Good stuff. I'm probably a little off, but I liked the work.
OT: Where Was Your First Paycheck Job and How Much An Hour Did You Rake In?
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Did you go out in the fields & bring the scattered bales to the hay wagon & throw them on to be to be stacked & brought to the barns & the hay mows. Liked that. Doesn't sound like you collected them that way.
Stacked it right in the meadow. The stacks were about 20’ across and 20’ tall. Each one weighed between 6 and 7 tons. Then you used a stack mover, which is a rail trailer with chains on each rail that you ran off of tractor pto and loaded the stacks. Put them in a stack yard(clever name) and then in winter would load them back on stack mover and take to feed the cows. Use a tractor with a grapple fork on it to pull stack apart and spread so they could eat it.
Now everything is done in round bales. The bales only weigh about 1500lbs and can get about a dozen on the movers. They go in stack yard just like the stacks. To feed them you put them on a pto spinner that unwinds them or in a bale processor that tears them apart for the cows.
No barns used. Would take too big a barn. Ha. Some guys would get some small squares like your talking about of alfalfa to feed their horses in the winter and they conveyor it to the loft in the barns where have to stack it then.
I hope any of that makes sense. Ha
5 years of grad school helps with that ratio. First job after grad school was about 10X my last job before college (and 4-5X my pay in grad school)
Yes it does. Thanks. Quite a different process. Our bales were rectangular & weighed 80+lbs.
Summer & winter break job at the Zinsser paint factory in Somerset. $8/hr for production line work 1985/86. Once, actually put on a bunny suit to help mix the paint (mostly primer like BIN), but also packaged wallpaper stripper. Worked with my brother, who actually did some blacktop work on roof for a week, a la Red & Andy Dufresne. Great bunch of blue collar guys. Remember buying some food from the food truck occasionally. Usually a pastry or Salisbury steak sandwich.
I started working in summer 2005 at a small hockey equipment store at the Woodbridge Community Center. My buddy and I got hired together making minimum wage, which was $5.50 an hour. Another guy got hired the same time we did and even though he didn't know anything about hockey, he was making more money because he was dating the manager's daughter. When minimum wage was increased, we got a memo saying that they are increasing our pay due to outstanding performance, as if people making minimum wage aren't aware of minimum wage increases.
I was playing in the House League at that time. That Shop seemed to have low inventory all the time.
I was 12 in 1984 and would get up at 6 am to deliver The Star Ledger to about 40 houses. After school I delivered The Daily Journal, an afternoon paper that I think was only distributed in Union County. I probably cleared about $40 a week, which fueled my arcade and video game addiction that I battled for 20 years.
There are a few guys that will do them “small squares” is what they refer to them as. The ones still done here are usually straw or alfalfa that get shipped to race tracks around the Midwest. The prairie hay is all in the bigger ones I described earlier. If we did ours in small bales like that we would have just over 150,000 of them annually. I pity whoever had to load them...ha
The guys that do the small ones bring in big bales and feed a small baler that’s stationary and has a conveyor that takes them up. The conveyor moves and there isn’t much work to it anymore.
When I was a kid in the 50’s we would go to my uncle’s farm in MA for a week every summer. (Dairy farm - maybe 30 cows). My brother and I would go out and help toss hay bales onto a tractor drawn wagon, Maybe 50 pounds each. Then back to the barn to push them onto conveyor to hay loft and stack bales in the loft. We thought it was fun!
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Was the summer of 1978 I was going to be a junior at Hillsborough High and was lucky enough that my parents knew the owner of the Hillsborough Deli. Got a job just cleaning up after the patrons for like 2.75/hr under the table of course. Noticed a lot of married moms of the kids I went to high school would meet there for lunch. A lot of joking and innuendos of shall we say of a sexual nature. What did I know. I was just a 16 yo kid that was pretty green. Little did I know that this was the local hangout for the milfs to hang. Good times.
Sunday Star-Ledger was always a challenge. I remember they used to drop off all but the news section on Saturday night so you could get started assembling the paper ahead of time. Then insert the pre-assembled section into the news section which they dropped off about 4:30a Sunday. Had to deliver 12-15 at a time due to weight, then come back to base camp and load another batch. Felt like you really accomplished something when done
Crescent Fairways in Union 1983 $3.35 an hr batting cages during the summer, range balls during the winter sold Christmas trees there one yr during the winter. Remember i made about $150 1st night in tips
I was a "gardener" at the Harry P. Leu Gardens in Orlando, Florida in the summer of 1967. I made minimum wage, which Google tells me was $1.40 an hour. I see my wages each time I get a Social Security statement showing that I made money that year.
