George Rebane
[This entry is posted as part of an occasional addition to RR’s My Story category as an expanding part of my autobiography. It may be of limited interest to readers as a period piece describing part of an America that sadly is long gone. It was an epoch that goes a long way to illustrate today’s generational differences in our culture, values, mores, and sense of nationhood.]
I was a teenager in the 1950s and we all had jobs in addition to home chores, school work, and after school activities (I played basketball). We lived in the rural outskirts of Indianapolis before moving to California in 1957. I did odd jobs for neighbors throughout the year and was much in demand because my dad and school shop classes had taught me to do almost everything required to build/repair a residential house. But my first regular work was as a field hand for Jack Maschmeyer, my school bus driver who along with his wife Mary ran a small truck farm growing specialty crops a couple of miles from my house.
The farm work started in late April and lasted through September. I got to Jack’s farm on my bike, and was there joined by three other teenagers. The four of us made up the vetted and proven core team of field hands that enabled the Maschmeyers to run their operation. Jack was a no-nonsense ‘Dutchman’ (WW1 veteran) who taught his charges carefully and put them through a probationary period before being welcomed as a permanent member. While we did many stoop-labor tasks and harvested several kinds of crops (e.g. field tomatoes, cantaloupes, strawberries, …), our main work always included the daily cutting of about 5 acres of asparagus, an amazingly fast-growing plant – we would always hear the hiss from the field as we prepared to go home in the evening. The white noise came from countless new spears pushing up through the dried husks of previously cut spears.
Cutting asparagus with speed and accuracy was the most skill-demanding job on a truck farm; a bad cutter was slow and usually destroyed the following day’s crop by imprecisely making broader thrusts with his V-bladed knife than was required to harvest the mature spear which had grown about a foot in the past 24 hours, and was packed cheek-by-jowl with the immature spears for tomorrow or the next day. Jack hired no bad cutters; these came and went real fast when we had turnover. Mary always sent us boys home with some produce, usually a bunch of freshly cut asparagus which my mom didn’t know how to cook – she boiled it to death, which was the Nordic way with most vegetables.
But the point I want to make here is that America’s society worked because teenagers also worked. We did countless jobs that included paper routes, yard work of all kinds (this was before Mexican gardeners), house chores, clean-up and construction jobs, etc. Suburban America’s yards looked good because the local teenagers kept them that way within win-win compacts with neighbors. There was no concern for child labor laws, regulations, wage levels, age restrictions, workers comp and liability insurance, … . The work contract was between the neighbor-in-need and the kid looking to work. Relationships were struck that lasted for years, usually until the young person’s school required transitioning to more serious jobs like farm work or clerking in local stores (Jo Ann’s teenage jobs).
The back story here is that they were willing to give me a chance because my father had recently been promoted from assembly electrician to become the company’s new and only design draftsman. And my dad got that job because I took drafting as one of my high school shop classes, and quickly became very good at it. My dad had always been a blue-collar worker (electrical contractor), and in America always wanted to work himself off the shop floor and into a white-collar job. Draftsmen in those days wore suit and tie to work in offices. One night he saw me doing some drafting homework in my room and quickly understood his own opportunities if he also learned to draft (since he already knew how to read schematics and blueprints).
Long story short, he enrolled in the top accredited, mail-order technical school at the time, and a year later graduated with a nationally recognized certificate as a professional draftsman - remote learning 50s style. With that he informed Bernco that he was now a draftsman, and they promoted him on the spot – he was a white-collar worker. So, when I asked whether I could work there also, since I too knew how to draft and read prints, he put out the word and I was given a chance. The rest is another good part of our country’s history, and confirmed that high schools still taught workplace skills that would enable a graduate to enter the workforce with skillsets that launched careers.
When my 17th summer rolled around, my dad had made the decision to move the family to California where he had an aerospace drafting job waiting. So, working for Jack in the spring of 1957 was my last gig as a farm hand. As we said our good-byes with glistening eyes, Jack assured me that no matter the vicissitudes of a fancy education and the economy, I would always have a job back on the Maschmeyer farm. Having learned that California was an uncompromising car country, I bought myself a slightly used 1956 VW bug with my savings, and followed mom and dad over Route 66 to our new life in Los Angeles.
