…Sha na na na, sha na na na na….,
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Get a job Sha na na na, sha na na na na….
---from “Get A Job” as sung by The Silhouettes (1957) Now that most of the Class of 1958 has retired from the labor force or is thinking about it (or even wondering if they should rejoin it as the economy has soured), I wanted to search the collective memory about the beginnings of our working lives.
In Summer 1958, an occupation, a life work, or more likely a minimum wage money-maker became a reality for many of us.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual unemployment rate for civilians (age 16 and over) in 1958 was the highest in 10 years at 6.8%. It remained the leanest year for the next decade and a half until unemployment really spiked in 1975 at 8.5%. Of course, the unemployment rate of “the youth labor force” (aged 16-24) just starting out is normally much higher. Although I don’t have figures for 1958, for the past two summers it’s been around 10.8% as we’re seeing harder times again.
So we 1958 high school graduates were lucky if we could find work, and most of us realized we better buckle downand get the job done. None of this “rewarding internship experience” stuff back then.
The most common job categories of the 22 people (14 women, 8 men) who responded to my class poll were either the same as me, (a) doing clerical work in an office, or (b) they were counseling or looking after other people’s kids. Next came retail sales in local stores. Others were engaged in manual labor, outdoor maintenance, food service, or construction. One was learning how to survey and another how to play golf.
Life as a “Stripper”
I worked that summer and the next two in the offices of the Otto Milk Company at 2400 Smallman Street in the heart of Pittsburgh’s Strip District long before it became cool. In fact, on a hot summer morning, nothing smelled worse than sour milk wafting from the concrete floor of the dairy operation I had to pass through on my way up to the office. In those days the Strip was dingy, industrial, and if you wanted to go out for lunch, you needed to have a car. None of the female staff went outside much for anything other than to visit the bookie and play the numbers at the joint across 24th Street.
My mother had somehow wangled the job for me. There were no equal opportunity hires in those days; “pull” was likelier. Our Ingomar neighbor and vice president of the company, Tom Otto, was my benefactor. He was a gentle giant whose willingness to employ me went a long way toward financing my higher education. The first year I was disparagingly referred to by veteran office workers as “Tom Otto’s little friend,” but after I relieved them of some of their more tedious tasks and filled in during their vacations so they weren’t swamped when they got back, I was accepted as part of the summer landscape. I learned that a dairy operation had lots of characters, cliques, and office politics to observe.
The first assignment happily foisted upon me was receiving all the envelopes the drivers brought in from vending machines dispensing 8 oz. cartons of milk. The grimiest coins came from the steel mills across the river. I had to fish out the pennies and slugs and place the rest of the nickels, dimes, and quarters in a sorting machine that also counted them. Once tallied, they dropped down into canvas bags to be tied up and sent to the bank when the Brinks truck came by.
Once when I forgot to put on the canvas bags before I turned on the coin counter, I spilled the vendoland change all over the floor. I was scrambling around on my hands and knees for an hour wrecking my pantyhose and scuffing my white sling-back pumps. Of course, I never balanced that day.
Otto Milk (not to be confused with the cousin’s Otto Suburban Dairy on Camp Horne Road that delivered glass bottles of milk several mornings a week to our homes) went out of business long ago. The old building (above left) had originally been the Phoenix Brewery (est. 1873) and is now considered an architectural gem slated to become condos starting at $200,000 for young urbanites anxious to live in The Strip these days.
Other Jobs
Others commuting to office jobs in the city were Millie Halboth Sutter, who was bookkeeping at Pittsburgh National Bank (now PNC), and Connie Stevens Wilson, who filled out stock certificates, did other office jobs at her Uncle Charlie’s stock brokerage firm, which she says has influenced how she’s looked at investments ever since. Pat Cook Wisniewski and Ruth Ann Slack Scuticchio worked in offices in the North Hills: Pat for the home builders Brown & Vaughan on Perry Highway, McCandless doing secretarial and payroll duties that let to her full-time career; Ruth part-time in the office of the W. T. Grant store in Pine’s Plaza. Afterward, she shifted plans from nursing to attending Robert Morris Business School.