1967--$2.45/hr.....My first job was stacking the dairy and frozen foods at the former Two Guys from Harrison department store on Rte 18 in east brunswick . It taught me to grab from the back whatever dairy goods I was looking to purchase.
I do this regularly, since freshness dates on dairy are fairly conspicuous. The dates on produce, OTOH, are sometimes creatively buried on the packaging and written in 6-point fonts.
Pretty sure it was $5.25/hr working concessions at General Cinemas in the summer of 1995, which would be $8.82/hr in 2019 dollars. It was just a touch over the state minimum wage at the time of $5.05/hr.
It was a firing offense to place the freshest dairy goods at the front of the shelf. "Rotate the Goods" was the battle cry!
While at Rutgers I got a "shape up" job at the old Ford assembly plant on Route 1. At the time the factory was running at capacity, with two 10 hour shifts, Mon to Fri, and 2 eight hour shifts on Saturday. This was 1970 and with so much overtime absenteeism was rife. Night shift (which I worked) ran from 3:30 pm to 1:30 am. I don't remember the hourly rate, but this was a union job and I got OT for Saturday, night differential, and OT for 2 hours working on the weekdays. I took home after tax around $110 which felt like a fortune at the time (Tuition and fees were $264 per semester). Learned a lot about people, including the guys on work release from Rahway Prison.
Wow, that is huge jump. Though I don't think people will ever see that again. With $15 min wage and college degrees becoming very common. A degree doesn't demand a massive jump the way it used it. Grad degrees are still valuable. The advise that I give kids going to college today is to get into a 5 year plan so they graduate with a Masters.
BTW, my 1st job was a part time job out of college, that part time job was 4x more. I don't think that could ever happen again.
At age 15 first job was $20/wk assembling bicycles after school at Towner Bros in Rochester NY in 1965. It interfered with football & swimming seasons in HS. So I worked AFTER PRACTISE at many restaurants as a busboy & Sundays. I learned early that if you worked at a Restaurant you ate well if you were crafty. I ate my weight in lobster bisque and steaks.
I was a bouncer In Rochester and Ithaca NY on/off & 1st REAL job with a paycheck after college(actually while ZI was a grad student at Rutgers) was as asst Director of Personnel at a comm college in NJ in 1980. I earned a booming 16k a year and painted houses on the side...but wages went up to $28k/yr when I was promoted to Dir of Personnel but I quit after one year & moved to Florida to become a college Professor....better money(not by much) , better hours and I love Florida
now retired
I was a bouncer In Rochester and Ithaca NY on/off & 1st REAL job with a paycheck after college(actually while ZI was a grad student at Rutgers) was as asst Director of Personnel at a comm college in NJ in 1980. I earned a booming 16k a year and painted houses on the side...but wages went up to $28k/yr when I was promoted to Dir of Personnel but I quit after one year & moved to Florida to become a college Professor....better money(not by much) , better hours and I love Florida
now retired
Blockbuster video inthe early 2000’s. Started at whatever the minimum wage was at that time (think it was $5.15 or $5.25).
Yes, but a PhD in pharma and other scientific/eng'g disciplines still makes a large difference. In 1989, I started at about $50K, while new BS engineers were around $30K. 30 years later, it's more like $120K vs. $75K. If, after 5 years with a BS, you've reached the PhD entry level salary (not common, but top talent will do that with fast promotions and larger raises), then clearly you've wasted your time getting the PhD, lol. Although in Pharma, eng'g is the only scientific discipline I've seen where non-PhDs can advance into middle/upper management or advance high up on the scientific ladder - in places like chemistry, biology, clincal areas, etc. non-PhDs are treated much more like technicians, with limited advancement. We've had department heads and even VPs in eng'g who didn't have PhDs (less frequently, but it happens).
Hutchison's in Avon right on the boardwalk (now called the Avon Pavilion). $3.85/hr back in 1984 when I was 14. Working in a restaurant is a terrific first job for kids- it is not easy, but it can be fun and social in the right place. Still friends with a bunch of people I worked with there.
My daughters worked there summers in high school and college in the early nineties. Mostly at Crust and Crumb Bakery but also a little at the amusement park.
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