We found a little apartment in Hollywood near the home of one of our Estonian friends. Dad went to work immediately, mom and I started looking for jobs. I discovered the existence of an agency called something like ‘California Youth Employment Service’ (CYES) where I was able to register by telephone. They took down all my vitals, the critical one was that I had a car. The drill would be that they would call at 6am in the morning with a job description and address. I accepted all jobs no matter they be located in Orange County or Chatsworth in the Valley, and the agency knew of my mobility so I worked every day, many times on multi-day gigs where the homeowner wanted me back. Again, no hassle with regulations, paperwork, proof of this or that; my driver’s license number was basically all they needed to check me out. And this, remember, was an agency of the state of California. My how the times have changed.
My jobs consisted of everything from raking tons of eucalyptus leaves (I loved those messy trees), cleaning pools, washing windows, to fixing things and helping people move. One job was particularly noteworthy. One morning I was directed to a newly acquired mansion in Beverly Hills. The new owners were movie stars Rory Calhoun and Lita Baron who were at the top of their careers at the time. Rory was starring in a western TV series, the kind that were popular at the time (e.g. ‘Gunsmoke’, ‘Have Gun …’), and was making western movies. So they bought this big ol’ mansion on the corner of Sunset Blvd and Camden, a prominent location in a pretty ritzy part of a ritzy town.
The first things famous people did then and do now with a new real estate purchase is to put their stamp on it and remodel it completely. When I arrived on that summer morning, the huge house was in total chaos with hot and cold running workers all over the place as I walked into the huge dusty front hall with bare walls and the floor covered with lath and plaster debris. The contractor/boss spotted me and walked over to assure himself of my identity and purpose for being there. He had called CYES and had them send over a warm body. When the kid, fresh from Indiana, was told who the owners were, my jaw dropped exactly as it should have – my first meeting with Hollywood stars.
But the reality quickly replaced awe when I was told that my job was to become Lita Baron’s flunky. It turned out that Lita had made it her job to be at the house every day, dressed in tight petal pushers, a revealing midriff knotted blouse, heels (of course), and made up for lights, camera, action. Not only was it a distraction for the working crew, but she insisted on telling random workers what to do that didn’t jive with their contracted work. So, the contractor told Rory that either she butts out, or he abandons the job. Rory’s compromise was suggesting the contractor assign one of his guys to be Lita’s flunky, and the contractor had a better and cheaper idea – me.
I recall being introduced to Lita in a manner similar to someone bringing her an animated toy to play with. Nevertheless, I was to be paid handsomely and just do whatever Lita told me to do. Most days ranged between mundane and frustrating; she had me clean out the same room three times in one day because workers came in to do something and leave a mess every time I finished. She did not coordinate with anyone else. The only memorable respites came when another troupe of Calhoun friends dropped by to see progress and get a tour by Lita. These little clatches of three or more people almost always included one or two recognizable and celebrated movie/TV stars. Almost every night I had an interesting tale to tell my parents and new friends when I got home from work.
My most memorable day began when Rory himself, who was usually never there, walked up to me and said, ‘George we have job to do today.’ He pointed to a big stuccoed wall that divided the back yard and said we were going to take it down. And then he admitted he really had no idea how to approach the job, what would I suggest and what tools would we need. I came up with a list of tools – remember, been there, done that – and Rory told me to drive down to Santa Monica Blvd where he had an account with a hardware store and just buy whatever we needed. This I did, and soon Rory and I were stripped to the waist swinging sledge hammers, prying with crowbars, and cutting chicken wire holding together hunks of stucco.
The fun part was our conversation, Rory treated me as an equal, asking questions about my past and interests, and answering similar questions that I put to him. (Rory considered his participation as an alternative to his usual gym work-out session. But I, Indiana corn-fed and all that, was already bigger and stronger than he with his camera-ready, tanned, he-man physique.) We had lunch together, and worked until the wall lay in a pile of rubble that I would clean up the next day, Lita permitting. I was blown away; I spent a whole day one-on-one with a star everyone in the country knew and recognized.
