After reading couple of posts online about “jobs I’ve had in my life,” I decided it would be a good topic for today. (I can’t find my camera to post a picture of an heirloom for the Carnival of Genealogy!)
In childhood and junior high, I thought I wanted to be a nurse. I had a great-aunt who had gone to school to be an LVN as an adult and I admired her a lot. I still can make hospital corners on a bed thanks to her–one of life’s really useful skills. 
I also read a lot of Cherry Ames as a child–then I hit chemistry class as a high school sophomore. That did it–I knew the nursing curriculum was not for me. Looking back on it, I should have recognized that the appeal for me of Cherry’s adventures probably had more to do with her solving mysteries than with her nursing skills.
The first regular paying job I remember was working at one of two of the dry cleaners in my hometown during the summer. My mom was working there and the owner had a daughter my age so it was familiar. I didn’t work much but I do remember being very tired after standing on cement floors all day–Mom had to get really stern one day after I’d come home from work, fallen asleep, and didn’t want to get up to go to the basement for the tornado coming our way. The dry-cleaners had a drive-up window where I took in items to be cleaned and dispensed the spic and span ones. The worst “take-ins” were floor to ceiling drapes from the house of some heavy smokers and the laundry of one of the harvest crews in town. ick! The other thing I remember from this job is that I folded shirts on a machine–the first step was to button the front and put the neck down into a cutout that had 3 knobs in it. After the shirt was “installed” and smoothed, I hit the button that made the 3 knobs move out to make a triangle of the shirt collar. One man in town had shirts with necks so large the machine wouldn’t touch the collar, so we had to improvise for his. It seemed like magic to me each time I then hit the lever that made the rest of the shirt fold up and I put it in the plastic bag. At least I didn’t have to iron them!
Another job I had about this time was helping my Grandmother Osborne clean her house–looking back on it, it’s sort of an interesting proposition. She wasn’t a warm and fuzzy grandmother, but I find my myself wishing I’d paid more attention. One of my jobs was to help her wash down the walls around the chair where my grandfather sat smoking unfiltered Old Golds. The walls were actually sticky and yellow. We also took down, washed, ironed, and re-hung the curtains. I don’t remember much else, but I do remember that she would write me a check for my “labors.” I wasn’t used to being paid for helping out around the house, but I think that was my grandmother’s way of telling me she appreciated my help and that what women did was important as well. I wish I had a copy of those checks–I’d still like to know if she had her own account and just how she and my grandfather handled the household funds.
When I got to college, I worked in the college print shop. That was probably one of my favorite jobs of all time. We worked in a really old building, and this was the early 1970s, before the days of ubiquitous photocopying machines. So nearly everything that was printed at the college went through our shop. We often knew the scoop before the rest of the campus because we didn’t fail to take a look at what we were printing. 
I didn’t actually run one of the presses, but I think I could have. Rather I was responsible for burning the plates, which sometimes included taping in negatives of photos–doing the layout. I had a desk with a top over it to shield the lightbox a bit and I wielded my exacto knife with precision. Then there was the folding machine–which my friend got her hair caught in one day–and the huge paper cutter that could cut reams of paper at once. I started out making $.90 an hour and then somehow the student rate was raised to a whole $1.00. It paid enough to keep me in Diet Dr. Pepper and Tab, as I recall, and the occasional dinner out at El Charrito ($.98 for the enchilada dinner on Wednesdays).
My other college job was being editor of the yearbook. For being selected for this position, I got free tuition for up to 18 hours a semester. I’m sure my folks appreciated that break in their tuition payments.
Summers and Christmas breaks I sometimes worked at Corner Drug in my hometown–doing inventory, cleaning out files, wrapping packages, doing extra duty on the floor during the last frenzied days of Christmas shopping. My most useful skill from these days is that I know how to make a ribbon rose, the trademark of packages from Corner Drug in those days.
My first professional job was teaching junior high school. The year after I graduated from college, 1973, I worked at a graduate assistant while earning my masters degree. I taught a 7:30 am class then then went on to my junior high school day. I usually had classes after school–how did I do that? Much younger! I taught 7th grade speech and I was glad for the job–I worked out in what we called the t-building (“T” for temporary) and those were the only classrooms that were air-conditioned. The last hour of the day, I had to go back into the main building and teach yearbook. I loved doing the yearbook but it was hot in that second-floor classroom. This was also the year I took on my first debt–I went to the credit union to get a loan to buy a washer and dryer. The house where I was living had hook-ups and I hated going to the laundromat.
I got married the summer after my first year of teaching, and midway through my second year, my husband and I moved to a small town in western Oklahoma. He pastored the church and I languished–I was way too unprepared for the expectations of being “the preacher’s wife.” The only question I remember being asked by the board when we interviewed was whether I played the piano. I did not–probably the only wife of a Nazarene minister not to do so, but, trust me, being a minister’s wife had never been one of my goals. I thought I was marrying a history teacher/bus driver.
