first jobs

I'm going to try starting on stories we can all relate to.  I hope this is one.

My first job was at that grocery store on 54th and Kedzie, Beagles might remember it, it was a Certified store I believe.  The big brother of a friend of mine, who was a little tetchy worked there and told me that I could come in that Monday after school.  So I came in every afternoon after school until Friday which was payday.  Two brothers ran the store and they were handing out cash to the staff, but not, it turns out, to young Uncle Ken.  "What about me?" I asked and one of them replied, "What about you?  I didn't hire you."  And the other brother said, "I didn't either."  

True enough, neither one had, I had assumed that my friend's brother had arranged that, but apparently he didn't.  After a bit of hemming and hawing they gave me some money and told me not to come back.  I was happy enough with that settlement.


My first summer job was at the State Lake theater which I can see right out my window this morning.  Well I can see the building, the theater and the marquee are gone,  The big deal was the movie Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  A big fucking deal let me tell you Skippy.  Seats were reserved and we ushers showed people to their seats wearing red suitcoats, a cardboard dicky and a bowtie that snapped on somehow.  It was pretty cool, after the main seating we just kind of hung around.  We always made sure to duck back in the door when the scene with the scantily clad dancing girls came on, some of us memorized all the lines.  When we got a chance we flirted with the candy girls who all seemed very hot at the time.  Sometimes we went out to Grant Park and played softball.

I met people from the North side for the first time.  I dunno,  they just seemed more suave than my southwest side buddies (There were no black ushers, I would have remembered that at the time), well they had to navigate all those diagonal streets, and all those other streets that didn't even have numbers, so maybe that made them a little smoother.  

Another summer job I had was packing bibles.  It was in one of those big warehouses off Archer by the river just west of State.  I think that Pope John had just been elected, and even though I was not catholic he seemed like a pretty good guy.  His face was all over the new catholic bibles.  I used to sit by the river and eat my lunch, a brown paper bag with sandwiches that tasted a little like the wax paper they were wrapped in.  I grew to like that taste.  

That summer was the last time I came back to Chicago.  I had a few short jobs in Champaign but I didn't start my first real pay the rent job until the spring of 68.


This may explain those texts that Old Dog was getting from Trump a week or two ago.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/20/trump-massive-texting-program-suspended-372302