How would you earn a living?

[BlueTrain]

Well, for what it's worth, they apparently didn't do a very good job of getting them into the hands of the troops (meaning me!). But I did see plenty of PS preventive maintenance magazines when I was in the army. They were wonderfully illustrated and the first ones were done by Will Eisner. Of course, by the time I was overseas, practically everyone could speak English, although to this day, there are Americans with accents I can barely understand, including my own mother-in-law from Lynchburg, Virginia.

On one of the old Abbott and Costello radio shows, one that had the who's on first routine, at one point Costello asks Abbott: "And another thing, Abbott, what page are you on."

 

[Doctor Strange]

I could probably be okay as a photographer. I worked in my parents' little commercial studio all through my childhood/youth in the sixties/seventies. My dad learned photography in the thirties/forties, and most of the photo technology we used was already old-school when I was doing it: sheet-film view cameras and deep tank b/w processing, graded-contrast fiber photo paper, slow films and hot lights... traditional methods and materials that had been in use for decades.

 

[AmateisGal]

I'd write short stories and novels. The market for short stories in the Golden Era was fantastic. I don't write short stories now (just focus on novels) but back then you could make a great living doing that.

 

[GHT]

Seeing my wife's dress making skills, always enthuses me, makes me wonder if I couldn't have been a tailor in Savile Row. I like the idea of exploiting a talent: GHT by Royal Appointment.

For pure fantasy though, I would have loved a job driving, if that's how it's described, driving a steam train.

 

[Big Joe M]

I would not be a coal miner. Rough life.

 

[Stormy]

I would be an entertainer, a jazz singer and musician. No doubt about it!

 

[Big Joe M]

Maybe I would sell Fuller brushes door to door

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ great illustration.

 

[BlueTrain]

A coal miner's life was rough as well as unhealthy and dangerous. But it was also a desirable job, too, because it paid fairly well. Living in a coal camp (literally a temporary town) was so great, either, and many miners were immigrants. I don't know if miners got drafted, though, if they were the right age, but that's not much of a choice.

I think there was a higher level of acceptable dangerous or unhealthy working conditions in the 30s and 40s.

 

[Nobert]

I remember seeing, at some science museum exhibit, a model of a normal, healthy lung (pink and supple), one of a smoker's lung (brownish and dried-out looking) and a coal-miner's lung. Lesson learned: if you're a coal miner, go ahead and light up, becuase there's nothing that R.J. Reynolds--notwithstanding their regular habit of calling in Old Scratch as a professional consultant--could put in a cancer stick that would make it look worse than the blackened piece of oversized chimney ash that these guys were carrying around in stereo within their chest cavities. I expect the health and safety standards have improved since then, but still.

 

[vitanola]

I remember seeing, at some science museum exhibit, a model of a normal, healthy lung (pink and supple), one of a smoker's lung (brownish and dried-out looking) and a coal-miner's lung. Lesson learned: if you're a coal miner, go ahead and light up, becuase there's nothing that R.J. Reynolds--notwithstanding their regular habit of calling in Old Scratch as a professional consultant--could put in a cancer stick that would make it look worse than the blackened piece of oversized chimney ash that these guys were carrying around in stereo within their chest cavities. Iexpect the health and safety standards have improved since then, but still.

Black Lung was almost utterly eradicated in the late 1970's and early 1980's, but it is now again a serious disease in coal country, for the safety regulations which eliminated this disease were very poorly enforced between 2000 and 2010 or so. They are again being relaxes, so we shall be seeing much more of this awful malady.

Note that about 12% of long term miners tested positive for this disease in 2007-2008. In 1998 but 4% were so afflicted.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think there was a higher level of acceptable dangerous or unhealthy working conditions in the 30s and 40s.

Not so much an acceptance as an entrenched system that was ferociously fought by the workers in an effort to eliminate those conditions to the extent possible. John L. Lewis was turned into a cartoon character by the Hearst press and its lackeys, but the workers themselves knew better.

 

[BlueTrain]

Without looking up any of the details, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was built with a safety net underneath the construction, something practically unheard of in those days and it was entirely because of the builders, or so I am led to believe. While safe working conditions are something we now expect, some jobs are still very dangerous, and that still includes mining.