It turned out that during my 17th summer I again made a ton of money, this time thanks to the CYES and my VW bug. At summer’s end we moved into our new house in Tujunga where I was to finish my senior year at Verdugo Hills High School. And what a year that was, hopefully to be remembered in a future edition of My Story. But onward with the saga of magnificent teenage employment opportunities in a time long ago when California truly was THE Golden State and envy of the world.
After graduating from high school, I was headed to UCLA as a physics major in the fall. It was my 18th summer, and the economy was in a small recession. It was hard to find a steady job, so I wound up managing a big parking lot (actually a field of weeds) at a local amusement park on weekends, and working for the local newspaper - Foothill Record-Ledger – as truck loader and cub reporter of little league baseball games. The pay was a pittance and I was miserable. The parking lot job was like herding cats in the attempt to get cars to park in any sane order on the empty field – as I was telling one driver where to park, four more cars would drive in and find their own crazy ways to park. And the newspaper trucks had to be loaded between 3-4am, so that shot the nights.
The only victory that summer was writing my sports column of the little league baseball games, which were beyond boring for a teenager to watch in the afternoons and evenings. I was paid by the column-inch and told to get as many player names as possible into print because that sold newspapers to the proud parents et al. Sitting in the ‘press box’ I noticed that someone was writing down every pitch/play into a special book using a code of symbols. I was told that was the baseball scorebook, and every game was recorded in such detail. Voila! I quickly learned to read the scorebook, borrowed the scorebook after the games, and never had to attend another game that summer. From the scorebooks I wrote wonderfully exciting columns about the games, making them much more exciting than what had really transpired on the field. Everyone liked my first foray into fictional journalism. Talk about fake news experience, today I would qualify as the perfect journalist.
During my freshman year at UCLA I lived in an apartment with two other high school classmates. Because of my financially disastrous summer, I had to figure out how to make ends meet, even with tuition being only $72/semester. So, I approached the apartment house owner and finagled a job for the three of us to manage the six-unit facility for a welcome reduction in our rent. Again, it was a matter of being able to handle the job that was the only qualification required, and not satisfying an arbitrary rigmarole of regulations. With my finances in-hand I completed my freshman year and with some trepidation approached my last summer as a teen-ager.
But the gods were smiling as I moved back home when the spring semester ended with the start of the 1959 summer. The recession had ended and the California aerospace industry was booming. My father, now a design draftsman at a big defense contractor in Glendale, told me that there was a shortage of all kinds of skilled workers, including draftsmen. Companies were filling empty slots with temporary workers placed by various ‘job shops’, outfits that minimally vetted workers of different skillsets and sent them to the companies in need. I looked up a job shop that specialized in draftsmen and industrial designers. Made an appointment, and marched in there to declare myself with a straight face as a professional draftsman. Turned out, the ‘vetting’ was little more than confirming that I could fog a mirror. They told me that it was up to me to prove myself at the job site, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t last until lunch.
After filling out a couple of simple forms, I was told to report the next morning to Librascope, a big aerospace company in Glendale, a prime contractor of combat systems for the Navy. My jaw dropped because that is where my dad worked. Now I was under real pressure not to get fired before lunchtime, because I would be working in the temporary extension of his department. And my name would not provide any anonymity were I to be let go. That night my dad told me to try not to embarrass him the next day as we both drove to work together.
The drafting department had expanded into one of the company’s large parking lots that now contained a formidable row of trailers, each one holding about six to eight drafting stations. In those days before desktop CAD systems, a drafting station with its big drafting board and credenza took up at least 40 sqft. And these trailers were not air-conditioned; talk about sweat shops. My trailer took in four newbies that morning, and we were all put to work drawing EOs (engineering orders). These were fairly simple drawings on letter-size vellums used to document changes to various circuits and assemblies that were made after the original design was released. EOs were the bread-and-butter of the least experienced or modestly skilled draftsmen. We newbies would be qualified by the quality and quantity of EOs we could turn out that morning. Two of us never made it to lunch, but I got to stay and finish the day doing EOs.
