Different Slants

By Robert M. Katzman © July 18, 2018:

“I’m Fourteen. I Need a Job”

At Midnight, June 8^th, 1964, I escaped an insane home on the South Side of Chicago where beatings with thick leather belts, belt buckles, rubber hoses and clenched fists were an everyday event. I left running with only the clothes on my back, in freezing rain, two weeks before graduating eighth grade at Caldwell School.

Met up at some point with my father who took me to live with him in a one-room studio with a small kitchen and bathroom in Hyde Park, across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry. I was going to need the industry part. He wasn’t working. This is what happened next when I was essentially on my own.

After graduating from Caldwell and no more daily trekking back to 85th and Cregier, where the damn school was five miles south of that new home for me, I settled in to my new situation. I had zero money and the little refrigerator had eggs, butter and cold water in it. My dad had two TV dinners in there, too. We ate them that first night.

The next morning, though, I discovered my father had no frying pan to make the eggs, which at first seemed a dead end. Then I got an idea. When a person is handy with tools and also hungry, innovation is possible.

I took those two TV dinner tins out of the garbage, washed them off in the sink, twisted one very tightly into a handle shape, then flattened the other one with the heel of my gym shoe. I bent the edges up a little with my fingers.

Then, I found a rag, wrapped the rag around the handle, my Dad found a safety pin which I used to connect the two transformed TV dinner tins and create a frying pan. This totally fascinated my Dad. He always boiled his eggs in a little pot he already had. I melted some butter in the flat pan, cracked the eggs and poured them into the bubbling butter atop his gas stove and made eggs for both of us. I think it was one of the best breakfasts I ever had, but then, I was really hungry.

I had to find work. Not for movies. Not for a girl friend. For food. For clothes. For a used bike somewhere, because I left that behind, too.

I sure missed that old bike which I bought at a rummage sale in 1961. No one wanted it because it was dented, the paint chipped off, no bell on the handlebar. Looks were nothing to me. A bike meant freedom, freedom to move fast. Unwanted stuff at rummage sales went cheap. I got it for a couple bucks.

I had never received any allowance as an even younger kid. Beginning when I was five in 1955, I pulled a little red metal wagon, and collected empty glass pop bottles in the prairies surrounding my home, thrown there by older kids from the nearby high school and Catholic school. Coke, Pepsi, Seven-Up.

Other kids, sometimes bigger kids, also did this bottle searching too, sometimes, so I learned to be quick about it. Keep a sharp eye out for my quarry, toss it in the wagon and keep moving. I learned to pay attention. When the wagon was so heavy I could hardly pull it, I dragged it to the Rexall Drugstore down the block from my house for instant cash.

Winters, I shoveled snow. Chicago received a lot more snow those days than it does now. If you shoveled tons of it as a kid like I did, that was something you would notice. An incredible amount of work for spare change, but the steady shoveling all winter made me stronger. Made me more confident about what I could do.

Two years earlier, when I was twelve, I sold firecrackers to my classmates in 6^th grade after a perilous trip to faraway Chinatown in 1962. Buses, trains, bad neighborhoods, local gangs of nasty kids. A big risk, but a big profit, too.

I knew very well what a buck was and that I had to start somewhere.

Starting on 48^th Street near Lake Shore drive as a starting point, deciding to go two blocks east or west, I started walking south on the last week of June 1964 in my sweaty T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, I was five foot four, one hundred twenty pounds. I probably looked twelve, long dark hair hanging over my dark brown eyes, but so what? I stopped at every single small store I encountered, usually heard bells jingle when I opened the door, asked for the boss, and said, robotically:

“I’m fourteen. I need a job.”

Some laughed at me.

Some told me they had nothing.

Or nothing for a kid.

Or I was too young.

Or I had–“big shock”–no experience.

Or I wasn’t big enough to do the work.

Didn’t matter what anyone said. I kept going, store after store after store.

49^th Street.

50^th Street.

51^st Street

52^nd Street

It was hot.

I was thirsty.

A cold Coke would have been a miracle.

But a kid needs jingle to buy a Coke.

I kept going.

53^rd Street.

54^th Street.

I stopped at construction sites, which made me seem smaller still to the big guys working there, lots of muscles, big hard hands, serious faces, laying bricks, pouring cement, hammering long nails into two-by-fours, driving trucks, white dust everywhere, settling all over me, sticking to my sweating skin, making me look like a ghost. A skinny ghost.

But here’s something I remember vividly, fifty-five years later.

Not a single guy laughed at me.

Somehow, they got it, that I had to do this, that it wasn’t a choice.

