What I learned from my worst job: twelve people tell about the dead-end jobs they passed through on their road to success.

Twelve people tell about the dead-end jobs they passed through on their road to success

Elbow grease

and the power of people

Newspaper editor Don Wycliff still remembers the names of his fellow employees at the Albert Pick Motel Restaurant in Terre Haute, Indiana: "Evie Baker was the salad lady, and Archie Summers was the chef."

It was the summer of 1965 between high school and college. Wycliff was a dishwasher working days and evenings. "There was minimal exercise of the mind," he says. "In retrospect, it was what people would call a dead-end job." But Wycliff is glad he had it. "I learned a heck of a lot."

The lessons were mostly about people. "I worked with people who were really good folks," he says. Baker was "kind of motherly," and the chef "was a tall black man who wasn't afraid to speak his mind." Wycliff says the power Summers wielded at the motel was impressive. "He was the ruler of the place." That kind of self-esteem was something Wycliff admired.

Wycliff, 49, earned 80 cents an hour at the motel restaurant and tried never to shortchange his employer on effort. "It was something my parents had been drilling into me from the time I was able to comprehend - to do your best no matter what," he says. The experiences that summer readied him for the working relationships he would establish in college at the University of Notre Dame and later during his newspaper career. "I'm the kind of person who does his best to get along with everybody. I try to see the best in people."

Wycliff, the editorial-page editor of the Chicago Tribune, spent years learning about the value of work on the staffs of such major papers as the Houston Post, Seattle Post-Intelligence, the Dallas Times-Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, and the New York Times. His best boss was Art Gorlick, an editor at the Chicago Daily News, where Wycliff worked in 1973 when he first arrived in Chicago. Wycliff worked the midnight shift as a general-assignment reporter. "Art taught me how to be a journalist. He was a taskmaster - he made you do your homework. I appreciate that now."

What turns you on?

Church historian Martin Marty, 68, recently requested his Social Security records to begin the steps toward retirement. The records reminded him of his first job and his worst job. He worked the last two summers of World War II on the assembly line making brake shoes for Sherman tanks. He worked six days a week, ten hours a day at the Rocklin Manufacturing Plant in Sioux City, Iowa. "It was like being a slave in a galley, you couldn't sustain thoughts because of the numbness of it all," he says. "My parents had just moved to Sioux City, and I wanted to make some money in a big hurry." He was attending Concordia College, now Concordia University, in Milwaukee.

At the manufacturing plant, he learned two things: "You shouldn't be measured by your work." Keeping in mind that millions of people are retired, unemployed, or disabled, Marty says he asks people, "What turns you on? What are some of your worlds?" Second, Marty learned that individuals should be described by their callings. "To me the fundamental thing is your vocation - your calling," he says. His vocation this summer was being husband of his wife and father of the bride when his daughter, Harriet, got married. "On top of vocation comes profession - what are you trained for?"

Marty is trained to be a pastor, teacher, and writer. His career includes working 11 years as a pastor of various congregations and 33 years at the University of Chicago, where he spends his days lecturing, editing, and correcting papers.

He was an observer at the Second Vatican Council and is the author of more than 40 books. He plans to retire from teaching in two years to continue his writing and serve as a national consultant on religious issues. "I see work as an extremely positive dimension of life. You may gripe about your work, but if you lose your job, you really know the value of work."

Work for the worker

Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, learned the value of work from Father John Hruska, pastor of his hometown parish in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania.

During his homilies at Our Lady of Consolation Church, Hruska "always told the workers' story." The priest used to tell parishioners in the coal-mining town that it was wrong to expose workers to hazardous conditions. Those lessons stuck with Trumka, 47, during his life as a miner and union organizer.

Work has been a driving force in his life since he was 10 years old, when he sold newspapers on street corners. At the age of 12, he worked for a small stone quarry "busting rocks with a sledgehammer." The owner of the quarry sold gravel.

After school and during summer vacations in high school, he worked on a farm. He was a night watchman at a local swimming pool and worked on fenders at a Ford garage. "Man derives dignity from the work he does," says Trumka. "I've learned there isn't anyone who didn't want to contribute to society through their work."

Jobs have taught Trumka about discipline, responsibility, and teamwork. "Man is not an island - no matter what the job."

