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Readers share their first-job horrors

October 16, 2007 12:35 am

FREDERICKS- BURG'S Phil Heim doesn't have a hard time remembering his first few forays into the working world.

They're easy to recall, he says, because "most of my earliest jobs were distasteful and/or stretched the limits of my youthful patience."

The city resident, who joins other readers this week recalling the first and worst jobs, mucked out calf barns, weeded mint on his hands and knees and walked behind a mule-pulled tobacco sled in the hot Georgia sun.

And though he said those jobs were tough, they paled in comparison to his duties as a J.C. Penney shoe salesman.

"Even now, my nasal passages still shrink and squirm at the mere remembrances of those back-to-school seasons," he said.

Heim said his first day in the shoe department "introduced me to an endless stream of dirty little feet in summer-tired tennies, with soles, insteps and sweat-strained tops that reeked like a long-lost gym bag."

On the eve of his first day, still reeling from the stinky feet, he sought advice from a pal with experience.

"On the second day, I smiled at those little cherubs and their parents, fitted them properly and thanked them for their business," he said.

He added, "As they left the store, I rushed back to the stockroom to refresh my nose with a dab of Vicks VapoRub and sallied forth to the next customer."

Marian McCabe of Spotsylvania County also has her first job--slinging hot dogs in a dime store snack bar--burned into her psyche.

"Three times a week, for six hours or so, I donned a yellow-and-white plaid uniform and slipped behind the glass-topped counter with the rolling aluminum grill and massive vats of mustard and relish," she said.

She made coffee in a huge urn, mixed up lemonade and fruit punch and cooked hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches--"getting burn marks on my arms in the deal."

After a pre-Easter Saturday when she told customers to wait their turns, she got fired from the job that paid $12 every two weeks.

"A few years later, I gained great satisfaction depositing my $95-per week paycheck from my job as a secretary at a bank located in the New York City headquarters of the same dime store company that fired me," she said.

Carol Brooks of Spotsylvania remembers a job she took in the late '60s. After months of searching, she found a job an hour away that paid $1.45 an hour, but came with a $4 round-trip bus ride into what was then a crime-filled part of the nation's capital.

"I canvassed 14th Street East in D.C., asking residents their names, occupations, places of employment, incomes, numbers and ages of persons in their household," she said. She sought similar info from businesses there.

Afraid to eat in strange environs, Brooks said she "huddled in doorways and leaned against trees to eat my brown-bag lunch, often in the cold and rain."

On the job, Brooks said she was met with resistance and "deplorable living conditions I was surrounded by poverty, misery, overcrowding, loneliness and isolation."

At one business, she was threatened with a gun for asking her questions. One of her co-workers began to stalk her, and she was forced to flee from a man who propositioned her on a street.

"I quit this job within two weeks," she said. "Six months later, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed and rioting broke out in the very area in which I had been working."

Look for more first and worst jobs in my Thursday column.