Tauck Tours
My first job was working for my friend Chuck's father's tour agency in New York City in the Summer of 1967. I was 11 at the time. I would take the train into Manhattan from Westport CT with my father and then he'd walk with me past the building where Tauck Tours was located, and then continue to his job. I'd be pretty much on my own all day, though Chuck (a year older than me) was working there too. I would go out to lunch by myself, usually at The Chock Full O' Nuts diner across the street. My first paycheck was for $44, which represented a couple of weeks’ pay, with a bonus. My father remarked that it was more than he got in his first paycheck out of college.
What I did was mainly stuffing envelopes with glossy brochures. Tauck Tours was represented by travel agencies throughout the country, and the agencies would request a certain number of brochures for each of the tours Tauck offered. They’d hand them out to customers who were attracted by the tours. We had all the brochures in big piles arranged alphabetically around a huge table and we walked around it, looking at the blackboard to see who’d requested how many of what, and selecting batches to be wrapped up and sent to each agency. I came up with the innovation of dropping the twine with which the brochures were tied onto the floor instead of throwing it out, so we'd have a softer floor to trod than the tiles, which ended up giving us sore feet by the end of the day.
Handyman
I had several gigs doing unskilled jobs at our house and for neighbors and friends around where we later lived in Bethesda MD. These gigs were scattered around in time, in between the next two jobs I list. Several I remember were exterior painting, mowing lawns, cleaning a neighbor's house before they moved in, and doing interior painting for our neighbors, the Lindsays.
The Washington Marina
My Dad bought a boat at the Washington Marina (https://www.washingtonmarina.com/), on the Washington Channel in downtown DC. And he convinced them to give me a job there, for two Summers while I was in High School (1970 and 1971). I was officially a shipping and receiving clerk, and I had an actual desk (really a counter). But they did not hesitate to have me do all kinds of unskilled stuff, like cleaning boats and sweeping floors.
I was also the guy they sent to our dark stockroom in the attic to fetch stuff for customers. And I always hit my head on metal beams up there. I remember going up there for an outboard motor once and hitting my head on the way to the back, where they were. I got the motor and was struggling out of there, then hit my head even harder on that same beam coming out.
Some of the long-term employees were great. I remembered being in the middle of cleaning a boat and beginning to feel as if I'd be a wage slave forever, when one of my adult buddies there strolled by and said in his gentle Southern accent, "C'mon along Jon, it's quittin' time!" That phrase has stayed with me all my life.
My pay was the federal minimum wage of $1.55/hour. They hired another guy my age and I found out they were paying him $1.65/hour and I was pissed! I talked to my manager and he told me that the new guy had dropped out of school and needed a permanent job, while I was going back to prep school and then on to college and before I knew it would be one of their rich customers. I still felt it was unfair for me to get lower pay for the same work, but it was a good reality check.
The Carousel
This was an upscale toy store that was originally located in Westport CT, where we lived in the 60s. It moved to NW DC right about the time we moved to Bethesda. It was owned and managed by a friendly but strict woman whose name I forget.
The Carousel employed me at various school breaks throughout High School and then most significantly, during Summers in high school and my freshman year of college (1972, ‘73 and ‘74). I helped out at the register and with sales during times like the Christmas rushes. We did free gift wrapping and I got pretty good at it, once wrapping five ping-pong balls in a tight package with no container. But I mostly was off the floor doing shipping and receiving and helping the assistant manager, my buddy, going on the road to assemble swing/gym sets in people's back yards. When needed, I picked up deliveries in the general manager's old station wagon, which was a death trap of a car and barely had any brakes, I had to downshift to get it to slow down.
The Carousel was located in a strip mall in NW DC, on Massachusetts Avenue, North of American University. I can’t find the exact spot on a map now. My Mom or Dad dropped me off at work most days, but sometimes I’d take the family station wagon myself. In my last year there we moved out to a shopping center in Bethesda, still not far from where we lived.
I think this was a minimum wage job also, though I may have gotten some small raises. I brought lunch and ate at the shipping counter in the basement or in the back room. I liked working there, I liked the people and dealing with toys was fun. We were selling quality stuff that kids would love, though some of the customers were a little too full of themselves, which fit in fine with my general impression of Washington.
