I got my first job in 1957. I was 13. I rode my bicycle to a radio-TV repair shop a few blocks from home and asked the aged owner if I could do some work for him on Saturdays. His shop was barely hanging on, but electronics had been one of my hobbies since age 10. I knew how to handle a soldering iron and how to spot a bad vacuum tube, overheated resistor, or leaking capacitor. I also knew how to squirt carbon tetrachloride into a scratchy volume control and clean it up. He let me tackle some of the junk radios on his back shelves that he had not been able to fix. I got one of them working, and then another, and another. Soon, I was doing service calls to people's houses on my bicycle, carrying several vacuum tubes in a paper bag that I dare not drop.
People often were confused when they were told that a "serviceman" would be coming to their house, and then there would be a scraggly teen with a paper bag at their door. But most of them let me in. And, on several occasions, I opened the back of a big TV, found that a mixer tube or an RF amplifier tube or a power rectifier tube was not glowing, and yanked it out. I pulled a replacement tube out of the paper bag, pushed it into the tube socket, and--voila!--cartoons or a baseball game appeared. Sometimes, happy customers gave me old radios to take back to the shop to repair for them. One customer gave me a vacuum tube that had had its tip broken off. He had carefully taped over the hole "so the vacuum won't leak out." I found a replacement tube in my bag and gave it to him. The shop owner appreciated the work I was doing and the extra repair jobs that I was bringing in. He began paying me first with used radio and TV parts that I could use in my own ham radio hobby projects. Then, one Saturday, he handed me the first formal "pay" I had ever earned: $1.25. I worked for him at that rate (plus parts) for several more months until he decided to close his shop, sell off his repair equipment, and retire.
A cash payday remained king when I was in the Navy and then working in gas stations while I was earning a journalism degree. At the gas stations, I was paid daily, directly from the cash register. At $1.25 an hour for part-time work, I made just enough to buy a few 20-cent gallons of gas, dinner after work, and breakfast the next day. I also could create my own cans of free motor oil for my rickety car by keeping an empty oil can handy in the service bay and draining the last few residual drops from the cans used in customers' cars. Brand mixing did not matter in a car that burned oil. At my first newspaper job, payday was every Friday, and the pay envelope always contained unwrinkled bills and shiny coins, fresh from a nearby bank. "I can't pay you much," the newspaper's owner would tell us, "but it's clean honest money." Once in a while, an extra $5 or $10 bill would be stuck behind another bill (because of the stickiness of the brand-new cash), and it would be overlooked when the money was being doled out by the payroll clerk. Everyone lived in hope that they would find that extra cash tucked into their meager pay packet. I never lucked out that way.
Thank you very much for considering buying me a digital "coffee." If you do, it would be a friendly donation that's better than being handed a free used 6AQ5 vacuum tube--or even that longed-for payday surprise.