High school jobs. What was yours?

Pappy

Pappy

Living the Dream
Location
Moved back to NY from Florida. 🤓 2025
Back when I was a youngster, it was easy to find part-work, or even full time. While you were in high school, did you have a job, or jobs. I'll start it off.

Delivered our local paper, six days a week.
Planted Christmas trees.
Baled and stacked hay for local farmers.
Ushered at our local theater?

Worked as a bagger and cash register runner for our local market, Victory markets.

What was your job?
 

I babysat and had a thriving $1/hour business doing that. At the time, the going rate was $0.50/hour, but I advertised heavily in our apartment complex, the kids liked me, and I taught them reading and arithmetic when I got tired of playing with them.

I also worked at Burger King, and at a clothing store at the mall.
 

When I was around 15, I lasted about two weeks as the weekend graveyard shift busboy/pot scrubber at a local 24 hr diner. They let me go after I fell asleep on my feet in the middle of scrubbing the burnt residue from the bottom of a large pot around 5 am one Sunday morning.

A couple of years later at the beginning of my senior year, my surfing buddy got me a job at small mom & pop Italian restaurant he had just started working at. Another kid we went to school with had gotten him the job there a couple of weeks earlier. We were primarily pizza makers and dish washers, but we eventually worked our way into prep cook assistants working day shifts a couple of times a week.

It didn't pay squat, but we made our spending money and got to eat plenty of free pizza and spaghetti.
 
Mine was working part time in the garden shop of Ames ( a failed discount store). I filled in for this Italian guy, Lefty. Lefty was rumored to have lots of girlfriends, even though he was married. One day a woman came in and asked, "Where's Vigoro?" I figured 'Vigoro' was Italian, so she meant Lefty. So I said, "he's off today". She wondered off. When the manager came out to clear the register, I told him about a woman asking for Lefty. He wanted to know all about it- maybe a little dirt? When I told him, he fell down on one knee laughing. You see Vigoro is a famous fertilizer brand.
 
jujube said:
Babysitting my younger sisters after school and during the summer. For which, I might add, I didn't get paid. Hmmmph. All my friends had these glorious 50-cent-and-hour jobs like lifeguarding and working as a car hop. I was so jealous.
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One of my best friends worked as a mechanic at his father's European car repair shop, working on MG, Triumph, Jaguar and Lotus sports cars. He "got paid" for it, but only when his dad felt like it, or could afford it. He had five siblings. Four younger sisters and one younger brother.

Plus his maternal grandmother lived with them, too.

Lotta groceries to buy.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
Mine was working part time in the garden shop of Ames ( a failed discount store). I filled in for this Italian guy, Lefty. Lefty was rumored to have lots of girlfriends, even though he was married. One day a woman came in and asked, "Where's Vigoro?" I figured 'Vigoro' was Italian, so she meant Lefty. So I said, "he's off today". She wondered off. When the manager came out to clear the register, I told him about a woman asking for Lefty. He wanted to know all about it- maybe a little dirt? When I told him, he fell down on one knee laughing. You see Vigoro is a famous fertilizer brand.
Click to expand...

Hahaha, did you ever tell busy Lefty?
 

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