Dad's School Days and First Jobs

At the same time that Mom and her family were struggling to survive the depression years, Dad’s family was too.
On top bad financial times for the country, Dad’s father was also sick with black lung disease caused by working in the gold mines. As a young teenager, dad was able to get some before and after school jobs to help himself and his family out. His first job as a fourteen year old was a door-to-door sells job selling the “Saturday Evening Post” magazines. This is what Dad said about his next few jobs. Judy

After selling “Saturday Evening Post” magazines, I finally got a job delivering shopping news by going house to house in the mornings before I went to school. My next job was to deliver the “San Francisco Examiner” newspaper on my bike before I went to school each morning. When I was a little older, I got a job of collecting the money from the people that took the newspaper. Almost every night, I was out collecting money. I would get a certain amount of pay for each house I collected money from.
Paperboys didn’t have to collect from the customers they delivered the newspapers to. I had one half of Alameda to collect from and another boy had the other half to collect from.

I was fifteen when my father died. After his death, I gave most of the money I made to my mother for us to live on.
As a ninth grader in high school, I started working for Western Union. I rode my bike to Oakland after school and on Saturdays delivering telegrams.
In the tenth grade, I only went to school half a day and delivered telegrams in the afternoons.

By the time I was seventeen, I got a job in a wooden box factory. My job was to stack cut-up wood in piles on pallets after a man cut them to proper sizes to build boxes.

Each time I changed jobs, I would get a better salary.

As a seventeen year old, I quit school and worked full time. Because of that, my mother and I could afford to live a little better life.
Dad