Oh, Those Jobs!

In a family with four kids, living on an Air Force salary, there was not a great deal of leftover money in our family as I was growing up, and at an early age, I learned the importance of saving money and being frugal. Herb and I discovered money-making projects we did from six years old on. In the early years fund-raising involved such ambitious projects as collecting bouquets of violets and lilies of the valley and selling them door to door to all of the neighborhood. This worked quite well until our parents and grandparents found out, so we then tried other things. Believe it or not, the butcher shop would actually pay us money for bacon grease, which we collected religiously in an old Crisco can before hauling our load up the street to the corner market area. However, it does take quite a while to wait for all of the grease to collect, so we gave that up. By the time I was eleven and Dad was already in the Philippines, it occurred to us that selling Christmas cards and stationery was a sure-fire winner, and we peddled those in our other grandparents' neighborhood. That was a huge success, and we had spending money for ourselves and Christmas presents.

Overseas, there was little we could do, but at least I became proficient in baby-sitting, as the youngest was ten younger than I. So by the time we reached Mississippi, baby-sitting became the money-maker. By Illinois, I was old enough to have a real job and obtained my first Social Security card, which means I have been paying into the system for 50 years. The local dime store hired me to do cashier work and to work behind the candy counter, which is why to this day I do not eat as much chocolate. I got sick of even the smell of it, especially those milk chocolate stars. That summer I worked at the local swimming pool as a cashier.

In Albuquerque, my work experience became even more diversified as I began working in the lingerie and hosiery department of a local department store. I found I definitely enjoyed the business of selling and was half-way good at it, so I continued to do that through college, first with Hubbard's, then with Fedway, which became Dillard's. Dillard's had me trained and working at the cosmetics counter, which was great fun! Since selling was only a parttime job, I also worked first at the soda fountain, and then in the accounting department of Valley Gold Dairies, totalling their recap sheets, which gave me some background for a later job. They also sponsored me as the state's Dairy Princess, which was fun, and then I began demonstrating dairy products for them all over the city, which also continued throughout college. As a high school senior, my mom had decided to enroll me in a modeling class, so soon I was modeling clothes for stores and making television commercials. I even was an Easter Bunny at a shopping center one year, and that was awful! The kids kept pulling my tail. A man who saw me there then hired me to be the sole human being for his puppet show, which was kind of like Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. We filmed about eight shows for a pilot, but, alas, no one apparently wanted to see the Adventures of Wilbur Worm and Missy Mary, although it was quite fun to do it. I was even hired as a census taker in 1960, collecting data door to door all summer.

During the college summers I began to work in the Administration Department of UNM, primarily in the transcript department, analyzing the high school applicants' folders and allocating points for grades, activities, etc. and making sure they had taken all of the necessary courses for admittance. One summer they hired me to actually complete the President's Cost Study, using class sizes, number of classes, number of professors, etc. to figure out how much each student was costing per professor and grad assistant per class. It was rather complicated, but somehow it was finished on time, and the results were fascinating. So by the time I graduated and began teaching, I already had years in the work force.

Even while teaching I continued to do several other things, including supplement the meager income by working summers at Penneys in Kansas City. In Oklahoma City when the girls were little I did modeling and fashion show commentating, which kept me clothed for three years, even as I did in Albuquerque when we first moved back there.

Before long, however, teaching and raising two girls became quite enough to keep me busy, until when 1HW and I were married, and we discovered the joys of antiquing. As I look back, many of those jobs provided me with all kinds of skills and enabled me to meet fascinating people who otherwise would have remained unknown. That is a blessing!