Jobs I have had

My first job was a paper route.

I was in the eighth grade. We had recently moved from Daisy to Red Bank. My mother worked at the A&P Grocery Store in North Chattanooga. She heard from someone about the paper route becoming available in our neighborhood and signed me up.

There were two papers in Chattanooga at the time: The morning paper was the Chattanooga Times, The evening paper was the News Free Press. My route was the morning Times. I had to pick up my papers at 3:30 AM. The district manager dropped them off in front of a little neighborhood grocery store that was located on the corner of Martin Road and Dayton Boulevard. There were three other paper routes that picked up their papers at the same spot.

The other three boys had motorcycles and could throw their papers pretty fast. I was only 14. I had to use my bicycle. Except, on Sunday the paper was so big I couldn’t carry them on my bicycle and I had to walk. I remember when Uncle Wendell came back from Korea he stayed at our house for week. He took me on my route two mornings in his new 1954 Ford Crowned Victoria Two-Door Hardtop. The third morning I asked him he wouldn’t get up.

I had 75 customers. The papers cost me 3.75 cents each and they sold for a nickel. If everyone paid me, I made 1.25 cents times 75 equals 93.75 cents per day. I usually had to buy two extra papers to insure I didn’t run out. That brought my profit down to about 88 cents per day. I had to go around to collect on Saturday.

I gave up my route the next summer when we went to Oklahoma to visit Mom’s relatives for two weeks. I was really glad to get rid of it.

Mulkey and Jackson Super Market

When we got back from Oklahoma my mother got me an interview with the manager at the M&J Super Market on Cherokee Boulevard. I got the job of bagging groceries. It paid 65 cents an hour. I worked 4:00 to 10:00 two days a week plus Saturdays. I usually got 15 to 18 hours a week. It was a lot better than the paper route. I worked there until I graduated High School. I learned to work the cash register and stock shelves.

Chattanooga Gas Company

I failed English and History my senior year because I didn’t go to class. I planned to take them in summer school at Kirkman High School. But my dad got me a job at the Gas Company. I worked common labor in the street department. I dug ditches. The man who hired me gave the job on one condition: I would go back to school and go to college. I worked in the street department for a year. The next Summer I transferred to a job gassing trucks. I came in at 4:00 am and worked until 8:30. I went to Kirkman Summer School, satisfied my high school requirements, and managed to get accepted to the University of Chattanooga on “Special Student” status. I started college classes that Fall. My grades were good enough to get off “Special Student” status. Actually, I made an “A” in Freshman Composition.

Insurance Debit

When Judy got pregnant I quit school and got a full time job working an insurance debit. I had to collect weekly premium insurance and sell health insurance and life insurance in an area just east of 3rd Street in Bushtown, near Carver Park. It was a terrible job. It wasn’t even a job, it was a life changing lesson in ethics. I saw a side of life that very few white people see. I think I am a better man for having done it, but I can’t recommend it. I came to realize the terrible things Insurance companies do. One Friday I quit, walked out of the office on Ninth Street (MLK Boulevard) at noon. I walked South on Market Street without a plan. I got to the Southern Railway Station and noticed the Railway Express Office. I remembered my Uncle Charles worked for them in Oklahoma when I was five. I walked in and asked if they were hiring.

Railway Express

The following is extracted from Wikipedia:

The Railway Express Agency (REA), founded as the American Railway Express Agency and later renamed the American Railway Express Inc., was a national package delivery service that operated in the United States from 1918 to 1975. REA arranged transport and delivery via existing railroad infrastructure, much as today's UPS or DHL companies use roads and air transport. It was created through the forced consolidation of existing services into a national near-monopoly to ensure the rapid and safe movement of parcels, money, and goods during World War I.

REA ceased operations in 1975, when its business model ceased to be viable.

When I walked into the REA office the man at the desk let me fill out a job application and he put me on the Extra Board, pending a government background check. The next day they called me to come in to work. I unloaded box cars onto high flatbed wagons with iron wheels.

