Having been stuck inside of Mobile with the coronavirus blues on end, I partook of the Facebook game; naming 10 jobs I've had and challenging folks to find the bogus one.
In putting together what I thought of as my first "real job", though, I neglected to consider that I had been working well before that. When I was younger, I would make money by shining shoes. We would construct a shoe-shine box and two or three of us would go into the bars.
When I got to be 14, I graduated into a more staple source of income, pedaling The New York Times And The Daily News to the same bar clientele. The paper came out at night and we had routes. We would gather at the Palace Theater on Jersey City's Newark Avenue, pretty much the same way you see it in the movies: a big truck would zoom in and throw out the bundles; we would queue up for our allotments, make our rounds and get back home before I suffered the embarrassment of my mother screaming my name out the window.
But at 16 I was finally able to work, now as a Western Union bicycle messenger. It was a well-paying union job, nearly $9 an hour in 1960 with all of the usual restrictions about overtime hours and pay.
But it was also a dangerous and hard job. If the weather didn't kill you some jerkoff throwing bottles, trying to steal your bicycle, or mug you, could.
Or, it might even be one's own hubris. We messengers became so cavalier about our ability to ride a bicycle that we would fight - with cars, and trucks, and busses - for control of the roadways. Playing chicky with a car, I hit a patch of ice, slid about three hundred feet down a hill and landed underneath it, breaking my wrist. If I told my mother she would make me quit my job. Telling work would jeopardize my job. I told no one and to this day, my left hand has limited function.
I quit one night when it got so cold that my bicycle froze up in the few minutes that it took me to go upstairs to an apartment and deliver a telegram.
Some time after that we moved to Puerto Rico. I had quit high school a month shy of graduating. I tried it again and, again, I quit high school, going to work with my uncle doing construction. A few months of tying rebar and mixing cement by shovel in the tropical sun convinced me that quitting school had been a horrible mistake.
I joined the Air Force and, luckily, ended up in Panama City. I started hanging out at the base pool, became certified as a lifeguard so I could work there. Eventually I got certified as a Water Safety Instructor.
When I mustered out of the Air Force, I returned to Panama City to go to school. The GI Bill stipend wasn't enough so I got a job as a Yellow Cab taxi cab driver. This was 1968. After 4 years of being in the military, I grew my hair long and let my freak flag fly. I ran into a bunch of folks from Alabama who were starting a head shop at the beach. I became their airbrush artist.
Eventually we encountered rednecks, go figure. They ran my wife and I out and we ended up in this sanctuary called Alabama. I enrolled at the University of South Alabama and, given what had happened to us in Florida, became heavily embroiled in the tumult of that day.
I'm not really clear on some of the timelines. Because we had to work, my wife Donna and I would take breaks from school while one of us took a job. I know that for a while I worked at the Fairhope Courier as a journeyman printer for two of the finest conservative men I've ever known. I was also an itinerant photographer for Prestige Photography and Donna and I would make sand candles to sell to art stores.
Eventually we graduated and moved to Puerto Rico. We both worked as copy editors for a university journal and I worked for the board of education as a graphic artist and, eventually, as a teacher in a private school (where my pedagogic career was cut short when I picked one of those little fuckers up by his neck and slammed him up against the blackboard).
Puerto Rico knocked us on our ass, though. We had gone there looking for teaching jobs. But the Puerto Rican system was so lethargic that nine months later we still hadn't even gotten an interview. Straight out of the counter cultural milieu, we had plunged back into a 1940's level of consciousness and, of course, a machismo that was a bitter pill for both of us to swallow. We decided to move back to Alabama. I swore I would not take a job I didn't want.
Consequently, I went unemployed.
I volunteered to work with the McGovern campaign and through the weirdest political flukes of all time we ended up running (ruining?) The Democratic party.
Desperate for a job, I went to the Press-Register. I had some credentials but, frankly, they probably weren't quite up to the "standards" of that flagship newspaper. I had been the editor of our college newspaper and of an underground newspaper.
But I gave it a shot. I was ushered into the office of John Fay. "I'm here", I told him. Naturally, he was puzzled. "Years ago", I told him, "I came here asking for a job. You told me to graduate and come back. Here I am."
He looked me dead in the eyes and chuckled, nodding his head and sporting a grin that I couldn't quite decipher; "That sounds like something I would say." But, he told me, that matter was no longer up to him. They had just hired a young man as the associate publisher. He was now in charge of hiring.
We went downstairs to meet him. As we were going down the stairs, though, we ran into my SGA president, David Parker. We greeted each other effusively. David looked at Mr. Fay and said "Here's someone you should hire." He was the new Associate Publisher. I was now a reporter. I worked for the paper for about a year until I got fired.
I had pitched John Fay and Fallon Trotter on the idea of a supplement to the newspaper that would be entertainment oriented. They didn't like it. Encourage drinking?, they asked. They saw no need for it.
So, using many of the Press-Register own staff, I published a monthly called the Azalea City News the concentrated at that time was being called soft news. I was called to a meeting in Trotter's office and told that I was competing with the Press-Register and giving a cease-and-desist ultimatum.
When the Azalea City News published the following month, I was fired. I ran the newspaper for four or five years, eventually selling it and becoming a paralegal at legal services.
Now confident that I was at least as smart as most of the lawyers that I had met, I went to and graduated from law School and returned to Mobile. Living there, I got heavily involved in downtown, became friends with many of the bar owners and eventually started DJing Latin night.
