The following is taken from a booklet of former Camden resident, Bill Jackman’s, memoirs:
Not all the kids worked on the farms back in the ‘40s, like I did. Many had paper routes, but I guess those paper routes just weren’t my thing. I walked a route one time or so, with a friend that had one. That was enough. I didn’t like dogs running after me. He got good money for the route, if I recall, about $8 a week. Maybe it took an hour to deliver the evening paper, then another hour in the early morning to deliver the morning paper. This went on Monday through Saturday, a carrying those yellow sacks of papers.
On Sunday before the sun came up, those papers had to get out, so kids could set on their folk’s beds and read the comics before church. I got a kick out of Dagwood and Blondie. He always wanted to take a nap on the couch and she’d always have something for him to do. I liked Popeye and Olive Oyl, Swee’Pea and Wimpy. Don’t know where they got the names for those characters. I also liked Orphan Annie, Sandy and Daddy Warbucks, Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchum.
Delivering papers was a good way of making money that didn’t take all the best daylight hours. I could see where it was a good job, still I liked to sleep in, at least on Sunday before church. The worst part was that all those newspapers you delivered, you were responsible for collecting the payments for. So sometimes you had to make extra trips back, as they were short on funds. If the money wasn’t there, then you were the one that was short. Maybe that’s why I would rather work on the farms.
When I was 16, I got a job in a drug store on 42nd and Thomas, cleaning, picking up and then delivering some prescriptions. Most of it wasn’t bad—lots of mopping up water on the floors in winter, carrying up what they needed out of the basement, bringing empty cases of pop bottles down to the basement. Of course, all those drug stores had soda fountains, probably where the drug store made half its profits.
Lots of kids came to the soda fountain after school. This one day the druggist asked me to take the putty knife and scrape some gum off the floor. I was fine with that. I was down there scraping away by the soda fountain and in comes a friend. He yells, “Hey look, Bill’s a scraping gum for himself,” as he spits a wad of gum on the floor. That’s the day I quit that job! Course the next day here’s this same friend cleaning there. He lasted awhile ‘til it got to him. He kind of evened things out, took a common pin and poked pin holes in a bunch of balloons—a hole in each one. They came one to the package. Guess that year there were a bunch of people surprised when they couldn’t blow them up. Those balloons weren’t worth a hoot and they were those great big ‘Happy Birthday’ balloons.
Course if you were really serious about pocket money, you would get the family lawn mower and go up and down the block looking for people’s lawns to mow!
So, that’s what some of the kids of my day did for jobs. I’ve written before about my experiences working on the farms around Camden. To me, that was much more enjoyable and I liked it a lot better, even though you got a lot dirtier. Bill Jackman
Note: As a footnote to Bill Jackman’s story, I read in the June 4, 1943 issue of the Patrick Henry Patriot, that boys in the Patrick Henry district were recruited by the War Emergency Agricultural Program to help the farmers with their crops. With so many young men off to war, the farmers would not have been able to meet the country’s food needs without their help. On the program the boys worked twice a week in eight-hour shifts. On the farms they received instructions about various phases of farm work, such as cultivation, planting, plowing and machinery operation. Thirty-five boys from Henry High stayed with the program. Barbara Meyer Bistodeau