I had to wait at home to be called to come in. When I worked I worked a full eight hour shift. Sometimes I worked nights and sometimes I worked days. After a couple of months I started getting called for delivery truck driver jobs. The pay was good. It was union rate. It was the best paying job I ever had. But, the company was poorly run. I worked out of the Southern Depot which is now the Choo Choo. The company used the railroad for handling the mail. They had a monopoly on the mail handling and they didn’t worry much about efficiency or customer service. The railroad mentality is not compatible with quality improvement. I enjoyed the good pay until I experienced after Christmas when the work slowed. I went a few days without getting called to work so I looked for a regular job. I found one at Jim Eberly’s tire store.

Jim’s Quality Tire Center

Jim Eberly was a self made man. He started the tire store on a shoestring. I think he had about $1,000 and a loan of tire inventory from Hood Tires. He had three employees when I went to work there. Betty was the bookkeeper and credit manager. A black guy changed tires. A white guy from North Georgia helped Jim wait on customers and he also changed tires. I started out installing new tires on cars and soon started waiting on customers.

I didn’t make as much money as I did at REA, and I worked more hours: 5 1/2 days per week and 11 hours a day on the full days. But I didn’t have to wonder if I was going to work each day.

Jim really loved haggling over price. He enjoyed the game of letting the customer bargain him down on the price. Everything was marked up 10% just for that purpose. Jim ran ads on Channel 12 with him talking through a tire. Jim did very well in his little business. He moved to Valleybrook. He ran for city commissioner, and won. He was pissed at me when I quit to go to work at DuPont.

DuPont

I applied for a job at DuPont but I didn’t get considered until Jim Sullivan put in a word for me. Jim went to the same church on Signal Mountain as the Personnel Manager at DuPont. One Sunday at church Jim asked him to pull my application. They called me in for an interview. I passed the physical and went to work. I felt like I had my first really good job. I had full benefits, retirement, better pay, less hours, and the work was clean and inside. The only negative was having to work swing shift.

The economy was growing. DuPont was expanding and they kept hiring. I soon moved from my Group 1 job to group 3. Group 3 jobs are semi-skilled and require three to six weeks of training. Over the next several years I took advantage of opportunities to train on a lot of different jobs. With the expansion and the additional hiring there were lots of job moves. In the nine years that I worked as a wage role employee I worked almost every group 3 and group 4 job in the plant.

I went to work for DuPont in August of 1963. In the summer of 1965 DuPont liberalized their Tuition Refund program to include wage role employees. I signed up immediately and registered for classes at The University of Chattanooga. Over the next seven years I took two or three classes at a time. I went to day classes. DuPont allowed us to switch shifts with someone on the same job, one day at a time. It was not much trouble to get someone on 4-12 to swap for my 8-4. For the next seven years I worked a lot of 4-12 shifts.

When I got my degree in 1972 I managed to get an interview for a salary job. An engineer in the plant had heard about my going to school and he took an interest in me. He too had gone to school while working as an operator. He pestered the HR people until they agreed to pull my application and grant me an interview. I would not have gotten the interview had it not been for that engineer.

There was only one other wage role person in the plant (4,800 employees) that was taking advantage of the tuition refund. It was a woman who worked as a janitor cleaning bathrooms. She took the janitor job because it was straight 4-12. She got her degree in accounting. She could not get an interview for a salary position. What’s really ironic, is that she got offers for accounting jobs (not with DuPont) that paid less than she was making as a janitor at DuPont.

Process Chemist

My first salary job with DuPont was daily monitoring the physical and chemical properties of certain hosiery yarns, and make adjustments to process settings as needed. I knew nothing and I had to scramble to get up to speed. They gave me bunch of stuff to read and turned me loose. I was able to learn the job without screwing up bad enough for anyone to notice.

Quality Control

The next assignment was making disposition of product that didn’t meet specifications, and investigating customer complaints. It was a good job, and I knew what to do, but I had a real screwy boss. He was getting a divorce and he was living in the Red Bank Motel. He really lost his ass in the divorce. Once he called me to his office to talk about something and he fell asleep while I was talking to him. He would call weekly meetings and ramble on about some vague philosophical topic for 30 minutes to an hour. Everyone would look at each other and roll their eyes. Danny Daniker was in the group. When we left a meeting Danny would say: “What the hell did he say?”

Spinning Supervisor

I worked about two and a half years as a first line supervisor. I supervised about 30 people in first floor 9-B Spinning. I was back on swing shift.

