Labor Day by Day, Decade by Decade

Job #1 School

Babysitting 35 cents an hour – 50-cents an hour, but the benefits: reading house un-american activities correspondence, touring Pioneer Square in its renaissance, dressing up in Victorian antique dresses for the Save the Wawona campaign, dressing up to go to weddings to keep an eye on Dana and Shelley, finding the Playboy stash – and reading the interviews, reading newspaper in "breakfast room;" conversations with architects and culture-lovers
Bought clothes with money saved
It wasn’t quite in my consciousness that I had to work after school to offset tuition costs that my parents couldn’t meet, I thought it was just something required, like homework.
So I started out, Cleaning classrooms – Sister tight lips overhearing me rant against her
Typewriter room and taking the typewriters apart to clean, all I knew how to do was unjam the keys with my fingers if I typed too fast or recklessly
Reception at school; work the intercom and answer the doorbell for the huge front doors; pretended it was my mansion
Getting calls from bill collectors as Dad got sicker – his final job pushing a cart of files in basement of county building, although his foot was so swollen from an untreated fall that he had to cut the tops off his leather shoes, fashioning sandals.
Then the ax fell; no transcripts released for college until $1,000 back tuition paid.
Luckily I had a wage-earning brother whose job was guaranteed after attending college on a ROTC scholarship. He paid the bill. (Twenty years later, my husband and I were the wealthy members of the family, and my niece was in a similar situation – we paid the $1,000 so that she could graduate from nursing school).
I graduated high school just as Seattle entered its Dyno-saur recession when Sec. McNamara pulled the plug on the Boeing program.
Famous billboard: Last person to leave Seattle turn out the lights?

Job #2 Independence
Job #3 Sex appeal
Job #4 Motherhood
Job #5 Amateur professional
Job #6 Rehabilitation
Job #7 Secretary
Job #8 Administrator
Job #9 Communicator