My First “Paycheck” Job

PP and I were reminiscing about some of the jobs we had in high school. This somehow led to a discussion of “How come kids don’t work hard today?”

It got me thinking about my first job. Not the paper route I had when I was eight or the lawn mowing and attic cleaning I did for extra bucks. I was thinking about my first real job. My first timeclock-punching, paycheck-receiving, tax-withholding job.

It was 1962. I was 12 years old, in 6th grade at St. Agnes grammar school. I had a weekend job at the Rockville Center Car Wash. I worked eight hours on Saturday and Sunday, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with a half-hour for lunch.

I worked in tandem with Brian, a classmate of mine. Our job was to wash and dry the interior windows of every car that went through the automatic carwash machine. At full speed, it spit out a car every 60 or 80 seconds. And on weekends, the place was so busy that they never stopped coming. “It’s a “hustle job,” Joe, the cigar-chomping manager had warned us when we applied for the job. And he was right. We had to jump in the car (I took the front; Brian took the back), spray fluid on the glass, and wipe it clean. In a typical day, we covered 240 cars.

You might wonder: Why did Joe hire 12-year-olds for such a demanding job? The reason was simple: We were small enough and fast enough to jump in and out of the cars all day long.

And what were we paid for hustling non-stop eight hours a day? Our wages were $1.25 an hour. That was $10 a day; $20 for the weekend. And we felt very lucky to have such a grown-up job.