9-B was the oldest process in the plant. It was developed in 1939 at the very beginning of Nylon. It is quite remarkable that it was still a viable product line after 30 years. It actually continued for 20 more years after that.

I did not like being a supervisor.

Customer Service

I finally got back to a day job. I was the plant contact for hosiery yarn. I took calls from the Tech Service reps about customer complaints. I investigated the complaints, authorized returns, and decided what to do with the returns. I also traveled a lot. I had never flown commercially before. I went with the Tech Service reps to visit customer’s mills. Hosiery textile mills were mostly in North and South Carolina, East Tennessee, North Georgia, and South Virginia.

My favorite take away from this job was learning about the Industrial Revolution. I had studied the industrial revolution in History class and did not find it very interesting. But seeing all those mill towns and knitting mills gave me a proper understanding of the great movement. The textile industry is the Industrial Revolution. I could see clearly the changes in how people live in the mill towns compared to how they lived on the land. I didn’t come away with a lot of judgement about it. I just came away with clarity. It’s a nice feeling to really understand history like that.

Systems Analyst

During my time in customer service I started using a computer. I got a customer complaint about some yarn that didn’t meet specifications. I talked to a colleague about it and he suggested using statistical analysis of the physical property in question. I don’t remember what property, but say “tensile strength”. He also told me we had a keypunch machine and card reader in our lab. He said it was possible to transmit data from the card reader over the phone line to a computer in Wilmington Delaware. Then the computer would send back the statistical analysis results.

After work I would stay late and teach myself how to keypunch cards. Then I learned to write the instructions for the analysis and for returning the results.

After a long and frustrating period of trial and error, I learned how the damn thing worked. I sent samples of the returned product to the lab. I punched cards for the instructions to do the analysis. I punched a card for each test result. I punched cards for the return of the results. I asked for an average, standard deviation, and a recession analysis. Now you can do it on your phone.

I ran the cards through the reader and printed the data from the cards. I checked it and made corrections. Then I ran them through the card reader again with the transmit card. The data went to Wilmington and the results came back within a couple of hours.

After I got the results I had to teach myself statistics to understand what I had.

About the time I was learning statistics, DuPont announced they were opening an office in Charlotte, NC for computer program development for Quality Control. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted it.

I went to Chattanooga Tech and signed up for BASIC and Fortran programing languages. They were two 3 hour classes. I started classes in January. I applied for tuition refund. My screwy boss had to approve it so he knew I was studying programing. Half way through the Semester my boss asked me if I would like to be the Chattanooga plant rep for the computer project in Charlotte. Duh!

For a year I went to Charlotte on Monday and returned to Chattanooga on Friday. I filled out my expense report and went home.

Wendey was a senior. We were living in Mountain Creek Apartments. God and Wendey only know what went on during the week while I was in Charlotte.

After a year of commuting I was transferred to Charlotte. Wendey went to college and lived in the dorm. Ted went to Memphis.

The job in Charlotte was writing specifications for a Computer Aided Manufacturing computer system. The first year was a lot of training and classes. We had about 33 people working on the project: about twelve analysts writing specs and the rest were programers writing code. We worked two years and spent five and a half million dollars and didn’t have anything that worked.

Wilmington said: “Stop! Don’t do anything else. We have to re-think this project.”

The project was so big that IBM consultants had been telling us for a long time there was no way you can build one program that big.

During the three months that it took for Wilmington to decide to pull the plug, the Charlotte group extracted a little piece of the system that sort of worked. The little piece had three parts. One of the parts was mine.

Wilmington gave us the go-ahead for the little Quality control piece. My part was Statistical Process Control. The other two parts were Product Release and Statistical Analysis.

I was rewarded with the job of installing, testing and training at the four European plants: Northern Ireland, Luxembourg, Holland, and Germany. I got to go to Europe six times on that assignment. I had never been to Europe before.

Quality Control

We had eleven plants in the US and Canada, and four in Europe. After the Quality Control system was installed and operating the Charlotte computer group was ended. My friend Ed Hill asked me to transfer to Martinsville to manage the QC system for them. I accepted. That was in 1990. In 1992 DuPont started getting out of the Textile business. I took early retirement in 1995 with a full pension and one year’s pay severance.

