Dayton Stories Project
Story Circle Session #072795
Dayton Jewish Center
Dayton, Ohio
July 27, 1995
First Jobs
Facilitator: Marilyn Klaben Recorder: Marilyn Shannon Transcriber: Holly Bergman Transcribe Typist: Sue Broadstock
Participants: Stanley Blum, Connie Blum, Maryan Caplan, Tony Dallas, Art Dicken, Mary Dicken, Millie Dlott, Molly Droz, Harriet Moscowitz
This session lasts approximately 40 minutes.
The following transcription of the session has been edited, with repeated phrases or interruptions deleted to make the text flow more smoothly. It is suggested that visitors who find the text interesting take the time to listen to the audio portion of this session. A more detailed text will eventually be added.
Marily Klaben opened the story circle and suggested the topic of their first job.
Stanley Blum
Im native to Dayton, and perhaps come from the area that a lot of the Jewish people in the community emanated from, Little Jerusalem, Rogge Street. Which a lot of the people who went off into Dayton to make names for themselves in business or as professionals and so forth can remember that they once lived on Rogge Street. Rogge Street was very near the synagogue, Beth Jacob Synagogue. And I can remember that even though there were non-Jewish people living on the street, it really felt more or less like Little Jerusalem because most of the families were Jewish. Now you may wonder what’s this got to do with a job. Most of the people on Rogge Street weren’t particularly well-to-do, and os everybody was doing work of one kind or another , even when they were very young.
I think that the first thing that I recall doing was making a grocery cart out of an old hamper for beans. We probably got them from Millie’s father. They used to go to the wholesale market with my father on St. Clair Street. So after he would load the truck and empty the various cartons and so forth, we had all these hampers. And I would go through the alleys on Rogge Street and Wyoming Street, Brown Street, and so forth, every once in a while and find a pair of wheels. I’d attach the pair of wheels to the bottom half of the hamper and then using the top of a bushel basket, tear it apart and just use the one part of it to attach to the hamper so that you could pull it. Then I would go up and down the street and just sell those for fifty cents. Which at that time I thought was a great deal of money. And at that time, people would take their grocery carts to the neighborhood grocery stores and so forth. So I remember that was one of my first jobs.
And then in relationship to Sinclair Street, I used to go to work with my father. A lot of times the wholesalers would have food that was coming in on trains, on the refrigerator cars. And they would send someone out to the refrigerator cars, unload the cars and then load the trucks and bring it to the wholesale market on St. Clair Street. So one of the first jobs for which I got paid for was helping to unload railroad cars. I was all of six years old, and my job was to...I stood in the door of the railroad car, where the car was loaded with watermelons, and I was the pivot person that they would hand the watermelon to me and I would hand the watermelon down to the person who was standing there. And standing around, were groups of people with their little tomato baskets. And they were waiting for something to drop, because then they could divide the spoils. And I got paid all of ten cents for whatever period of time that I did that. And I would work with my father. Those are the kinds of things that I did to begin with. Odd jobs, washing down the outside of houses, painting fences, and things like that.
But the first job that I had as an employee, I guess, really, was when I went to work for the Dayton Public Library. Then I was the old age of 14. I remember starting at ten cents and hour on that job, but within weeks, there was a law that said they had to give a minimum wage of 25 cents. So I had a tremendous raise very quickly. I was a page at the library at the Patterson Branch on Wyoming Street, that’s where I started off, and then I branched out to the Main Library. Mr. Hamilton was the head of the library at that time, and that I had the pleasure of meeting him in person, not in relationship with anything to do with the job, but there were two girls who were working at the library. I don’t know what their real names were, but we referred to them as Brenda and Convina. And that they always seemed to be together. And I found them rather attractive and I was trying to follow them one day on the stairway, and I didn’t want them to know that I was following them. One of them turned around, so I quickly turned around and I jumped and there was a big post at the bottom and I connected with the post and I hit my head and I still have a bump there. They took me in to Mr. Hamilton to, I guess to see that I was totally all right, and I remember him putting compresses and pressing my head and so forth, and asking me how the accident happened. I was a little bit too embarrassed to really say exactly how it happened. There were a lot of other persons that were working at the library, and it was a real good introduction to work in the Dayton area, ‘cause I was able to get around.
