As a schoolboy I mowed lawns, shoveled driveways, ran a paper route and did yard work for pocket money. In high school I spent one summer tending a small refreshment stand at the beach, on which my father took the season franchise as a way to keep my younger sister and myself out of trouble. We got a weekly allowance of five dollars each, against a share of the season profit (which amounted to another five dollars and change for the whole summer, so we split that three ways for our dividend).
My first job with FICA and IRS withholding was the following summer, when I was kitchen slave in a seafood restaurant, twelve hours a day, six days a week, for sixty-five cents an hour. I walked six miles to work every morning, and got a lift close to home from somebody every night.
I'm not sure I should count four years in the peacetime Navy, since that was like a four-year pleasure cruise for me, all expenses paid, plus pocket money, a new movie every night, cocktails at the PX for twenty-five cents a glass, lots of good poker games, and charming females at every port of call.
After that I went off to college, and spent one summer as a camp counselor, then did two internships--one at the daily newspaper at the state capitol, then at a daily legal reporting service in Foggy Bottom DC. Those were two great jobs. The latter produced a job offer when I graduated, which I would love to have accepted, except the summer heat in DC was too much for me, so I began my adult career working in labor relations for a cement company with mills scattered around the eastern and central US. That was the era of building out the interstate highway system, with lots of big dams still being built, plus new airports with long runways for jet planes, not to mention general economic expansion.
I had lotsa good times and some not so good during my working years, but made it through with only a few small pieces missing. I've been retired now over twenty years, and can attest I am very well suited to a life of leisure.