Student at Virginia Tech

Part of the severance package with DuPont was $3,000 for re-training. Since I couldn’t get a job, I used the money to attend Virginia Tech. I started out with a goal of a BS with a major in physics. But after a while I changed to math. I attended VT for two years: ’96 and ’97. I quit because of problems with my heart.

High School Chemistry Teacher

While I was at VT I had taken a couple of education classes. I applied for a teaching job at Bassett High School, teaching science. I taught Earth Science and Chemistry. I hated it. After two months I turned in my resignation. They didn’t find me a replacement until two weeks before the end of the school year. I had my bypass surgery in October and they didn’t even replace me then. I can understand why they couldn’t find a replacement. Teaching is not fun.

Sailor

I bought a sailboat around 2000. I am not sure exactly when I got it. I have had a lot of great adventures with it. I have been to Key West twice, The Bahamas twice, up the east coast, and down the Intracoastal waterway. I could not have done all the sailing I did without the help and companionship of my good friend Robert Terrell. I miss him.

Substitute Teacher

When I moved to Georgia I took a shot at substitute teacher at Lovejoy High School. I will never do that again.

General Contractor

I took a shot at being a general contractor. I will never do that again. I worked my ass off 11 hours a day 6 days a week for over a year and lost $40,000.

Quality Manager

I took a job as Quality Manager for a small manufacturing plant in West Atlanta. They were a very small operation. The owner ran it with about six or seven employees. They held a couple of patents and made tomato containers for the fast food business. I had been there about five weeks when the owner yelled at me. I quit. I guess I really don’t want to work any more.

2010 Census Data Entry

I took the census job for the fun that’s in it. I enjoyed the work and the people I met there. The job lasted a few weeks during the summer. I worked the night shift doing data entry.

Truck Driver

The truck driving thing was on my bucket list. In 2007 I wanted to go sailing in the winter. It was going to cost a few thousand dollars to go back to the Bahamas. The stock market was down and I didn’t want to take money out of mutual funds while it was down. So, the combination of bucket list and need for cash led me to go to truck driving school. I loved it, at first. I didn’t have any trouble with the school. I passed my driving test on the first try. I had to parallel park an 18 wheeler. No problem.

I went to work for Werner Trucking. After a couple of weeks as a student driver I got my own truck. My first job was pick up a load in Alabama and take it to Canada. I went in through Detroit and came out through New York.

After five weeks with Werner I didn’t like the way my dispatcher was treating me so I quit. I took off a couple of days and started driving for J. B. Hunt. It is no problem getting work so long as your record is clean. You quit, they don’t care. Just turn in your keys to the garage.

Driving a truck is a hard life. You have to sleep in a truck. You are gone from home weeks at a time. Truck drivers either get fat from eating out every meal and sitting all the time; or, they get real skinny from taking drugs and driving all the time without eating.

After seven months I had my fill and it was time to sail to The Bahamas.

Cafeteria Worker at Canyon, Yellowstone National Park

Carrie Bruce told me about the Yellowstone Helping Hands program. I applied and got a job. I worked 20 hours a week: four hours a day, five days a week. I worked at the cafeteria at Canyon. Sometimes I served food and sometimes I bussed tables. The rest of the time I was free to see Yellowstone. I hiked almost every day. I slept in a dorm. I ate in the EDR (Employee Dinning Room). They paid me $10.25 per hour and took out for my room and food. After expenses to drive up there and back, I broke even. But I lived in Yellowstone.

Poll Worker

I worked the polls for the 2020 Presidential Election and 2021 January General Election. I learned to set up the polling place. I learned that poll workers do everything they can to make sure everyone that wants to vote can.

Snow Lodge Grill, Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park

In 2020 I went back to Yellowstone to work. I was assigned to Old Faithful Food and Beverage. My job was Snow Lodge Grill. I worked from 3:30 until around 7:30. I got 40 minutes for dinner. My job was to stand at the door and make sure everyone wore a mask over their nose and mouth. After closing I helped clean up. Usually I mopped and ran the dirty side of the dishwasher.

Yellowstone was not as fun in 2020 as it was in 2019. With covid there was no pub, no gym, no group activities, dinning room food was carryout in a cardboard box, and no socializing in the dorms. I got fed up and left a week early. They were closing up anyway. The good that came out of it is I met Mary Ann. That has been real nice. Meeting her has changed my life!