The next day my boss discovered that I was a college physics major, obviously experienced in drafting (the EOs were a piece of cake), knew how to read rough schematics drawn by the design engineers, and had a couple electronics courses under my belt. I never touched another EO and was immediately given bigger (‘C size’) and very complex drawings to work on. My admitted forte was that the design engineer could come to my board and talk both electronics and math to me, which I understood enough to make the communications efficient. The rest of the summer was a blizzard of fun and rewarding work. Job shoppers, due to their temporary nature, got higher pay, and we all had the opportunity to work unlimited overtime.
I regularly worked 60-hour weeks and made a ton of money (actually two tons) during that summer. Not bad for a 19-year-old. Again, the impediments for getting the job were minimal or non-existent; the driving criterion was whether you could do the work. Before I left for school that fall, my boss (the head of the drafting department) did his best to talk me out of going back to school. He said that with the skillset I had demonstrated, I had a ready-made career and would more than likely be a candidate for his job in five years. And whatever I decided, Librascope would hire me as a permanent employee next summer.
As a coda and a story for another time, I worked as a design draftsman during my undergraduate summers, and was given the chance to make my technical ‘bones’ when promoted to a full-fledged circuit design engineer in the company’s R&D electronics lab before graduation. And it all started because in those days high schools all over the country actually taught life and career skills to students, in addition to preparing them to enter four-year colleges. It was a blessed time for America.
Returning to the larger perspective, my story is not unique for that post-war period. Most of my friends and their friends in junior high school did regular work for pay, and everyone I knew in high school had a job, if not after school, then during their summers. Perhaps it was a middle- or working-class thing, but we teenagers worked.
Today, we read stats like “just under 30% of teens ages 16 to 19 had jobs in 2020”, and “since 2000 the percentage of teens working summer jobs has fallen from 51.7% to 30.8%. Since 2000, the percentage of teens working jobs through the non-summer months has fallen from 43% to 27.5%.” The most hopeful statistic available is that there are about 25M 13-19 year-olds, or about 7.6% of the population, and our teen workforce – with jobs and looking for jobs - is comprised of 4% of the population. (more here, here, and here)
These numbers don’t fit well with the current progressive narrative that continues to applaud our union-driven public education system. By any and all measures of academic achievement, our public high schools perform dismally, and many astute observers of working teens write that one reason more of them don’t hold jobs is because they possess neither knowledge nor skills to do productive work. On the other side of this observation reside the lamestream media in charge of maintaining the narrative. Their explanation for the paucity of teenage workers is that today’s high schools are academically more challenging and therefore don’t leave time for students to have outside jobs. (example here)
Again, the overwhelming evidence is just the opposite. High schools no longer teach students to reliably read, write, and do math, let alone impart a knowledge base or job skills from which to launch working careers. Today colleges lament that their incoming freshmen need up to two years of remediation before they can undertake the curriculum that was formerly required for a four-year undergraduate degree. This is not the case in other developed countries to which our employers ship jobs or from which they recruit needed talent.
Nice essay. I wish that more people wrote biographies (or made their hoard of old photos digitally available to more people). The article link needs an edit to work.
While illegal aliens have obviously largely destroyed high school/college job opportunities (while making social demands since the workers are adults and 'need to make a living wage' at the fast food place) it would be interesting to examine kids-these-days vs. those of yore for schooling.
I'd love to see some rigor showing the class schedule and textbooks for, say, 1962 vs. 2022. An interesting side project would be to examine school budgets, payroll, etc. and see how the staffing has changed. The folks at CNBC, the referenced article, obviously didn't do a lick of research beyond the most cursory web search concerning employment. Maybe because the writer just got out of a modern school.
Posted by: scenes | 26 December 2021 at 05:39 PM
scenes 539pm - Link fixed; thanks.