Some wished me luck, or said they wished they had something I could do.

One gave me a buck.

I bought a Coke.

These are things I don’t forget.

It was my first face-to-face encounter with working class men, all of them one injury away from unemployment. It was the beginning of my respect for them.

How could I dream within a year I would be one of them?

The Coke was manna from Heaven.

I kept going.

55^th Street.

A Greek grocery store.

They needed a kid to sell fruit and vegetables.

75 cents an hour. Five hours a day, five days a week. Cash.

He thought I was Greek.

I didn’t try to talk him out of thinking that.

I took the job, started the next day. Same clothes.

By then it could have very well been my one-hundredth store and it was the beginning of my separate education about determination and a goal. But I got the son-of-a-bitch job.

75 cents an hour x five hours x five days?

I did the math in my head, like my dad taught me to do. Told me it would help me one day to be fast at that, with no paper, no pencil.

$18.75

So, what does that translate intoin today’s money?

In 2018 dollars, $152 for a five-day week.

That’s a lot of Cokes, eggs, T-shirts, jeans, underwear, socks, butter, TV dinners, toothpaste and soap, isn’t it?

First thing I did though, was buy a used frying pan for a buck. Imagine what a difference it made in terms of all the kinds of foods we both could cook?

Within two weeks I bought a rusty Schwinn bike with good tires, a wire basket to carry things and a bell at a junk store for $10 bucks and I was mobile. A bike meant choices. I made one.

As soon as I had the fruit and vegetable job nailed down, I went looking for more work for the weekends. The bike made everything go faster, and was a clincher for my next job, as a dishwasher at a lunch counter inside of a drugstore. The boss, Betty, was a tough Irish immigrant woman who admired spunk. She didn’t care if I looked Greek. She wanted a kid who could hustle. She decided that kid was me.

Free meals came with it. Didn’t tell me how many meals I could eat in a five-hour shift on Saturdays and Sundays. It was a buck an hour for slave labor. But I managed to (very quickly) eat three meals in those five hours twice a week

But Betty cared a lot one time when I dropped a big metal bin of dirty dishes, breaking some of them. Words weren’t necessary to stop me from allowing that from happening again. Her angry face darkened and looked like thunder. And doing the harsh endless labor made my thin arms stronger.

They needed a kid to deliver medicine to sick customers who couldn’t get to the drug store. The bike got me the job, though, and delivering drugs to sick people got me tips.

$1.00 x five hours x two days = $10.00 then, or $81.00 today.

My two jobs got me $28.75 a week, or $233 in today’s money.

Now I could even go to a movie, and get popcorn with butter, too!

With that rusty Schwinn, lots of things were within my range.

But one of my first purchases was a heavy chain and a good lock.

Protect what ya got or someone else will take it away from you.

No, no girlfriend in 1964, but even then, money couldn’t buy me everything.

That would take another three years. No cash was involved, however.

I kept those two jobs for a year through my freshman year in high school, until August 1965, when a quiet kid from Bowen High School whom I knew from Caldwell, Richard Munden, asked me if I would open a newsstand with him. We argued over the site of the thing and we agreed to start out in Hyde Park and if it didn’t work out, we’d move it closer to him where he lived on 85^th Street near Caldwell. But we needed an actual newsstand to do this thing.

I had tools, knew how to use them, built the first newsstand in a backyard near Rick. It was four feet by four feet, five feet high, with folding doors at the bottom to lock up unsold newspapers when we closed at night, and a shelf to stack the newspapers on when we were open. The roof projected out a foot over our heads to keep the rain off of the newspapers, but not us.

Rick’s father rented a small U-haul trailer, attached it to his car, delivered the newsstand to 51^st and Lake Park, one of the many places I passed when trying to find that first job and I stayed there for the next twenty years.

Rick left after sixteen months to explore the world.

At my father’s suggestion, I later named the shack Bob’s Newsstand. Some people who read this may remember that business which eventually grew to five stores, fifty-five employees and also where in 1975 I met the beautiful woman who made me fall in love with her, a decade before I closed the last and original store on July 29, 1985, thirty-three years ago next week. Gone a year now, she meant more to me than anything.

Thinking back, I think that Schwinn was the key to all of it.

Wheels made me move fast.

Hope this little story inspires someone’s kid to look for a job.

Don’t be proud.

Ignore rejection.

If you’re willing to do hard labor as the price to being hired, grab it.

Take the first offer you get, then with some money coming in, look for a better job.

Having an income allows a person to begin to have control over their life.

Worked for me.

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