WORK AS A TEENAGER IN THE 1940s (Biography)

As a child, living in St. Paul, MN,to make some money, teenagers had snow shoveling, lawn mowing and trimming, changing screens to storm windows in the fall and storm windows to screens in the spring, including washing the windows at the same time. Sometimes you could earn a little by running errands for people or for caddying at the local golf course. Lawn mowing was the most profitable. All this was very competitive, not from the standpoint of what you would charge to do a job particularly, but who could get to the job first. I didn't mind mowing lawns but I hated trimming for some reason. Caddying was heavy work as most golfers at that time didn't use pull carts for the bags. You had to carry them by a strap over your shoulder. Sometimes they wanted you to take two bags, one for each shoulder. You got paid more, but it was awfully heavy work for me. My memory may be faulty, but I think you got $3 for one bag and $5 for two for 18 holes, actually not bad at that time for 3 or 4 hours work. Of course you could do three or four lawns over the same time and would probably earn more.

One of the residents in our neighborhood was a man by the name of Herbert Beutow who was Treasurer of 3M (as it is now called) who paid the best by far. In a snow fall there was a great rush among us teenagers to see who could get to the Beutow's first to shovel the walks. He paid $5 when you were lucky to get $2 from anyone else. Of course the Beutow lawn mowing was a coveted job too. And they gave out whole candy bars for Halloween, when others might give you a couple Hershey kisses. He eventually became Executive Vice President and later CEO of 3M and helped me get summer jobs at the 3M factories (tape slitting and abrasive belts) for three summers. The tape comes out of the tape factory in "jumbos" that might weigh as much as a ton and had to be slit down to usable size. You might run off a hundred commercial-sized tapes at a crack. The tape slitting plant ran three shifts: the Day Shift from 7:00 AM until 3:00 PM, the Swing shift from 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM, and the Graveyard Shift from 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM. You rotated every week from one shift to another, and it played hob on your system. In abrasive belts (sandpaper), we just cut belts from big jumbos of sandpaper and glued the abrasive belts together in a big hot press. Some of these belts were very large and used in the automobile industry or furniture making factories.

Working in tape slitting one summer when I was 20, there were tapes that had sticky sides after slitting so they were sprayed to make a plastic coating on them. The business was not good for 3M that summer,and all the youth on summer jobs were let go but me because I was the only one who enjoyed working in the spray room. I liked it because I was having sinus trouble that summer and the volatile solvent for the plastic cleared my sinuses, so I could breath through my nose. I was also recovering from a collapsed lung so I appreciated light work.

The summer after my senior year in high school, I couldn't get work at 3M so I got a job delivering groceries and stocking shelves for a grocery store. I think the name of the store was C.J Sonnen and Son. Not many grocery stores delivered groceries so they had a lot of business. Not surprisingly, many people who ordered groceries lived in second and third floor walk-ups, and you had to carry the folding grocery boxes loaded with canned good and bottles of milk up to the apartment. It could take an hour or so to make a full delivery round to quite a few houses so the people at the end got warm milk in the summer. Curiously some people that would complain would be ignored, but others got quick attention and my route would be changed to get to them early in the delivery round. I'm not sure but perhaps these "important" customers were the bigger customers. I also had to drag such things as 100 lb sacks of potatoes up steps to the main floor of the grocery and stock the shelves. The sacks of potatoes were the worst, but I also had to bring up cases of canned goods,sugar and flour. I worked over 50 hrs a week, as I recall, including Saturdays and got 55 cents an hour for this and no overtime. The middle aged man who got the fresh produce such as lettuce, celery, etc. early every morning and took care of stocking vegetables got paid only 50 cents an hour. I felt bad about that.

Also possible was short-time work during the canning season. You could get a job with Green Giant for maybe two weeks working with such things as corn and peas. I did corn one summer. There was this conveyor belt that brought the corn in cobs from the delivery trucks. My job was to pull back the husks and cut out any wormy parts. There were two kinds of worms: one was the simply the large corn worm and the other was smaller called the corn borer. Well the corn was delivered pretty fast on the belt, and, although there were two of us, quite a few corn cobs got passed us without the worm search. I wouldn't eat canned creamed corn for more than a decade after that, though there was no charge for the extra protein. And of course, everything was cooked and sterilized by the time you bought it.

Another job that lasted for four weeks (I don't recall why it was just four weeks, but maybe I was a fill in for regulars on vacation.) was with the meat packer Rath in south St. Paul. I did miscellaneous things, mainly cleanup, but I saw sausage being made and wouldn't eat sausage for years afterword either.

Then there was one job that lasted less than half a day. It was with a railroad, and we were to walk along the side of tracks and cut the weeds down with a big scythe. There were three of us that were to walk abreast, but the other two were older men. Well, I was the middle syther, and I was just scything away when I stopped briefly and looked back. The two old men were about half a block behind. The straw boss came up to me and told me to slow down. I suggested that the old men should speed up whereupon the straw boss called me a punk kid and I should go draw my pay. That was that.