Down at the other Grant’s in
the McKnight Mall, Janet Gilleland was selling yard goods for most of the summer at the 5 & Dime (how's that for an outdated department and an outdated store category?) to save money to go out to Chicago and visit Karen Rudolf. She recalls: “One strong memory are two songs that Grant’s played on the overhead system. One was Volare (or Nel blu di pinto di blu) and the other was Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White. Another sales clerk and I would dance in the aisles (when the supervisors weren’t looking) every time one of them came on. [Click on titles to hear them if you feel a mambo coming on now.] Yard goods, which were not located in a high traffic area of the store, required folding and refolding and refolding….”
Pete Thurston was also clerking at the mall for a family-owned hardware store, where he earned the princely sum of $1 per hour (10 hours per day, 6 days per week, and no overtime). He enjoyed stocking and learning about hardware items, but especially disliked sweeping up the parking lot in the dark after the store closed.
Tending Kids
Up in Butler County some college-bound grads were staffing scout camps. Marge Downer Arciniega and Jami Hart (née Donna Osterwise) were counselors at Girl Scout Camp Redwing near Renfrew. Jami taught camping skills, crafts, and nature. As dramatics counselor for the two dozen 10- and 11 year-olds in Brookside Unit, Marge claims she perfected a skill that served her well in college: “Sleeping as late as absolutely possible and getting dressed really fast.”
On the Connoquenessing Creek nearby, Eagle Scout Bob Beilstein was working at a new camp, Semiconon, where he taught the boy scouts axmanship in the morning and in the afternoon, the use of a 22-caliber with bird shot to shoot clay pigeons. Although he was warned in advance that the campers might not dig axmanship, Paul Bunyan had nothing on him: he mesmerized them with his trick of swinging the large double-headed axe to light a match (a feat he might demonstrate at the reunion if the Sheraton can provide a match and an ax).
Nannies
Karol Kress Freburg, Marilyn MichalkoVelkey, and Grace Sherman spent some or even all of their summer caring for small fry. Mickey was a live-in nanny for the children of a pair of social butterflies in Monroeville, Grace was helping with a family of six children (age 12 and younger), and Karol (when not working in her dad’s Swap Shop) babysat two in Longvue Acres (across from NAHS). Although their father had suggested that Karol read the Bible to the children while they ate their dinner in silence and afterward have them write and draw about the lesson learned, she instead turned the radio to a rock-and-roll station. She didn’t know (until the father learned of her insubordination) that the radio was turned on only during breakfast when Dad wanted to hear the weather and driving conditions.
Mickey got taken along with the family to Jersey Shore for a week—but was only free to enjoy it early in the am. Grace escaped to the popcorn stand at West View Park, which was a lot more fun, especially those nights when big-name entertainers played there and she got to assist. Her only mistake was taking her lunch break on the roller coaster until finally the manager told her that it was making the paying customers ill to watch her eat a sandwich and drink a milkshake during the ride!
The Great Out of Doors
As an 18-year-old, I thought an outdoor summer job would be heavenly. Out in Bradfordwoods, Pat Henke Sexauer was selling pop, grilling hotdogs, and taking admission at Windwood Swimming Pool—while admiring the head lifeguard. Sounds pretty cushy—until you hear about Paul Mahoney’s job at the golf course in North Park. He mowed greens and fairways, cleaned picnic groves, painted guard rail posts—while receiving free golf lessons from the pro. He confesses that Democrats got all the best summer jobs Allegheny County had to offer, and since his dad was a ward politician in Pittsburgh, Paul held onto this plum for four summers.
In Ingomar, Tom Brunt was assisting Robert Becker, a registered civil engineer and surveyor (receiving $1.25/hour plus free gasoline for his 1930 Plymouth). He learned how to use a transit, draw maps, and do land surveys including the work for the Ross Township sewer system then being installed. It was good experience for the engineering degree Tom was already planning to pursue at Lehigh University in the fall.