 

[Big Joe M]

Another job I'd pass on

 

[LizzieMaine]

 

[MitchellFW]

Well, I'm currently in retail, so that profession might still suit me well. Even more so, considering my personal style always seems to throw the younger people off these days. Failing that, my family had a fair bit of money before the 1970's, so I might just live off them, or marry well with their connections. Take up golf or badminton. Collect 18th century playing cards or stamps or something else trivial to pass time.

 

[BlueTrain]

The photo of the construction workers (none with hard hats) reminds me of something in the relations in the working world between men and women. The photo is a good illustration of the point.

I mentioned somewhere here that factory work was usually seen as something completely suitable for women and in fact, many factory workers have always been women. You first have to get away from the idea that a factory is someplace where cars and big machines are made. That much is true, but so is a place where clothes are made. One place I worked for nearly fifteen years, which was a photofinishing plant, had more women than men employees. Much of the work involved sitting at a work station running a little machine. It was easily about as complicated as running a sewing machine.

Well, these days, some women want to do things like work in coal mines, drive trucks, herd cattle and things like that. Men doing those jobs resist, possibly because it makes the work less masculine or something. The odd thing is, up until the industrial revolution, in the late 18th century, there were no factories. There were things that came close, to be sure, like flour mills, blacksmith shops (don't know any women blacksmiths) and some small operations that eventually developed into factories, but most work was done at home. On a farm, everyone went to the fields, which is mostly still true on a family farm. That's only one point of view, however, and not many women want to be coal miners.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My Aunt Edie would have enjoyed being a coal miner. It would have been easier on her lungs than slinging tapioca in the holds of ships.

I think a lot of the whole modern misconception about women not working in factories until WWII comes from the postwar mythologization of Rosie the Riveter . Yes, a lot of women worked in factories during the war, but no, they weren't all nice middle-class ladies who were just doing their bit for the duration and were glad to go back to the kitchen once the war was over. A great many of those women war workers had a long history of prewar factory work, and many of them continued to work in factories after the war. Elizabeth Hawes wrote extensively about their lives, hopes, and experiences in her books "Why Women Cry" (1943) and "Hurry Up Please, It's Time" (1946), and wrote with extreme anger about the Boys and their postwar "constructed femininity" in "Anything But Love" (1948). Among other interesting points, Hawes found in a survey of female members of the United Auto Workers -- there were over a hundred thousand women in the union at the time she did the survey -- that the vast majority of them wanted to keep their jobs after the war.

There were indeed a lot of industries where the factory workforce was primarily female. The needle trades are the most obvious, but women also dominated electrical and electronic assembly plants, food processing, canning, and bottling, and pretty much any industry involving the fast-paced assembly of small parts. It was believed that men just weren't deft enough with their hands to keep up with this work. Many women spent their entire adult lives in such factories.

 

[BlueTrain]

The thing is, I believe, most people have a narrow view of life. That includes me, of course. We base our ideas and opinions on our own experiences, the experiences of our parents and sometimes our children, and generally things we see with our own ideas. We broaden it a little by reading and seeing films about things, but only a little. This is all understandable, and mostly excuseable to the extent we make any use of that knowledge. Many go beyond that and believe things that are totally fictional or even worse, believe thing they are told to believe. Politicians and clergy can be very talented at telling people what they want to hear, whether or not it is true or not. The politician tell you to be afraid of (fill in the blank), which is usually anyone who is a little different from you. Every defined group has gone through that somewhere or other over the years. The preacher who tells you that God wants you to be rich and drive a Cadillac and doesn't approve of mixing of the races is equally suspect, too.

So when it comes to jobs, there's someone who thinks they (usually a he) know what people ought to be doing--and how much to too much for them to be paid.

 

[Fading Fast]

Over the last decade, I've noticed in NYC a meaningful increase in the number of women construction workers. When I first got to NYC in the '80s (and realized that there is always, 100% of the time, even during recessions [just less of it], construction going on almost everywhere), there were none or almost no women construction workers. And while still a very small percentage today, I do see them regularly.