Career(s?): Employment
When I left my childhood home in San Bernardino, the paycheck was already a familiar piece of the picture, as sketched elliptically in the Timeline. So was service, in a mixture of contexts.

A seventh-grade morning paper route at age eleven kicked off the process in a conventional manner, followed by a marvelous and much less typical interlude as a government employee (save the mark!), receiving fifty cents an hour from the State of California to read textbooks to Beverly Gladden, a master’s degree candidate at a nearby college. Among other delights, we dug into Shakespeare and Freud, at length.

As I would read, pronouncing aloud the non-obvious punctuation as it sprouted among the words, she would take notes on her Braille slate. Perhaps the best laugh we shared came when I encountered a passage which emerged from my deadpan lips as "obstruction colon."

I have said often, then and since, that that was work I would gladly do without pay: doubt I’d yet encountered the word “autotelic,” but the concept was already clear to my not-quite-yet-teenaged mind.

Valerie still rejoices that my skill along those lines spared her major burdens that other students’ wives typically bore. Nowadays, it’s “keyboarding,” and the average six-year old today is as good at it as I was (atypically) in college. The same tot can also enter data into his hand-held device with his thumbs, in a manner utterly beyond my ken, if not my barbie.

During and between high-school years, by the kindness of long-time County Clerk V Dennis Wardle, a family friend, a Church associate, and a fine gentleman, I worked in the Marshal’s Office, typing* and filing summonses and such legalities, and then later as errand boy and general dogsbody at Nielsen’s Pharmacy, at the corner of Highland and E Streets, just across from Arrowview Junior High. My special friends at the drug store were proprietor Cliff Nielsen and Ruth Worsley, another long-term family friend.

It’s clear that my parents and teachers were diligent in many ways in helping me prepare for the world of work, anticipating that I would eventually have a family to support. Even though my social proclivities in those youthful days appeared to tend more in the direction of a hermit lifestyle. But then, that was well before somebody saw fit to invent the lifestyle; I’ve often doubted that I could afford one …

More about employment here and there in the chapter, as the chronology brings it up. Here, as an index to the variably remunerative activities I’ve undertaken, and as accurately as records and memory permit, follows a list of my “jobs” since the early ’50s, with links to mentions in what follows:
  1. 1953—Pre-dawn paper route for the San Bernardino Sun
  2. circa 1954—Reading to Beverly Gladden, a blind master’s candidate
  3. circa 1957-8—General dogsbody at Nielsen’s Pharmacy
  4. Summer, 1958—Purified beeswax for Woodrow Miller at the Miller Honey Company in Colton.
  5. Summer, 1959—Clerk-typist in the Marshal’s Office in the San Bernardino County Courthouse
  6. Summer, 1960-61, -64—Chemist in the process control laboratory of the California Portland Cement Company’s plant in Colton
  7. 1964-65—Taught SAT Preparation on Arlington Street, Boston, on Saturday mornings
  8. 1964-65—Desk duty at East Campus, MIT
  9. 1965-66—Taught early-morning Seminary in Menlo Park, California
  10. 1965-66—Student-taught physics at Capuchino High School in Millbrae, California
  11. 1967-68—Taught Seminary in Cambridge
  12. 1968-83—Policy research at Abt Associates, Inc.
  13. 1983-84—Software development at Hayden Software, Inc.
  14. 1984-87—Project Director for M/A-Com Linkabit
  15. 1987—Wrote technical documentation for Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
  16. 1987-95—Phase V Technologies, Inc.
  17. 1995-2002—CoMMensa, Inc.
*Pappy had gently and effectively urged me to take a typing class at the college; I hadn’t yet matured enough to feel as much gratitude for that as I would later develop: boys of the 1950s didn’t see typing as a manly attainment.
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