My brother embezzeled money from the business and I folded the business.

Later in my twenties I worked for awhile as a Circulation Manager, which is great grist for a Comedy Movie in consideration of what young paperboys in their first jobs, might do.

Certainly back in the day as is the case with most cash businesses there is an element of crime that arises out of the facts of cash.

Juke box businesses, and vending machine businesses, and cab businesses have colorful histories.

A job I had early in my working career came from my desire to build a Bomb Shelter.

In our Garden Lot I was observed digging a deep hole and an old man in the neighborhood offered me the job of painting a house for 30 bucks.

Whenever I was running out of paint he said, "Put more water in it."   30 feet in the air I got stung on my eyelid by a wasp.

The 4 foot deep and 4 foot square I had dug into the ground filled up with water and drowned rats, so one day I poured gasoline in it and threw in a match.

At the Boy Scout job, I and some others got fired for insubordination.

Oddly enough this was due to us who had fought out a terrific water battle with the Initiation crew of older Scouts, of our first year, still wanting to continue the tradition in later years.

What had been standard prior to our "administration" had been that the new crews were assembled in a room and taken out one by one to be tied to trees naked overnight covered in shaving cream and some like torture or humiliation.

We, came together and grabbing all the fire pumps fought back the superior force en masse.

It was a glorious battle.

Anyway the next year it was prohibited, and we felt cheated, and got fired.

Of course by that time I was a really good shot, and the guy that had trained me to shoot really hated the Camp Director, and they may have had some sort of fears I wasn’t aware of.

After that I think I moved and when in Chicago going to High School did about three weeks as a bag boy at a grocery store.

Got a scholarship to a Writing Program and they gave me some cab fair money I used as my allowance taking the El instead.

Did have to take a cab once due to extreme cold and had a terrific high speed curb hopping ride in a Checker Marathon.

I think I sold cameras in a camera store as my next job.

It is apparently similar to selling cars.