Posted by: George Rebane | 26 December 2021 at 08:31 PM
Good story George.
"Talk about fake news experience, today I would qualify as the perfect journalist."
So you got your 'fake news journalist' degree legitimately - using your own time-saving technique by learning a baseball scorebook's symbols. Or in your case, known as a pre-draftsman's 'manual of unusual characters'.
How do today's 'journalists' get their degrees - by working political conventions, or by attending NAACP meetings? And they seem to get to make up their own special symbols (woke; LGBTxxx; Latinx; transgender...) that never require a glossary defining each one.
Posted by: The Estonian Fox | 27 December 2021 at 05:12 AM
re: [email protected]:12AM
The journalist of the future is a computer program.
It's the only thing cheaper than a 25 year old intern.
The tricky thing will be to find a way to turn the 'woke' knob up to 11.
Posted by: scenes | 27 December 2021 at 05:42 AM
When teenagers worked.
Dr. Rebane, it appears that our histories are similar and even our paths have crossed, albeit not at the same time. When working in LA, I rented a house in Tujunga, aka, the Hills of Health on a hill overlooking La Tuna canyon and La Crescenta, La Canada, and the San Gabriel Valley. Records showed that in my neighborhood there was an old stone building that once was a hunting lodge/spa. Bet few locals down there even know that today. Before that it was a nunnery.
Yes, every kid worked odd jobs and went to school. When I turned 16, I was able to legally work for an employer. . That job was as a soda jerk for the car hops, making cherry colas and ice cream sundaes at 20 cents below minimum wage. Couldn’t work past 10 pm, but it was something for the resume besides mowing lawns and such. The underage females worked as baby sitters. Everyone had odd jobs….it’s was the only way to get spending money…cause no one had money, lol. Some of my wealthier classmates got an allowance! If I got an allowance, it was probably no more than a quarter a week. My Mom slipped me 5 bucks so I could go to the prom…..don’t tell your father. She went out and scrubbed floors on her hands and knees to come up with that 5 dollar bill. A mother’s love.
About that job in a parking lot hut making flavored sodas for the car hops on roller skates. First, it sounds like ancient history. The Burger joint was six miles from home and the lone bus did not run past 5pm and not on Sundays. I worked Saturday and Sunday nights and walked home and usually hitch hiked to work. Yes, I was young and a handful and usually just ran the six miles home in the dark. Much faster and more reliable than thumbing it.
Looking back, no one said that job was child labor exploitation. It was hailed at the time as a way to get teenagers work experience by inducing employers to hire kids by paying 20 cents/hour less. Quite innovative at the time. Work was not considered a four letter word.
Like work-study in college. Hire the young students at half the going rate and the government paying the other half. Paid for a good hunk of my tuition.
I worked for the grounds crew and learned how to drive the dump truck and run gardening equipment.
With permission, I would take the old dump truck out and do side jobs hauling free sand from the quarry or free garden sludge from the sewer plant to gardeners at a astronomical rate of 20 bucks a trip…time and gas and material included. That led to a job at night (after the union folks left) loading box cars with appliances with only a pallet jack. Dryers where light and thrown on top of the heavier stuff like fridges and washers. Made $9 bucks an hour at night. Had to be gone before the Union workers showed up in the morning and get to class, lol.
To gain perceptive, that was twice the wage at the time for school teachers, lab technicians, city workers and the recent average college grad. And I was only 18, let home when I was 17, as did my brother and sisters. The heart was filled with what’s over the mountain.
Whether I was a good worker or not is not the point. The point is you gotta work, like it or not. I welcomed it. It’s what you do. It’s what everybody did. And as a high school kid, my Dad cut down my daily chores (sometimes a few hours a day) because of homework and my side jobs and going along with Dad on his side jobs. He was a cop, drove RX deliveries for a local pharmacy at night, and had a gardening business on Saturdays.