Connie Blum
Well, my father owned a drug store. So my earliest working experiences, before I ever got paid for anything, were in my father’s drug store. And the first thing I can remember doing, I was very little, I couldn’t’a been more than 7 or 8, various personal hygiene items would be purchased in wrapped packages in those days. And so my job was to wrap packages. Pull the paper wrap, seal and stack ‘em on the shelves. Next job I remember, at the drug store, was during World War II, when many items were rationed. And one of the things that was hard to get was cigarettes. And a shipment of cigarettes would come in, and they’d be gone, you know, within the hour. And we’d have, like an assembly line. Somebody would stand behind the counter and shovel the cigarettes out to the people, and somebody would stand at the cash register and make change. And I was, like, pre-teenager at that time, so I would stand at the cash register and make change. Cigarettes were 16 cents a pack. So, I’d remember very clearly, people would come with a quarter and a penny. And you put the quarter and the penny in the register and you pull out the dime, and that was my job, to put the quarter and the penny in the register and pull out the dime to make change for people. By the time I got into my later teenage years, about 15, 16, my father had added a soda fountain to the drug store. I just thought, you know as a teenager, this was just the most wonderful ting in the world I mean, all the ice cream, all the sundaes, all the sodas, all the whatever. The goal of my life was to be a soda jerk, so I learned how to make sodas and sundaes. And I’d come down after school, “Can I work, can I work?” And summer vacations, and I worked for 50 cents an hour at my father’s drug store, making sodas and sundaes.
Art Dicken
The first job that I remember was working at a grocery store as a stock boy, clean-up man,
a go-fer man, do this, go fer that. I had a bicycle that I purchased for a dollar and a half, put some additional parts on it. I would run errands, with small packages, to people’s houses that couldn’t easily get to the grocery. I would also wash the windows. They would decorate them with hand-painted white chalk signs on the window of various specials of the weekend. And of course, mop the floor, restock the shelves, even ride the bicycle down to the floral shop and pick up some fresh greenery for the meat cases. Stack empty bottles, anything like that. I got about, oh, a couple dollars a week. Enough to go the picture show, buy some candy, and have a little bit to put in the bank.
Mary Dicken
My first job for which I was paid was a real catastrophe. My girlfriend, who lived on Volusia Avenue, and I were fortunate, we always had some spending money. But we wanted to really work, so we applied without our parents knowing, at Woolworth’s downtown. And I was at a counter, I think it was near the holidays, and I had items shaped like candles, long-stemmed candles, and statuettes and so forth, of various shapes and sizes. And we not only had to sell the times, but we had to wrap them, and as Connie said, I didn’t do well wrapping. Things were shaped so oddly, and I wound up breaking more. And also, we both came to work dressed in party dresses, you might say we didn’t know a thing about proper dress for business. But I wound up paying them at the end of the day ‘cause I’d broken so much. And we went to work a couple days later- I still don’t recall how we got involved with this-but we sold chances at an undertakers convention. I don’t know what on, but we got a percentage of each chance we sold, and it was at the fairgrounds in Dayton. And that was that. Then I became a dance teacher, and it worked out successfully.
