How did you get your first job?

by Jim Stamp on December 22, 2022.

So, how do I decide my “first job”? I grew up on a farm. My job
included putting the feed in front of the stanchions before the
cows came in to the milking parlor (lol), milking cows, feeding
pigs, gathering eggs, and feeding ponies. Part of the chores in-
cluded mucking the stalls, pulling hay from the hay mows to the
shed for the cows and ponies, throwing straw into the shed for
spreading to help keep the cows clean.

By age 12 I mowed yards for Mr and Mrs Platt, Mrs Fultz,
Grandma Andre and Grandpa and Grandma Stamp. When the
potatoes were ready, I picked potatoes for Albert Gamble –
something that I did for several years. Mr Gamble also had
an apple orchard – but, the timetable for the apples conflicted
with doing our own farm work – combining, corn picking, etc.

When I was 14 I worked for Tom Stein at his truck farm. He
unfortunately trusted me to weed his flower garden around
his house. I didn’t know I was pulling up his orchids with
the weeds!!! I was promptly reassigned!

Every summer, Grandpa Stamp and I combined wheat and oats
at our farm and at his farm. When I was younger, Dad didn’t
want me to use the mower on the tractor so he or Grandpa
would mow and then I could rake the hay or straw. Grandpa
and I would start baling before Dad got home from work – on
weekends, Grandpa, Dad, Lee, Jay and I would all be baling
and putting the bales into the barn. Uncle Bob Miller LOVED
to bale and he would hustle down after work and he and I worked the hay wagon.

When I was 16 I had enough credits to graduate from High
School. I had 18 1/2 and we needed 16. However, I really liked
school and probably would have gone till I was 50 if they let me.

I graduated from High School when I was 17. I enrolled in
the Railroad Communications School in Kansas City, Mo. I
headed for Kansas City, Mo. The first thing I did was find a
Methodist Church (after finding a sleeping room). Then I
tried to find a job – In Missouri, you had to be 18 to get a “real”
job so that didn’t happen. I met Mike Grimm, who would
become a lifelong friend and eventually would be Best Man
at my wedding. Mike and I got an apartment together to split
costs. Mike was also 17 so job hunting was almost a bust for
both of us. Shortly, we found jobs at the Kansas City, Mo.
Public Library. Amazing! 2 square blocks of underground
archives. 13 stories above ground, including a TV station,
radio station, historical archive of rare books and newspapers.
I worked in the History Department and I loved that job.
That library we MUCH MUCH larger than the Book Mobile
that I used when it came to Winona. In the evenings, Mike
and I went to Railroad Communications School.

    Me and Lewis arm wrestling in Kansas City

Mike and I were able to test out of 3 months of school and we
headed home. The school had arranged a job interview with the
Nickle Plate Railroad in Brewster, Ohio. The interview went
well, but, they had filled the job on Monday. I was there on
Friday. The dispatcher said they had two openings in Muncie,
Indiana. The following Monday, Mike came to Winona from
Martinsburg, W.Va and picked me up. We headed to Muncie,
Indiana. We found the depot in the dark and met P.J. Bredwell.
What a character he was! The next morning we were to fill in
the applications and take our physicals (age 18) to work with the
Nickle Plate Railroad. One of the questions on the application
was “Have you ever been in the hospital?” I answered, “when I
was 5 years old I had my tonsils out and spent a night in the
hospital, and when I was 14 I was hit by a car. That resulted in
me being in a coma for almost 10 days with a fractured skull,
multiple concussions, torsion of the brain stem…” and several other things.

That answer didn’t work for the railroad. They could not take a
chance with a closed head injury if someone was going to be
working with trains. Mike, for unknown reasons, did not pass
the physical. So, we headed to Chicago. In Chicago, we were
directed to Aurora, Illinois where the dispatcher for the CB & Q
Railroad was located. The CB&Q application had the same
questions. I, however, did not have the same answer. My
answer was “When I was 5 years old I had my tonsils out and
was in the hospital overnight. Holey Underwear!

Mike and I were both hired as telegrapher/station managers on
the Chicago, Burlington & Northern Railroad. I considered this
to be my FIRST grown-up job where I spent the next 20 months.
Over the subsequent 20 months I worked in Cicero, Berwyn,
Eola, East Eola, Naperville, Lisle, Downers Grove, Aurora,
Shabonna, Lee, Mendota, Princeton, Peoria, Rock Island,
Savanna, Galena Junction, Kewanee, Zearing, and more.
Sometimes I found a sleeping room for rent. Sometimes I slept
in the backseat of my car or in a railroad car, or, I would get out
my Army cot (I was never in the army) and a sleeping bag, fire
up the Franklin Stove and sleep in the depot. One of the depots I
slept in was in Barstow. It wasn’t actually haunted, but, one of
my friends had been handing up orders to the train (we had to
prepare orders in triplicate. We kept one copy as a depot record,
one had to be handed up to the Engineer and one to the
Conductor. The hand-off was done with a ‘sling-shot’ with a
string in the triangle and the message secured to the string. If
either the Engineer or the Conductor missed the message, the
train had to stop) and when the train came around the bend one
of the flat cars hauling telephone poles that were banded, a band
had snapped and was waving in the wind. It was like a razor
and de-capitated my friend. That always created images of some concern…

My 1958 Plymouth. My first car and part-time camper

The great Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad

By September of 1962, I was enrolled at Mount Union College in
Alliance, OH. I found a job in a fabrication shop in Salem where
I racked plate steel, cut steel for the welders, and drove truck to
pick up steel in Massillon, OH. They let me work around my
school schedule. It probably helped that my Dad was the Chief Engineer.

After a few months, my Dad needed help (and I was taking
Engineering Drawing at Mount Union) so he brought me in
from the shop to be a draftsman. One of the things we made
was boat trailers. I got to draw the blow-out drawings for the
owner’s manual and the parts catalog.

When school got a little more intense, I got a job with Sears
and Roebuck in Alliance and shared an apartment with Pat
Miller. Pat also worked at Sears. Working closer to the school
saved a couple hours a day. I started out in the paint
department. A couple months later, I was transferred to the
credit department. Looking back from today, it seems a little
obnoxious for someone at my age – no house, no real life
experience – to be deciding whether a person/couple was credit worthy. But, I did it.

From Sears, after I graduated from Mount Union, I went to
work with Ernst & Ernst. We referred to Ernst & Ernst as E & E.
E & E was one of the top 5 accounting firms in the world. I was
not an accounting major but I was hired with the provision
that I attend University of Akron in the evenings until I had
enough accounting credits to sit for the CPA exam. So, I did!

Kansas City, Mo Library