Digging ditches was hard work, but I loved it because it paid real money and was good for the muscles. Still, in moments of quiet candor, I had to ask myself: is this why I went to college?
It was the summer of 1931, the depth of the Depression. The streets of San Francisco were teeming with college graduates, all seeking a job -- any job. The typical response was as reasonable and humane as it was maddening: “Before we can give you a job, son, we have to rehire the man with a family we laid off last month.”
I got the ditch-digging stint thanks to a distant cousin who was city manager of San Mateo. When that ended, I delivered handbills house-to-house. Next, I counted automobiles on El Camino Real for the state highway department, which was studying the need for a three-lane highway. My crew drew the midnight shift, so we had a lot of time to tell adult jokes and swap hard-luck stories. The job paid $3 a night and lasted four nights.
Later, my Uncle C.J., mayor of Belmont, wangled me a post at the dog tracks. A Chicago gang had decided to take the dog-racing craze to California, and Uncle C.J. helped them get a Belmont location, which gave him some clout. The mob had developed an apparatus that held the dogs in individual saddles at the starting line. Occasionally some straps would get tangled, delaying a dog’s start. This convinced the fans who had bet on the dog that the race had been fixed, and their cries of “fraud!” were loud and embarrassing. My job was to stand by a model of this contraption and demonstrate to irate bettors how their dog’s hangup was an unfortunate accident, then give them their money back.
My last brief job was the most depressing: selling newspaper advertising to concessionnaires along the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where in happier times my brothers and I had driven the Crazy Cars and thrown baseballs at wooden milk bottles. I arrived for work on a drizzly day in April. The folks along the boardwalk were desperate to draw business but unable to buy advertising. For me, that grim day symbolized the suffering of the time.
My story has a happy ending, though. In 1933, thanks to F.D.R.’s 40-hour workweek, some jobs opened up at a slaughterhouse in South San Francisco. I was hired as an order clerk, several rungs below those who slit the cattle’s throats.
It was a steady job with an $18-per-week paycheck. I was on cloud nine.
-- Paul V. Lorton Sr., ’31