Millie Dlott
My maiden name was Zimboch; I’m a Dayton native. And my folks were in th wholesale produce business, and they had some customers that didn’t buy large quantities of things, so with the broken boxes, we had stands in the market. We had open air market on Jefferson Street and around the library park, and then a closed market on Wayne Avenue. And my first job, or course, was helping sell at the market stands. Well I had to get to be really good at picking out fruits and vegetables, ‘cause a lot of our customers were friends of the family, or people we knew real well, and if I sold ‘em something bad, I would hear about it the next week for sure. So to this day, everybody relies on me for quality in fruits and produce, ‘cause for some reason or other, I can smell out a good piece of it. I t was called Zimboch Company. In fact, the whole street was full of my relatives, St. Clair Street. The Linder Company, the Donoff Company, the Zimboch Company-it was all the same family. There is a little park right now, towards Fifth Street [on St. Clair Street], the park was my folks’ store. And across the street was the window people and Hall’s Hand Laundry, that’s Dave Hall. His father and my folks were real good friends. And there was Mayor Krebs, he was a good friend. Everything was all down there. The whole street was full of produce companies-that’s all that was there, besides the hand laundry and Mayor Kreb’s office. The reason they got rid of St. Clair Street was because it was a hazard to traffic. They’d pull those big trucks up there, you know, and block off the street. My folks went to work when I went to sleep, sometimes, you know, at midnight, one o’clock in the morning, they would go to work. And they’d be through on the street late in the morning. A real day was Saturday. They would go down at one o’clock in the morning, and work in the store until mid-morning, and then go to the market, and by the time they got back to the market and put everything away, and got home it was eight, nine o’clock at night. That was almost around the clock. Oh, many times when I started dating later on, I would pass my father coming in; he was going out to work. It’s an interesting business, but very hard one.
Stanley Blum
It was a great street to come down. I remember the first time when I was riding in my father’s truck, and before you ever got to St. Clair Street, you could smell it. It was delightful. First of all, you not only had the wholesalers there-Office Brothers, Linder’s, Pinske’s, all of them But also, a lot of the farmers would come in for the day and would be selling from the sidewalks. So they had their corn and potatoes and strawberries and everything else that were just fresh right off th trees. I’d walk with my father and he would pick out whatever it is he would want. My job was to sit on the truck, and then when everything came on the truck, then I would empty it from one case. And he would display all these things on the truck. As a matter of fact, people, as they would come to the truck-his regular route customers-would then come out and they would enjoy looking, just looking at all the food, because he would arrange it in such a nice way. And they would see what they wanted, and my job would be to weigh it. But when I think of St. Clair Street, I think not only of the crowding and the bargaining, the good camaraderie that was there, and the smells. I don’t remember the name-there was like a little restaurant or something there. A lot of times, my point of the morning was when I was able to go in and I was able to get a donut, or to get something to drink, a glass of milk or soda, that was something then. St. Clair Street was really quite a landmark in Dayton for very long time. It was from Fifth to Third.
Molly Droz
I lived in or near Dayton for all but eight and a half years of my life, so I’m almost a native. It was just before the war ended, Christmas of ‘44, and I was a freshman in high school. And there weren’t too many people available to work, and Rike’s was hiring high school students without a work permit to work that Christmastime. So I don’t know how I got there to get the job or whatever, but I got a job and they assigned me to the baby department in the budget store, which was down in the basement. There was a baby department there and a baby department upstairs. The most important thing that they stressed to me was do NOT, DO NOT wait on anybody who’s coming to buy a layette. In other words, I’m certainly not qualified and I don’t know anything about selling baby things. But I could sell a toy, or a blanket or something like that. And I would be excused from school early-whether it was one or two o’clock in the afternoon I don’t know-but we got excused from your classes. And I would take the bus down Third Street-I went to Roosevelt High School-and that was my first job. And it was just over the Christmas vacation. By Summer, I was working at Baker’s selling handbags. Again, 14, 15 years old, what do you really know about that? But it was easy; the salesman would come up with a pair of shoes and say, “Sell her a purse to match.” But that didn’t last too long. I went next door to Thal’s This was all in a period of a year, year and a half’s time. And where did they me in Thal’s but selling dresses, which didn’t work out too well. So on the main floor, they had what they called the hat bar. And there were two entrances into the store and the hat bar was in the middle. I only worked on Saturday’s, but they advertised various hats for the weekend. So when you came to work, you had to wear one of the hats. These were wild. It was not a very good thing because certainly 15 year old girls at that time really didn’t wear hats. Hats were really for older people. I finished my high school working career at Thal’s. And again, you made, like five dollars on a Saturday. Which was great, and when I’d go to get the bus to go home, they sold gardenias on the corner of Third and Main, and I used to get a gardenia, pin it on my coat and go home.