The worst job Trumka held also inspired him to seek the best job he has had - being a labor leader. Like both his grandfathers and his father, Trumka worked in coal mines. He first saw how workers were affected by labor strikes when he was a young boy. He asked his maternal grandfather how he could help workers on strike, and his grandfather advised him to go to law school.

Trumka graduated from Pennsylvania State University and later worked the midnight shift in a coal mine while getting his law degree from Villanova University Law School. "I worked underground 3 1/2 years after I got my law degree," he says. Trumka did pro bono legal work for other miners.

After he became an activist in the Miners for Democracy reform movement and was elected president of the United Mine Workers of America in 1982, he served three terms as president of the UMWA before being elected the youngest secretary-treasurer in AFL-CIO history.

Trumka spends his days campaigning for the rights of workers. "For a whole group of workers - America just isn't working for them. Nobody's job is secure today." Trumka says the greatest thing he has to offer workers is hope.

He has traveled the country promoting the recent increase in the minimum wage. He wants to bridge the gap between the wages of corporate executives and their employees. "We have to learn to reward work in this country."

Who's laughing now?

Author Maya Angelou learned to laugh from the job experiences that originally made her cry. "I had a job once working for a large company in San Francisco, and there were young women who had been in high school with me. They were white and got all the good jobs, and I was given the job of bus girl," says the 68-year-old poet and professor.

"They had been girls who I'd helped with their homework and when they got into the workplace it was as if my face fell off. I learned that those young women were no more worthy of being my superiors then I was unworthy to be their inferior."

While those experiences were very disturbing for her, she says, "I also found them funny - privately I was able to laugh. I remembered how slow they were." She took some comfort knowing they would have failed without her help. "What I continue to remember is that laughter," she says.

Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Bantam, 1971), received a lifetime appointment in 1981 as the first Reynolds professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. A former student of dance and literature, she holds degrees from Smith College in Massachusetts, Mills College in California, and Lawrence University in New York.

President Gerald Ford appointed Angelou to the American Revolution Bicentennial Council, and President Jimmy Carter chose her for the National Commission on the Observance of the International Women's Year.

Angelou wrote "On the Pulse of Morning: The Inaugural Poem" for President Clinton's inauguration in 1992. And among her latest works are Lessons in Living (Random House, 1993) and Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, (Wheeler, 1994).

The award-winning author has written for television and movies, and her articles, short stories, and poems have been published in magazines and newspapers throughout the country. Angelou completed most of her writing before she began teaching. "If I had taught before I wrote, I probably would not have written anything," she says. Today, "I'm always working on something."

The best jobs

for baby busters

Career consultant Marilyn Moats Kennedy started working at the age of 14 as a clerk in a Christmas store in her hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and taught in Chicago at DePaul University before opening her own business in 1975.

As the managing partner of Career Strategies in Wilmette, Illinois, she counsels people who are changing jobs or dealing with political issues in the workplace. She also lectures and writes several magazine columns and a monthly newsletter. "Most people are looking for greater job satisfaction in work," she says. Workers in their 20s and 30s are looking to improve their skills and are interested in engineering and technology. And they don't complain - they move on.

Kennedy says rewards for workers in the next two generations will come from within themselves rather than their employers. "They are going to derive their self-esteem from their skills." Workers in their 20s and 30s - baby busters as she calls them - will seek to be self-employed, marry later, have smaller families, and consume less.

Baby busters saw their parents - the baby boomers - work numerous hours for big companies only to lose their jobs to corporate downsizing. "You are not going to see the attitudes of the boomers in the next two generations. Boomers were emotionally loyal to their employers. What their children saw was the emotional pain of their parents."

Ultimately, Kennedy believes that the new attitudes in the workplace will improve employee relations. Employees will have more control over their schedules and more time with their families. "It's going to be a much better thing than having individuals depend on the decisions of a few people. It's going to unleash a whole new era of productivity."

A fountain of opportunity

It is possible to work in less-than-adequate positions for a short time, if you know there's something better down the road. That's what Dartmouth cell biologist George Langford learned working summer jobs in college. "As a college student, I was a soda jerk at a drugstore in New York City at 42nd and Eighth Street. It was a terribly unpleasant setting for me. But it was a big incentive to stay in college," he says. "Even when you are in jobs like that you can draw upon those experiences."

