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X ` Man[_3_]

On 1/5/12 1:56 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:06:48 -0500, X ` Man
wrote:

On 1/5/12 12:49 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:58:33 -0500, X ` Man
wrote:

I don't know what the average paycheck was back then.

In the 50s my father made about $5,000-6000 a year as a GS11 in the
government
That GS11 is probably about 12x that now and gas is 17x

In 1963, at a summer job through the Teamsters, I was earning about
$7.00 an hour loading skids of razor blades and shaving cream onto
semi-truck trailers. It was a semi-skilled job (I ran a forklift), so
probably paid below the "average" paycheck in those days. It was higher
than many of the workers at the factory, but lower than the guys who set
up and maintained the machinery. Shick used to sell us packages of
blades for a nickel each...that sure deterred theft. I'd load up before
the semester started and then resell the blades on campus for half the
price at the local markets. :) I also sold and delivered doughnuts,
picked up drycleaning and delivered pizzas, though not all at the same
time. College was cheap back then and it was not difficult to pay most
of your own expenses.

I was a Teamster in 1962, making a third of that. You must had a
heluva contract. I was only making $2.50 an hour at IBM in 1966

I made a buck more the following year loading beer delivery trucks at a
local brewery. The third summer I got placed through the Boilermakers
union and did a little better learning to clean out and repair huge
boilers that came back to the factory on rail flatcars. Through the mid
1960's, the New Haven area was a hotbed of manufacturing and plants
competed for workers who were willing to work.

The boiler factory job was the toughest job physically I ever had.
Climbing into boilers in the hot summer sun to clean tubes and and and
reweld was enough to make me sweat and feel like Niagara Falls every day.

The boiler company paid in cash every Friday at 3 pm. An armored car
would come onto the property and hand out pay envelopes.

The end of my junior year, my dad got me a job with Ruger Firearms. Bill
Ruger was a customer and friend of his. In fact, Ruger had a Porsche
Speedster and when he came by to visit my dad, he let me drive it around
the marina. But I didn't take that job...I was hired by the Kansas City
Star to start working that summer as a reporter, and I worked there and
then when my senior year of college started, I was asked if I wanted to
work through my final two semesters. Of course I did. So I was on campus
a couple of days a week for classes but from 4 pm to 12:30 am, I was a
newspaperman. Great days and great memories.

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