Harriet Moscowitz
My father owned a laundry, in north Dayton on Vermont. And every summer it was my job to go down and file the drivers’ slips. Which is not a bad job, except the girls that worked in the office, saved ‘em for the time that I left in September to go back to school until June the next year. And you know, computers were not there, and all the things that we do now. They had to hand write a slip in duplicate. And so that was my job. And during the hot weather my father felt that I shouldn’t be in there-there was no such thing as air conditioning-because the office was in a little house next to the plant. So my father would drive me over there, pay for my lunch, pick me up, you know, an hour, two hours later, and then tell everybody how hard I’d worked. It was fun. I think my first real paying job was working for Elder’s. In the cosmetic department, which was a ball. I used to come with different colors all over my arm. And you tried on all the makeup and you also sold perfume. So you tried out all the perfume. Came home smelling just horrible, but it was fun. And it was during the war, so we worked on Monday nights. My father wouldn’t let me walk from the bus alone, so he had to go up and wait for me at the bus stop. And he said during gas rationing, he doesn’t think that I really made enough money for what it was costing him. And now the family business is Economy Linen. My father and Dave Hall were friends, and I mean it was not the scrub boards and laundry. That was not what it was.
Stanley Blum
After I worked at the library, I then got a job-really not after ‘cause some nights I worked at the library and other nights I worked at Wessels’ Pharmacy on the corner of Brown and Oak Street.
And learned the soda fountain too, to make all the various things. It was also a very interesting job, in that we had a pharmacist that couldn’t help but give medical advice to a lot of people that were coming in, in order not to have to go to the doctor. They would tell the symptoms and then he would tell them what particular kinds of medications that they ought to consider. He would be able to say that he was advising them. Then I went to work at GH&R Foundry. I worked as a supply person. Any time a machine would break down or something, that they would come to me and they would fill out a requisition and then I would fill out another requisition and i would go to the storeroom, get the part, bring it out so that they could get that. Then I worked for Mr. Levine at Western Variety Store at the corner of West Third and Western, right across from Liberal Market. It was near Roosevelt High School, and I used to particularly enjoy watching the young ladies come and go. It was also a very interesting kind of job, in that Mr. Levine had tried to talk me into going into business when I finished high school, but I was determined that I wanted to go on to college, and so did not do that. Along the way I also sold magazines for Collier, they were three-for-one. Collier is a very pretty Liberty magazine, or something like that. Those were all before I finished high school, but again, it was rather typical. That is the main pont, that people worked at many different kinds of jobs because of the time, and that there was need.
Maryan Caplan
Hearing everything around reminds me-you mentioned Liberal Market-yes, I used to work at Liberal Market. I worked at The Home Store, giftwrapping. We had real stringy ribbons then, `and we had to make our own bows. I was only 13.
I want to tell you of a job my father had, I mean an experience he had. And if he had a hundred dollars, I wouldn’t be here today. My father used to manage the cigar store, United Cigar Store, Third and Main. My father’s name is Charlie, and one of his customers was Charlie Kettering. And Charlie used to stop in every day and buy his cigar, “Hi Charlie, how’s thing doing?” “Fine, Charlie.” One day Charlie Kettering stopped in and said, “Charlie, I’ve got a deal for you. I’m going to start my own company. You’ve got at hundred dollars, you can come along with me.” My father said, “Charlie, I just don’t have a hundred dollars.” Charlie Kettering said, “Well, too bad.” He went ahead and he formed Delco, Dayton Electric Company. I wouldn’t be here today if my father’d only had a hundred dollars at the right time.