Langford, 52, a graduate of Fayetteville State University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania, is a pioneer in the field of cell biology. He served as director of cell biology at the National Science Foundation and served on the faculties at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Howard University, and the University of North Carolina before joining the faculty at Dartmouth in 1991.

But it was at the soda fountain "that I learned tolerance." Putting up with low pay and mindless chores helped develop the patience that he uses today in researching cell motility and the cytoskeleton. Instead of making ice-cream floats, he is now working to develop ways to stimulate nerve cells and restore function to damaged muscles.

The toughest job

you'll ever love

Author and retreat master Pat Livingston says her favorite - but by far most challenging - job was motherhood. "There is no job training; there is no limit to the hours or the task. I had four babies in 5 1/2 years - I was exhausted all the time."

Now that her three surviving children are grown and having children of their own, Livingston can reflect on the value of those years of sleep deprivation, changing diapers, and cleaning up spills:

"What it did for me is the most classic challenge to our Christian faith - dying to yourself. You have to let go of your time, your privacy, and your body. That was the beginning of me really finding God in the immediate present experience, because there was no other way."

In Lessons of the Heart (Ave Maria Press, 1992), Livingston shares one of the ways in which she has put those lessons to work: "Life is not, and never was meant to be, an ongoing state of happiness." This is also one of the lessons she passes on to priests, religious, and lay ministers who gather each year at the University of Notre Dame for her continuing education classes.

Livingston began her career in ministry in 1978 teaching communication skills and parenting classes. She later developed lessons on listening, assertiveness, and conflict management into a course for seminarians.

In the 1980s, she presented programs on sexuality, intimacy, and relationships in the context of religious life. She currently lives in Tampa, Florida and travels the country presenting courses, lectures, and retreats designed, in part, to help participants learn to value their own experiences. "There was a time when motherhood was so taken for granted that it couldn't have any value," Livingston says. "But I think we are coming back to appreciate motherhood. I see more and more men getting into the parenting thing. The more they really do, the more they appreciate the mothering their wives do."

Army life drills in values

Newspaper columnist Clarence Page knew when he was in high school that he wanted to be a journalist. But it took him a few jobs to get there, including several steel mill jobs.

His first news job was writing obituaries for the Chicago Tribune. "But the worst job I ever had was when I got drafted into the Army," Page says. He had just started with the Tribune when his draft number came up in 1969.

Today, he is thankful for the experience: "The Army taught me to work and live with other people. The important thing about all of those job experiences is that they taught me how to organize my life in every kind of way."

Page, a Pulitzer Prize winner and Ohio University graduate, says his best job is the one he has now - writing two newspaper columns a week. "Being a columnist kind of combined my own dream of being a journalist with my parents' dream for me to become a minister. Now I preach two sermons a week!"

As editor of his high-school newspaper, Page, 49, began to appreciate the news events of the day - the civil rights stories, coverage of the Vietnam War, and the footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Most of his classmates wanted to be engineers. "It was the Sputnik era, and everybody wanted to beat the Russians. But it was a very attractive time for journalists, too." The only job he liked better than writing columns "was serving one afternoon as a judge in Mike Royko's Ribfest."

Experience rules in his favor

Judge John Noonan became an entrepreneur as soon as he was old enough to drive - he sold Christmas trees in the suburbs of Boston. Noonan bought the trees downtown at wholesale prices and sold them door-to-door in surrounding neighborhoods - for a little more. "I thought it would be a great business. It was so seasonal, and the mark-up was very high," says the San Francisco federal judge.

Noonan, 69, has never had a job he didn't like. "I really have been very lucky; probably the best job I've ever had is the one I have now." Noonan's job serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the past ten years "is really a mixture of intellectual effort and a certain amount of practical effort."

A nationally known author and lecturer, Noonan says the only thing he would rather be doing is more writing. His books include Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Harvard University Press, 1986), Power to Dissolve (Belknap Press, 1972), Persons and Masks of the Law (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1976), The Antelope (University of California Press, 1977), A Private Choice (Free Press, 1979), and Bribes (MacMillan, 1984).