No use decrying that the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. I will end this with my thinking, “What in the heck were my parents thinking letting me walk home on Saturday night 6 miles in the dark?” They were thinking clearly. It was safe then. It was like the sitcom ‘Cheers’ where everybody knew your name…or my brother and sisters name or my Mom and Dad’s name. Those places exist today, but only in the back roads of my mind. I can go there anytime by closing my eyes. The conscious mind can travel the present, past, and future seamlessly. Good thing since the old drive-in movie theaters (passion pits) not longer exist. Land and open spaces too valuable, I reckon
Posted by: Bill Tozer | 27 December 2021 at 09:32 AM
BillT 932am - Yes indeed, those were the days which altered and illuminated our early lives, and you and I were there. And now we, and hopefully many others, carry memories of how our country was and could be again if we correctly practice the art of the possible. Thanks for sharing Mr Tozer.
(Memories from other readers welcome and anticipated.)
Posted by: George Rebane | 27 December 2021 at 10:15 AM
PS: advice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMtLdE5Zq-8
Posted by: Bill Tozer | 27 December 2021 at 10:16 AM
I remember using draftsmem, at HUGHES. Many if not most were prima donna Artistès who took forever to take my drawings and massage them into industry standard masterpieces (I was responsible for any delays) and if any mistake they introduced wasn't detected by me, I was held accountable.
The department coffee pot was visible from all drafting tables and of course, they were above making coffee if they took the last cup so it was often their boss and me making a fresh pot.
Most all were job shopping contractors making more than I did, and I remember one guy explaining how he didn't need the HAC medical insurance 'cause he could get free care at the ER for his entire family. The drafting manager Frank was always trying to get them to accept permanent positions, but no.
Computer Aided Design tools killed that gravy train. Thank goodness. Free at last, free at last. Gimme a decent PC and a pen plotter and I could crank out designs and my own industry standard masterpieces in a fraction of the time.
Posted by: Gregory | 28 December 2021 at 02:44 PM
Gregory 244pm - And the same thing happened with technical reports that involved lots of equations, figures, graphs, ... . In the old days there were a couple of secretaries who specialized in producing ('typing up') the stuff we engineers gave them in our scribbled handwriting and drawings. They used rub-off stencils for the special mathematical symbols called for in the equations, and there was a 'Graphics Department' that made the figures and graphics. And as the author you had to go through what seemed like a gazillion edit copies and corrections before it was ready for publication. And then came the PC with word processors, draw packages, and equation processors which put all those boys and girls out of business since no engineer would ever let anyone generate one of their technical reports save, perhaps, to add some references, footnotes, and company formatted covers and control numbers. The times they were a changin'.
(The same thing happened with aerospace 'programming departments' before every engineer learned to code and 'IBM cards' generated by 'Key Punch' Departments were replaced by 'write to disk' work stations. I kept two programmers busy until I learned Fortran then Basic. Then I did my own card decks and made my own runs. My programmers went to Disney where one became the head of its Animatronics Division, and the other the head of all Disney amusement park computer systems. We are still friends to this day.)
Posted by: George Rebane | 28 December 2021 at 06:06 PM
When teenagers who did not work end up in Silicon Valley
THE MISERABLE LIFE IN WOKE SILICON VALLEY
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/01/the-miserable-life-in-woke-silicon-valley.php
Posted by: Bill Tozer | 14 January 2022 at 09:25 AM
"THE MISERABLE LIFE IN WOKE SILICON VALLEY"
That's a nice story, it gives me hope that I'm not misunderstanding the world.
Ya know, if I were smart (not) and ran China (not), I'd use the bejeezus out of that situation.
It wouldn't cost a whole lot to encourage disaster at US companies, particularly ones that you target as strategic.
So, should a US tech startup be in South Dakota? or do you simply give up and go overseas? the latter has it's own serious minuses of course.
If you'd like to check out another wellspring of craziness, look up one Coraline Ada Ehmke (that's a man, baby).
The fact that there's a national political party that is surfing the insanity doesn't surprise me a bit. It's all about winning and if the village has to be destroyed in order to save it, that's cool.
Posted by: scenes | 14 January 2022 at 12:59 PM