The Curious History of My Employment

In last week’s issue I wrote about average annual wages in Door County and this led me to reflect on my own employment through the years. Like many of you who have reached my age, I have done a great many things through the years in order to earn a paycheck. Unlike many of you (hopefully) there has been a disturbing trend to my employment history that, at various times, has been an interesting point of conversation with friends and family.

Initially, my working career was modestly successful:  I took on an early morning paper route when we moved to Beloit (I was 13 years old at the time), which I continued to add to all the way through my first semester in college (when I was 17 years old). This responsibility necessitated that I arise at 5:30 am to fold and load all the papers and then head out on deliveries, returning home at about 7 am to get ready for school. This early morning ritual probably explains why I am still more of a “morning person” than an afternoon, evening, or night-time person (at least as far as accomplishing anything during the course of the day.

I did have a brief stint working at a car wash in Beloit. My job was to hose down cars before they went through the wash. On my second day, with the temperature hovering around 5 degrees, my jeans became so soaked by the wind-blown mist from my hose that they froze solid, creating an extremely uncomfortable chafing the led me to quit at the end of the shift.

In college I worked for two years washing dishes before taking on resident assistant duties in my final two years. So, at this point, you are probably wondering what “disturbing trend” my employment history holds – after all, through college, my work history is rather mundane.

Well things began to become interesting when I moved to Chicago. My first job was with Kroch’s & Brentano’s flagship store on south Wabash Avenue in the Loop. I worked in the technical books department on the lower level for about nine months. When I started, Kroch’s had something like 11 stores in the greater Chicagoland area. When I left (I quit because I wasn’t earning enough to subsist, even though I had two roommates), three of these stores had already closed and, within three years, Kroch’s & Brentano’s was out of business.

After leaving Kroch’s I took a part-time job working in the Book Mart on Cedar Street in the “Gold Coast” neighborhood. This store was owned by Charles Levy Circulating Company, the Midwest’s largest magazine, newspaper and pocketbook distributor, so it was a very different experience (for many reasons that may be the subject of a future column). At the time I started, Book Mart had 36 stores in Illinois. By the time I left that number was reduced to 19. And, as you no doubt have surmised, Book Mart(s) no longer exist.

While I was working at Book Mart I was doing freelance copywriting for Marquis-Hultman Communications, a marketing communications firm. This work led to a full-time copywriting position (at which point I left Book Mart) and, through a series of promotions, I eventually was employed as Vice President in Charge of Operation with an office on the 43^rd floor of Lake Point Tower (overlooking the as-yet un-remodeled Navy Pier and a great place to watch the Chicago Air Show).

Unfortunately, a husband and wife team owned Marquis-Hultman and, when their marriage ran into difficulty, so did the company. Thus, I found myself unemployed (two weeks before my first marriage) and, as you may have guessed, Marquis-Hultman soon ceased to exist.

At this point you are, no doubt, beginning to see a pattern. Unfortunately, my next forays into the workplace only continued (or reinforced) this pattern, but let me speed things up a bit since you have a sense of the pattern.

After returning from my honeymoon I took evening work delivering pizzas for a pizzeria called Capone’s, just across the street from my apartment. They were out of business in three years.

I filled my days, in between looking for full-time work, doing freelance copywriting, design and marketing work for nonprofit arts organizations in Chicago. Among my clients were the Chicago City Ballet (defunct), the Orchestra of Illinois (defunct), and Wisdom Bridge Theatre (which has struggled ever since I did a project for them).

A friend helped me land a more-or-less full-time job delivering produce for VanderBosch Produce out of South Water Market, which took me all over Chicagoland. They (you already guessed) went bankrupt.

The same friend then got me a job as an “on-call” fill-in produce delivery driver for Ira Fischer & Sons, also out of South Water Market. This was a very lucrative job (I made more working three days a week than I did as vice president of the marketing communications firm). It was also very hard work with days often lasting more than 11 hours.

Though I left this position prior to the company closing shop, it too is now defunct and, for that matter, South Water Market no longer exists.

This progression of my starting work and the companies I worked for quickly going into a tailspin led several of my friends to suggest that I try to take advantage of my misfortune. Why not, they reasoned, go to a business and tell them you will get yourself hired at one of their competitors, thereby assuring that the competitor will go out of business. The company that I approached with this proposition would then pay me handsomely for my “service.”

I never took this suggestion. Instead I moved back to Door County, where none of these misfortunes has ever occurred with the exception of the Door Reminder and that was most certainly not my doing.

Now I am happily employed full -time by Peninsula Publishing & Distribution, where I intend to remain until I stop working – one way or another.