What was your first paying "real" job growing up...

[Don Buck]

First real money came from my paper route in Hampton, VA delivering the Times Dispatch, I had one of the largest bike routes in the area (4 bike loads on Sunday's) and even won an all expense paid trip to Spain and Portugal as a carrier. First salaried position was working as a counsler at Boy Scout Camp Chickahominy (near Williamsburg, VA) making $15/week my first year (1968). I Co-Op'ed while in college, starting out at $2.32/hour based at a pulpwood yard in Henderson, NC. First job as a college graduate was mowing grass via a bush hog in the seed orchard of the Chesapeake Corp in West Point, VA which I believed paid $3.65/hr. And those "Occupy Wall Street" college grads think they have it tough today. Pay your dues and you will be rewarded...

[Carl Babel]

Another paper route carrier. I think that I made 6.5 cents per subscriber - per week (for a daily paper). I loved and hated that paper route. The worst was when they had a "subscriber drive": for one week, they would bring you a paper for every house in your area. For me, that was ~2,000 newspapers. Sunday morning, I woke up to see a mountain of newspapers at the end of the driveway. Must have been somewhere between 10 and 20 bicycle trips.
My second job was working behind the counter at a local donut store: Spudnuts. $1.50 / hour and all of the day old donuts I could eat.

[Greg Portland]

I started working for my parents @ 12 (as a cook during the summer). My first job away from my parents was working as a bike mechanic along a busy bike trail. I became very adept at patching tires and truing wheels (lots of collisions & punctures). That same summer I worked at a dive shop filling tanks, cleaning rental gear & doing some sales. Cleaning urine-filled wetsuits during the summer makes you want to work hard @ school :-).

[Gordon Eyre]

Thining sugar beets at 25 cents a row. The rows were long and you were bent over all day. I did learn to work which was worth a lot.

[Kevin Gregoire]

my parents owned a body shop and trailer court so my first job was mowing all the yards in summer and then scooping snow in the winter.
but i consider my first real job since my parents werent involved was a mowing job for the local trap shooting club. i did that for several
years.

[Mark Patoka]

As a kid my cousins and I would all help out when it was time to bale hay, younger unloading the hay wagon and the older would either be in the hay mow stacking bales or on the wagon stacking bales. I think Grandma paid the young ones 25 cents per wagon load.

Sophomore year in high school, my first real W-2 wages job at $2/hr was as a dishwasher/busboy at a local supper club. Didn't have my driver's license yet so rode my bicycle 3 miles each way on back country roads. Fortunately rec'd my license by the time the snow started flying.

Junior year went to work on my cousin's dairy farm. Senior year started working at my uncle's full-service gas station before everything became self-serve like it is now. Loved that job. Small-town, got to know everyone and the regulars. Our gas wars were with the Shell station across the street who was always 10 cents higher than us and this is when gas was just reaching $1/gal.

[Rick Williams]

baling hay at age 11 in 1961. $.015 a bale, $.02 if we put it in the loft. Hot, sweaty, itchy work. Did it all the way through high school with our QB and his older brothers when they were home from college during the summers. Also had a job as a carhop at the same age. Had to lie and tell them I was 13. Paid me $.45 an hour plus tips. Sophmore in high school started pouring concrete splash blocks for $3.50 and hour. Thought I had died and gone to heaven. Hard work but a good wage for 1966.

[Don Orr]

Like many others I worked on our farm at home doing whatever I was told. Feeding animals, putting in hay, cleaning barns, etc. All for room & board. Mowed a few lawns too for actual money. Helped out a farmer down the road around age 13 for pay doing whatever I was told-feeding animals, putting in hay, cleaning silos, etc. Then I got a steady job in the church cemetary cutting grass and burying people 6 days a week during high school, except winters when I would plow snow at the church. If I had a burial during the week the school bus would drop me off at the cemetary and my mom would pick me up on her way home from work. I also worked weekends at a banquet hall doing prep and washing dishes til I went off to college. Lots of different jobs since then. Been in current one for 18+ years.

This is a fun and interesting thread.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I shined shoes, delivered papers, mowed lawns, helped harvest corn and worked one summer for a haying contractor moving hay....from the field to stacked in the barn. Then I turned 15 and began working as a rough neck on oil rigs for my father working morning tower (2300-0700) and going to HS days.

[Bruce Page]

My first tax paying job was dishwasher/busboy at a steak house on Ventura Boulevard called Adams Rib. It was just up the road from some of the Hollywood studios. A lot of the Hollywood types ate there - I remember that Frank Sinatra Jr. was a great tipper.
I made $1.25 an hour plus a small percentage of the waiters tips.
Prior to that I worked summers for my dad as a surveyor chainman for $10 a day.

[BOB OLINGER]

My first job was for a local general carpenter right after graduating from high school - summer job. Pay was likely $4-5 per hr.

[Dennis Peacock]

Yea, I mentioned first real paying job as I grew up on a small farm and we all worked....for free...because we liked to eat in the winter months. We worked all summer and into the fall every year putting up food we grew so that we had food to eat over the winter. We had some money, just not enough to keep us going. We worked as a family and we survived as a family. My best memories are of us working in the summer putting up veggies, drying apples, making kraut, and eating cold watermelon.

[Jim Becker]

My first summer job was selling shoes at WT Grant...and I made less money than my 12 year old daughter now makes working at the barn where we ride and board our horses.

[David Keast]

Delivering newspapers every morning before school. I was 11 when I started, but that was in 1958 and I think rules were a lot looser then. I delivered to around 50 houses by bike 7 days per week, and was paid 2 shillings and sixpence per week. For those that dont remember the UK's eccentric currency system prior to it being revised in the 1970's, there were 20 shillings to a pound sterling, so that was a weekly wage of around 20 USD cents - which at the time bought quite a lot.

[Rob Cunningham]

My first summer job was selling shoes at WT Grant...and I made less money than my 12 year old daughter now makes working at the barn where we ride and board our horses.

Wow, WT Grant. Haven't thought about them in years.