The U.S. Tariff Commission
I realized that I had to make some better money in my Summer/vacation jobs, and the answer was to get a U.S. Civil Service job. I taught myself typing at home (at my mother's urging) and tried many times to do well on the periodic typing tests the Civil Service would give. The middle-aged women who were also at the tests gave me some serious evil eyes; who was this long-haired white kid who wanted to take a "woman's" job from them and keep food off their tables? Maybe that's why I never did well, good speed but enough mistakes to sink me, probably because of the evil eyes.
This was a big step towards a “real” job for me. I remember early one hot, humid, and rainy morning, when I’d been dropped off at some government building where I was going to apply for a job or re-take the test, or something, and watching all the people … not too much older than I was … streaming in from the street, shaking out their umbrellas and getting in line for the elevator, which would take them up to their boring offices where they’d slave away all day at jobs they didn’t like (as I imagined), working for Nixon’s government. None of them were smiling. I asked myself how much I really wanted to do that, even if it paid real money. It was a chilling moment, and my vow that I’d never get desensitized to a job I didn’t like has stood by me.
In any event, I did well enough on the tests to get a job as "Clerk Typist 1" at the U.S. Tariff Commission at E and 8th Streets NW in DC. I kept trying to pass the Clerk Typist 3 test, which would have meant a couple of hundred bucks more for the Summer, though my job had nothing to do with typing. The agency has since changed names and location. This was supposedly the 3rd-oldest building in the District at that time, and it was sinking into the landfill that much of Washington was built on. The East half of it was condemned and empty, but we were in the West half, which was full, and I was working with two other guys in the basement. Dress for us guys (no girls there) in the basement was informal, though most of the people in the building were what we’d now call knowledge workers and wore coats and ties. At that point my Dad worked near there, so we car-pooled.
This was the Summer after my sophomore year of college (1975), when I had dropped out and didn't know if I'd ever go back. One of my cohorts was a student like me (Jeff), a little younger, and the other was an ex-Army guy (Buddy) who considered the federal Civil Service a sinecure. In fact, several people there told me, "Go back to college, get a degree, then get a Civil Service job and you'll be set for life."
The main output of the Tariff Commission at that time was an annual report, which was time sensitive. It was divided into an endless series of volumes and as soon as the eggheads upstairs finished with one, those of us downstairs had to get it copied out ASAP to all members of Congress, many in the Executive Branch, and a list of other government VIPs. Jeff, Buddy, and I ran a massive Xerox machine, and though most of our time was spent sitting around while waiting for another volume (we were encouraged to bring books and read at work when there was nothing to do), when one was ready we had to jump to work and get it copied for the mail room guys to deliver. Jeff and I were eager to get to work, but Buddy told us in a slow, authoritative voice, "Now hold on Jon and Jeff. The *first* thing we need here is a Standard Operating Procedure." And we spent our first week producing that and getting it approved, copied, and put in a binder where all could see it. The bosses were fine with that, they apparently considered it professional and normal. It was the government after all.
I had several adventures roaming the corridors of the condemned half of the building, when I snuck over there to smoke a joint or just to explore during down time. I encountered lots of cockroaches and sunken tunnels to other lost government buildings, with beady red eyes staring at me from down in the murk. I made and brought my lunch each day (usually just bread and lettuce) and would generally walk the few blocks down to the National Mall at lunch break and find a nice place to sit and eat. Boy is it hot in Washington during the Summer, and the white government buildings made the glare worse. At lunchtime of our last day, Buddy took me and Jeff to a strip club across the street for a goodbye party.
I can’t remember exactly what I got paid, but it was more than minimum wage (I kept taking the typing test because if I passed I could get GS3 pay rather than GS1, but to no avail). And the bosses liked me and might have found a better place for me if I’d wanted to continue. But I really wanted to get back up to my life in Massachusetts and leave the federal government and DC behind forever. The guys in the basement were fun and I made a number of friends at work, but I was a fish out of water there and was eager to leave it in the rear view.
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