A fan of customer service

Baseball manager Vince Naimoli started putting customers first when he was 11 years old. As a paperboy in his hometown of Patterson, New Jersey, he used to deliver the Patterson Evening News. As a service to his customers, he also would purchase other papers at the downtown newsstand and deliver them, as well. Naimoli didn't charge any extra but he got lots of great tips. "It was customer service. If you take care of your customers, they will take care of you," says the chief executive officer of Harvard Industries, a major supplier of automotive parts, and managing general partner of the new Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Naimoli, 58, says he has been fortunate "to always have jobs that turned into better jobs." His greatest challenges involved business ventures that could have ended in bankruptcy. His favorite challenges involved looking for creative ways to solve problems.

Naimoli once worked for a plant near Rochester, New York, where he had to get rid of more than seven million cans designed for food products. "We had a warehouse full of supposedly defective cans. I looked at those cans everyday for a year." He finally found a way to use the cans to package novelties.

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Naimoli believes successful people have several qualities in common: they serve as role models, are persistent and determined, and know "there is no substitute for hard work. It's a matter of leadership by example."

The science of success

Professor Dorothy Feigl's first job sounded delicious. "It was in a cookie-packing plant, and I thought it was going to be glorious because I like cookies," says the vice president and dean of St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

"The wonderful aroma of baking cookies is wonderful - for about a day," she laughs. Between the hot ovens, those little boxes, and the boredom of the assembly line, Feigl passed the time by thinking up games and ways to beat the clock. "The big thing was, I knew I didn't want to do this for a long time."

That is how Feigl eventually ended up as head of a women's college. She kept trying things that left her wanting more from a career. She worked as a secretary or "Girl Friday" during the summers between college. "There are real skills associated with that," Feigl says. But the job satisfaction was not there.

When she finished college at Loyola University in Chicago, she went right into teaching chemistry at St. Mary's, where she has remained for 30 years.

At 58, her days are spent planning budgets, developing curriculum, and hiring faculty members. "I love to use myself as an example of people who think they have to make a career choice at an early age. I have always liked chemistry, but there is not a chemistry lab within 400 feet of me now."

Surviving some of her early job experiences is what taught her to think effectively and to appreciate career longevity. "In a school environment, the name of the game is interaction. It's simply the pleasure of knowing very many people, very well, for a very long period of time."

It's a beautiful day

Fred McFeely Rogers knew the value of television the first time he saw it. He had just returned from college in 1951 to his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania when he turned on his parents' new set. "I saw people throwing pies in people's faces," and he knew there had to be a better way to use TV. Rogers took his degree in music composition from Rollins College in Florida to NBC in New York, where he worked on a variety of programs for two years.

In 1953 he returned to Pittsburgh to WQED, the nation's first community-supported public television station to work as producer, musician, and puppeteer on a live, one-hour show called "The Children's Corner." "My friends at NBC said I was crazy."

In 1966 he developed the half-hour "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," which is the longest-running children's program on public television. For the past 30 years, Mister Rogers, 68, has been helping children understand their feelings and develop self-esteem. "I've had so many wonderful experiences in my life - what a blessing that is. That doesn't mean that every minute of the time was absolute joy. In anybody's work, there are stresses. The important thing is to build community."

Rogers, an author, pianist, and composer, has written the music and scripts and worked the puppets on the more than 600 shows produced by Family Communications Inc. This spring, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" aired an entire week of shows about work.

"We talked about some of the feelings children have when their parents go to work," he says. His puppets, King Friday XIII and Queen Sara, worked while their son, Prince Tuesday, had a day and night sitter. When they returned, they expected their son to be happy to see them. Instead, the prince was upset that they had been away so much. "It is important for children to realize that there is such a thing as ambivalence."

The father of two sons and grandfather of two boys, Rogers says one of the greatest lessons parents can teach children about work is to enjoy what they do. Many of his programs feature people doing jobs. His "work" programs include footage of people making things such as peanut butter, bass violins, and stuffed bears. "We like to present a wide variety of people doing things they love so the children at home can catch their enthusiasm. That's one of the best gifts we can give children - our honest enthusiasm for what we do. Your children want to be like you."

Rogers says his love for work began with his Grandfather McFeely, who manufactured bricks until he was in his 70s. After selling the small business, he bought a farm and 5,000 chickens. "After a while, he decided to sell all the chickens and get hogs. Later, he got a little coal mine. I got the idea that going to work was really fun from him.

"Whenever you're feeling low, just remember your work - be grateful for your work and do it well. Work is one of the most satisfying things that a person can do if he or she is interested."