my first real job

People who work hard sleep well, whether they eat little or much. (Ecclesiastes 5:12)

My first real job was a fun job, especially for a young man 19 years old. I took money out of pay phones for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company in Houston, TX.

Until recently, every business in the world had a pay phone. Since, of course, this was long before cell phones were even dreamed of, everyone who had to call home did so on a pay phone. And each time they did, it was ten cents. More if long distance.

My job was to go to each of these businesses and take the money out of their pay phones. And there were some really strange businesses I got to go into.

Every morning, I got a bicycle lock (the pad lock with a long upper part) filled with keys, along with a binder filled with the cards that went with each pay phone I was to empty. The cards were punch cards, done on those new machines called “computers.”

Each key only fit one phone. And each key had a card with all of the vital information, including location, on it.

And phones were everywhere, from the fanciest hotels to the sorriest dives, from churches to strip clubs. It was my job to go into each of these places and take the money out of their phones.

All day long I would deal with people as wildly variable as you can imagine. After all, everybody in business had a pay phone for their customers.

I mostly drove around all day. I drove a step van with a big bin in the back that had the coin boxes locked into it. Every night I would go back to the shop and unload them.

My route would vary from day to day, but I usually covered the same areas each week. I covered much of southwest Houston, along with South Houston and also Texas City, where I had graduated from high school. 

I went everywhere and saw everything, from the most boring to the most interesting. Body painting studios were in vogue at the time and I had several of those in the Westheimer area of Houston (the alternative section of Houston).

Strip clubs were also becoming more accepted and I had some of those. In fact, I saw my first nude girl in a place called Red Baron. It was totally red inside and I had trouble seeing. A girl came over and asked me if she could help me and then led me by the hand to the phone. About half-way there, it dawned on me that if she had anything at all on, it was very small and below her waist. That made an impression.

Ice houses were big in some sections of Houston. Those were open air bars. I also had several just plain dives with drunks everywhere that I had to dodge around.

There, of course, were business buildings with offices and the like and restaurants, stores of all kinds, hotels, the airport, the bus station.

Downtown was on my route and I went into many of the businesses there, including some of the strangest places on old Market Square, the original center of Houston that had been taken over by the hippies. A Hare Krishna girl tried to pick me up one day.

I loved to go near downtown to the Bell Telephone headquarters at 3100 Main and call Ella on the brand new Touch Tone phones. Those were only at the 3100 Main building until the early 70’s and I would call and play her a tune of the buttons.

I also enjoyed calling Ella from some of the sorriest places I would go in, just for the fun of it. I even got robbed a couple of times, but in general, it was fun.

I got drafted in July after only about four or five months working at the job, and had to go into the army in August of 1969. I came out in August of 1971 and got my job back. There was a law that guaranteed your job if you were drafted so I wasn’t worried.

But for a while, I was on top of the world. It was a good and well-paying (to me at least) job. I had a car and an apartment, along with a pretty girl-friend and friends at church. It was almost idyllic. It was fun. It was the kind of life that every young man needs before he settles down.

I would love to go back and do it again. Much of that is because it was a carefree time, one in which I had no real worries or concerns. I made plenty of money so that I paid my bills and still had enough to take my girl out to do whatever she wanted.

But it was a good job too. It was one that had a lot of variety and one in which you got to meet everyone in the world.

There are no jobs like that now. Pay phones are just about gone, and not many jobs involve quite the interaction with the public that one did.

What a great way to start off life.