How would you earn a living?

[Edm1]

Ok..you wake up pre WW2. What would you do to earn a living? Could you do your same job? And making money betting on sports...inventing something that doesn't come around for years doesn't count.

I am in sales and cover a 3 state area. My job is tons easier today than it would have been 50 years ago. We have computers cell phones etc. in the past you had to fill out forms detailing your activities every day and mail them in. I would probably not chose to stay in the same profession.

I would enjoy the military. I enjoyed it when I served and would do it again. Knowing WW2 was coming would be a bummer.

Maybe an engineering job. I dunno.

 

[Stanley Doble]

It would be easier to get a job, but the pay and lifestyle it would buy would be disappointing.

 

[rjb1]

I'd be a mechanical engineer, just as I am now. If still in academics, I'd also likely be teaching the same courses as now. Except for writing material on the board with chalk, instead of using PowerPoint, it would not be all that different. (and it may be more educational then...)

If I went into industry I'd be designing P-47's or P-38's, which would be great.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'd register with an agency to get a fast-and-dirty secretarial/typist/clerk job and as soon as I was settled I'd start submitting freelance scripts to the Columbia Workshop radio program. They paid scale, but it was a foot in the door.

I suppose I could run a movie theatre easily enough -- and when the war came along and they were desperate for draft-exempt projectionists, I could have my pick of high-paying union jobs.

 

[Retro Spectator]

I would probably be a musician playing the Accordion or Piano. It would probably be easier for me to be a musician, since I only play old genres. Either that, or I would work on a farm or in a factory, as they have better pay than being a cashier. Or maybe I would be a musician and have a job just to get by.

 

[Shangas]

I'd be much like Lizzie - A writer. Maybe for a magazine, a smalltown newspaper or something like that. Or a literary journal. Same as what I want to be now, really.

 

[Stanley Doble]

You writers would have a much easier time getting work. Back then, newspapers and magazines were popular entertainment, there was no TV or internet, but there were dozens of magazines and every good sized town had at least 2 newspapers, and the average city had half a dozen. All disappeared in the sixties and seventies.

But again, you might be disappointed in the low pay and modest lifestyle your work brought you. Then again maybe not, because everyone else was in the same boat.

And if you did manage to write a best selling novel or otherwise make some serious jack, you might find a lifestyle superior to anything you could afford today.

A hard working magazine writer of the top rank could make $100,000 a year in the twenties, and it would go as far as several millions today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If there's one thing I got used to in the fifteen years I spent in journalism, it was low pay and a modest lifestyle.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Or you could later on start your own religion like a hack pulp magazine writer named L. Ron Hubbard did.

 

[DesertDan]

Construction/maintenance trades. I've done it all my life and I could find work a plenty with WWII and the after-war boom times coming.

 

[Touchofevil]

Teaching high school would be the first and obvious choice as it is what I have done for twenty-two years. Construction would be a second as it is what I happily did off and on while making my way through college.

 

[1mach1]

Either construction, my current trade, or auto mechanics.

 

[Renault]

Pork mining! That's where the money is!

 

[JonnyO]

Firefighting or carpentry. If lucky enough, I would have liked to run a haberdashery.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I'd be a mechanical engineer, just as I am now. If still in academics, I'd also likely be teaching the same courses as now. Except for writing material on the board with chalk, instead of using PowerPoint, it would not be all that different. (and it may be more educational then...)

If I went into industry I'd be designing P-47's or P-38's, which would be great.

My Father designed aircraft in San Diego at the time Pearl Harbor was bombed and throughout the war. Then spent the rest of his work life as a mechanical engineer/Machine designer here in midIndiana.
HD

 

[ingineer]

E to the x dx dy
radical transcendental pi
secant cosine tangent sine
3.14159
2.71828
come on folks let's integerate!!

Probably the same thing i've done before.
Engineering
Making a lot of stuff that either helps or possibly kills ppl
Love to kick Ed Teller in the A
Course my father taught me the trades to fall back on
There is better money in plumbing and carpentry.
Richard

 

[Fading Fast]

I have earned my living in two related ways - as a trader / money manger and as a writer. I believe I could do either or both again in the pre-WWII era, but my hours would be much, much better. Stock market hours were silly short in the pre-WWII days - and really up until the 1980s (when I got into it). Most "market' professionals, worked 8 hour day or less back then. Today, honestly, it never stops - you just worked until you are exhausted, sleep, get up and start again.

As to the writing aspect - I think it was summed up well above - there would be more options, many more options, but the pay was not great. But it isn't great now as the Internet has made writing a low-paying commodity (again). Of course, as in almost any field, if you can distinguish yourself and break into the top ranks, there is money, but for the very good, but not great writer, it is a tough grind today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the big question is "just what kind of "lifestyle" would you be expecting. If you think you're going back to 1939 and live a glittering penthouse art-deco Rainbow Room life where you'll go swanking around in your shiny new Packard while wearing new bespoke clothes every day of the week, well, you won't be doing that as a writer. If, on the other hand, you'd be happy living in a cheap Brooklyn walk-up and riding the BMT to work and getting your clothes off-the-rack or making them yourself, you'd probably do just fine as a newspaper reporter or a penny-a-word pulp writer.

Most people in the Era lived very simple, quiet, entirely non-glamorous lives and made less than $1500 a year. That's the equivalent of about $25,000 a year today. But they also didn't have the standards of consumption that modern people have -- you weren't considered an oddball if you didn't own a car, a house, or a telephone.

 

[Fading Fast]

I always knew I'd need the money management / trading aspect of my career to make a better living - then or now. However, there must have been a middle ground to the two scenarios you outlined above as I today live in an apartment building in NYC that was built in the 1920s. It is on 3rd avenue - not Park or Madison, etc. - and my apartment is about 850-900 square feet - has one bathroom and two very small bedrooms.

There are studio, one bedroom, my apartment and some slightly larger two bedroom apartment floor plans in this 200+ unit building. And there are several similar type of buildings nearby. There are no maids rooms (a Park Avenue thing) or other extravagances. But it is also not what I think anyone today or in the 1920s would think of as cheap. It has hard wood floors and a fireplace, but not much else in the way of "fancy." It seems to me this apartment building catered to the middle class of its day as it does today. The rich people live in the better part of town in nicer apartments - then and now.

Hence, there had to a be a middle class back then or they wouldn't have built all of these middle-class apartment buildings.

 

[LizzieMaine]

An apartment like that in the Era would probably have been occupied by two or three single petty white-collar workers as roommates, or a family with the parents in one bedroom and the kids in the other. It would have been very much a working-class type of residence -- a step up from the lower-class tenements that were torn down to build it.

The middle class in the Era was defined as families employing at least one servant, usually a cook-housekeeper. She wasn't necessarily a live-in, but she would be there. A wife who "did her own work" was considered working-class.