Several classmates worked for or with their fathers. Ray Wick was mowing yards and being a handyman for folks when he wasn’t busy helping his dad on the farm. Arthur P. Brandt, Jr. was working for Brandt Paving, as he had since age 13. In 1958, Arthur P. Brandt, Sr. (known to his crews as El Toro) expanded his son’s responsibilities to include running heavy equipment and serving as crew foreman. Unlike those who enjoyed working outdoors on a summer day, Pete claims he prayed for rain so he could get a day off.
Despite various screw-ups, he says, “The one that forever endeared me to my fellow workers occurred while paving streets in Zelienople. We were in the final process of preparing the street late on a Saturday afternoon. We had a big dump truck loaded with #4 stone (the big 4-inch, hard-to-shovel bastards). We were shoveling them off the back of the truck and placing them where needed. Easy to do while in the truck on the flat hard steel dump body. It was time to pull the truck forward and being Super Driver, I jumped into the truck, started the engine, and pulled forward. No problem, except I had the dump hoist in gear and ten tons of #4 rock landed on the street at 5 pm. It took about three and a half hours to shovel them back into the truck. After the initial "THAT BOY DON'T KNOW, HE JUST DON'T KNOW" not much was said. I do know I shoveled more than my share, got home about 9:30 pm, was glad my dad was not there for the interrogation, and went to bed very early.”
More Manual Labor
Several other guys toiled away in plants. Ron Huch, at E. G. Smith’s in Emsworth, was also under the watchful eye of his father, who, he says, “was constantly embarrassed by my incompetence.” Ron answered the question “What did you learn from the experience?” succinctly and in words a number of us could second: “Physical labor was not for me. I knew that I needed to do well in college.”
Bill Vestal left home to spend the summer in a small plastic insulation plant in New Castle. In addition to the common experience of long hours, low wages, and exhaustion he had the experience of living on his own away from “Ingomar environs, feeling adult.”
Restaurants
Sue Sutter Mascia was head cashier at Howard Johnson’s
on the Pa. Turnpike at Warrendale during the era “when you counted out change without the benefit of a calculator and computer” and of course, the cash register had to balance with the receipts at the end of the day. Sue learned what stress was when double lines of customers formed to pay their bills. “It was such a fast-paced job that when I worked the evening shift and then went home to sleep, I couldn’t because I kept counting change in my head,” she says.
Karen Rudolf Jones waited tables starting at 6 am 5 days a week at a breakfast and lunch café in her new hometown of Geneva, Illinois. Along with most of us, she learned a lot about working with people from that summer. Indeed, numerous skills were being thrust upon us: taking responsibility, arriving on time and working late, managing money (our own and other people’s), handling job pressures, cooperating, keeping our mouths closed, being discreet, and keeping our dreams alive while enduring some boring duties.
Adulthood was staring us in the face!
* * *
There will be one more posting before I leave for the reunion on August 20.
shouldn’t expect we members of the Silent Generation (as those who were born in the years 1925-45 just before the Baby Boomers have been labeled) to stick our necks out or demonstrate much attention-seeking. We were raised to listen to parents and authority figures, follow leaders (such as the avuncular war-hero president Ike), and get with the program. Various books have been written about us: William Whyte’s Organization Man (1955), Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (made into a movie starring Gregory Peck in 1956), and David Riesman’s sociological classic The Lonely Crowd (1950), which coined the term “other-directed” to describe slavish attention to peer pressure. Riesman's book argues that although other-directed individuals are crucial for the smooth functioning of the modern organization, individuality is compromised.
No, I wasn’t expecting many comments at the end of my postings from my contemporaries. But I was very happy when people emailed me anecdotes about themselves that my recollections had stirred up. When someone wrote: “This is a personal message....copyrighted and protected...not for republication!!! Simply some musings to my friend.....” then I knew I had better watch my step!
