Feb.14, 2022 Lessons from my first job

  

 

February 14, 2022 

My First Job 

by Brenda B Wright

 

           When a dime was a lot of money, I would agree to polish my dad’s shiny black Sunday shoes for the glory of owning that coin. The feel of the black paste as I poked my cloth-covered finger into it was always pleasant but also under my scientific scrutiny. I would watch the paste buckle up under my finger pressure. It would feel soft yet slightly rigid as it rippled up haltingly unto my cloth-covered finger. I loved the smell of shoe paste, especially the kind that came in the flat round cans with the fantastic opener, which was like a magic lever you would turn until it pried and then popped the top of the can off.

I hated how the paste always got under my fingernail, no matter how many layers I overlapped the cloth. I would scrub on the smooth paste onto my dad’s shoes with my left hand shoved deep down inside his shoe while holding the rag in my right hand. This method always left polish marks along my skin below the elbow of my left arm. That paste was hard to get off skin. I recall several days I had those marks on my forearm as I left to go to Sunday church services because I didn't like to scrub as hard as it would take to get it off completely.

But I would smear the pasty wax all over Dad's shoes and then attempt to polish the wax with his soft shoe brush. I never could whip the polishing brush back and forth hard enough to get the shine required, so Dad usually did a few quick expert strokes with the brush before handing me the beautiful shining dime.

The hardest part of polishing dad's shoes was putting a penny in the tithing envelope to pay to the church. No exceptions, a full ten percent of all earnings went to the LDS church coffers.

Then for many years, I babysat neighbor's children to earn some spendable dollar bills. I had increased by ten percent on my understanding of money.

My first so-called real job with income taxes and other withholdings was working for Utah State University Vending. I got to work at the Vending company office at the top of the university campus by six in the morning for four years. I wrapped donuts and cinnamon rolls placed in vending machines all over the campus. I sealed those sticky confections into waxed paper for all four years of college.             Occasionally my job expanded to cleaning tables in the Student Union, working concession stands at various ballgames, and adding figures for the account in the days before calculators. Watching the elderly ladies working full time made me want a degree more than ever to get a better job one day. I had no idea how those ladies did their jobs day after day, year after year, for the $1.65 hour, which was the minimum wage then. But I had advanced to working for tens of dollars. Ten dollars could repurchase a lot in the early 1970s. I could get a great pair of shoes for less than ten dollars, Levi's 501 jeans were $10.00, and gasoline was about twenty-five cents a gallon.  

While going to university, I was a firefighter for the BLM in the summer months. When I graduated, I got a job at Bentley's clothes store at Crossroads Mall in downtown Salt Lake City for a few months. Then worked as a typist for the Utah State Government Department of Criminal Identification. I was earning four hundred dollars a month. I felt I had arrived and increased by ten percent again. Now my brain began thinking in terms of hundreds of dollars. The rent was $110.00 a month for my little place on Belmont Avenue. Car payment was about $100.00 a month. 

During most of my marriage with jobs as a narcotics agent for the Utah State Department of Public Safety, Eastern Airlines, and school teaching, my life had existed around thinking in terms of thousands of dollars. We bought and sold cars, earned monthly wages, remodeled, and bought furniture for thousands of dollars.  

By 2012, my husband and I sold our house and rentals and moved downtown to City Creek. Here is when I knew I had arrived in the hundreds of thousands of dollars land. I had to write a check that was like two hundred and ninety thousand dollars for the one-bedroom condo. Our Murray home sold for two hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. Terry had purchased that same home in 1976 for forty-two thousand three hundred and fifty dollars.

Starting with that first job of shoe polishing, it has taken me nearly a lifetime to understand the value of work, the power of money, and inflation. 

But before I die, I wonder if I can reach the million-dollar threshold? I'm not dead yet, so I believe I better get up and do some work!