Part of what helped me during that time is that I worked part time at a flower shop. This was a small town but it had a large hospital that drew people from the panhandles of Okahoma, Texas and southwestern Kansas. Until my boss put in his shop, there’d only been one florist in town. So we were the new kids in town. We were very busy. I remember being ankle deep in clippings from corsages and bouquets on Mother’s Day. The other thing I remember about working there is that there was a significant Seventh Day Adventist population in the area. Their faith discouraged them from buying and selling on their sabbath, so about 1 hour before closing time on Saturdays, the phone would start ringing. They allowed as much of their sabbath to pass as possible before they placed their orders. Then we had to scurry to get them done and out the door before being closed for Sunday. Other memories of this time include our boss getting married and our having to do the flowers–talk about pressure!!
We moved back to Oklahoma City after about a year when I got an offer to apply for a teaching position at our alma mater. I got the job with the proviso that I would start graduate school and earn a PhD, which I readily agreed to. The next few years are a blur–we lived in the men’s dorm where my husband was the resident counselor, we had a son, and I continued teaching fulltime and going to school. I had no idea what I was doing in grad school–I could certainly do the classwork, but I had a hard time grasping a vision of what I was doing beyond meeting the requirement for teaching at the college. Time moved on, we bought a house, re-did it, had another son, my husband finished grad school, sometimes commuting 150 miles 3 times a week, and I grew restless, thinking I was never going to finish my dissertation. I had no problem finishing my coursework but not having the discipline of class meetings to write, I soon began to feel like I wasn’t going to make it. I took a sabbatical from teaching and determined I was going to finish–therapy also helped. I was an avoidant personality–oh, really? I remember taking my 6 year old to school one morning during this time and noticing that he was distressed. When I inquired, asking him what was wrong, he replied, “I don’t know what I’m going to do my dissertation on.” yikes!! I assured him that not everyone in the world had to do a dissertation, and resolved to be a little less transparent about my struggle. (Just this week he started his own graduate program!)
I was stuggling, too, at the college. Women were not very high on the list of valuable human beings at that place–it was very paternalistic, reflecting its religious roots. I was growing more and more dissatisfied with the whole conservative religion thing–I’d traveled to Russia as a sponsor of a mission trip with abut 50 college students and was treated like an underling–told to go to a meeting with the students when the rest of the (male) sponsors went out on the town in Budapest. I’d been able to move into working in the degree completion program for adults and that had helped me some, but I just didn’t see staying at the college for the rest of my life–as I did when I started.
So, with a newly minted PhD, finally, and a great deal of disagreement from my husband, I quit my job there. I worked as a GA again, this time in the school of library and information studies at the University of Oklahoma. It was small-time wages but I felt like I had to re-tool. My library studies classes merged nicely with my communication studies. I was offered the assistant dean’s job in the library school, which I accepted. Commuting 35 miles to Norman everyday was not great, but my mantra was “I am the mother of teen-aged sons; time alone in the car is not the worst part of my day.” I got a cell phone for emergency calls, most of which entailed some variation of “What’s for supper, Mom?”
I worked at OU 3 years–then I decided I wanted to work in a library–what I’d gone back to school for. I actually didn’t get a couple of jobs I thought were shoo-ins for me. I had this great academic background but no academic libraries seemed interested. Just as well. I hired on in the large public library system in town and became manager of the Downtown agency about a year and a half after I started. I learned a whole lot during that process–we built a new building, installed the internet, went through a couple of directors, and about 9.5 years later, I knew it was time for another change. I’d gotten too old to dread going to work each day, to work for a person who was a nit-picker and who was never going to give me the support and freedom I needed to do my job. Besides, I found myself at the same age my mother was when she was diagnosed with the cancer that finally took her life, and I knew that I didn’t want to spend the next 10 years of my life there if my life-path happened to follow my mother’s.
For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t working. The first six months were great, but then I began to become the hermit that I am prone to be. My friend at the library at the state historical society asked me if I wanted to work a few days a week, and I agreed. I’ve worked there about 2 years as a library-tech–and it’s been great. It’s the sort of job you don’t have to take home with you. I’ve recently been “promoted” to replace the librarian who has left–I’ll have some supervisory duties and work 4 days a week. Part of me wishes I could have just kept the tech position, but this is the library that got me started in my genealogical adventures and where my volunteer time convinced me I wanted to go back to school to earn an MLIS. So maybe this is my give-back time. We’ll see.
That’s my history of labor–it’s fascinating to look back and see how fortunate I’ve been to be able to nearly always work in a job that I love–that involves information and communication and research of some sort. And, as I always told my seniors at the college and a few people since–it’s not the degree, it’s the skills. Market your skills.