But we always did an awful lot of volunteer work, it seems to me. I think I was the last examiner for the American Red Cross; they had examiners in that time, instead of instructors. I used to teach classes for the Red Cross. I loved theater. We used to have a radio show, WSMK. And it was in the old Lowes building. And I remember one of my parts each week-we had one mic, and it was a two sided mic, it wasn’t a pepper mic like they have today-we worked with somebody by the name of Martha Gowdy. I had to stand at the end of the studio and run towards the mic in my bare feet, yelling, “Police, police, help, help!” And screaming, and I was not a screamer, it was very hard for me to do. But we were doing it for the AAA.
But the first job I had that I went out to look for a job, was when I graduated from Miami Jacobs Business College. My father, in Colonel White High School when we were in what, ninth grade, said, “We can’t afford to send you to college, so therefore you’re gonna have to take a business course.” So I took a business course. And then I went to Miami Jacobs. They had the Jewish Community Council, which was down at 59 Green Street, and Jane Fisher was the head of the Jewish Community Council. And she was the social worker to end all social workers. And she was so helpful. I took ballet lessons from her; I learned nothing. When I graduated, I wanted to go into accounting, but my father-and I was offered a job by a big accountant firm, can’t remember the name of it now, but a big accountant firm- but my father says no. People were jumping out of windows in 1929 and accountants. “My daughter’s not jumping out of a window.” And so I had to take a much more mundane job. And I found a job with Williamson Cowen as a bookkeeper, and I went to Williamson Cowen down on East Third Street, and I said, “I don’t have any experience. But I’m good, and I’m going to give you a deal. I will work for you for two weeks at the rate of five dollars a week for two weeks. Then you will increase my salary by two dollars a week until I get up to twenty. They said, “Okay!” I had a job. I think I must have kept it for six or eight weeks; anyhow, I don’t think I ever got up to twenty dollars and I was off to something else, I can’t remember what it was. But we always worked when the Dale Theatre was built. Santa Clara and Main and Marathon was the Dale Theatre. We used to pass out little flyers We got to go for free, because we passed out the flyers.
Mary Luben Dicken
[about another job she had]...it might bring up a little store that somebody might remember, a very small ladies fashion store on Main Street downtown, called Virginia Dare. I got the job modeling for them. I modeled play clothes and formals, which I dearly loved that. It was very nice and then when I did have my dance studio, they did carry white tap shoes. So that was the symbol of my studio. All my students, if you’d ever see them any place, they had on the white tap shoes instead of the black patent. But it was a nice little store, not too expensive. They had pretty little things and I loved the job that I had there. And I did get to keep my pay there. I didn’t tear any of the gowns, or ruin anything.
Art Dicken
I wanted to add to Stanley’s comments about the open air market. It was kind of a three-sided thing that bordered on Jefferson Street, ST. Clair Street, and down through Fourth Street. All of the merchants-most of them were horse and wagon at that time. They would back up into the curb in order to get the space for all the merchants. There was a place down there called the Jefferson-Main Arcade that was down below Sixth Street. In the wintertime, or in the fall, they would peddle all the winter types of vegetables and fruits down to Christmastime, when you’d have Christmas wreaths and Christmas trees. Patterson was now Patterson Boulevard, that sign that was part of the canal land. Early in time, the canal boats did come up that far. Part of the time that was known as a hay market. They would bring in their winter hay and sell it for the best price possible. So that really completed the whole triangle there. Haymarket Street was actually up off of Fifth Street, off of Wayne Avenue.
Harriet Moscowitz
My father had a used tire store on Third Street. We’ve got pictures of him with his brother-in-law. And my father went to Detroit to buy a load of tires. Came back with a lot of money. That’s how the laundry got started. And he rented a garage in Belmont.
