1. Parking lot paver helper at A-1 Paving and Striping. I was 13 years old and shoveled hot asphalt (I still have scars on my wrists from the hot asphalt walling down in my gloves.) under the Florida sun for my Uncle Harry. I made $2 per hour and thought I was rich. That was the summer of 1982.
2. Parking lot striper helper. When I was 14 Larry Savage of Savage Striping in Sunnyvale, California hired me to help him lay out the chalk lines on parking lots so he could paint the lines. (He had learned the trade from my Uncle Harry Powers in the 1970s. Uncle Harry died a couple of months ago. I took my son Basil to his funeral in Visalia, California. After the funeral I drove him to Harris Ranch for a steak so he could learn to better love California.) It was a hard job but it was fun. Larry also played the drums at Bethel Christian Center, the church my dad pastored in Palo Alto, California from 1969 to 1979.
3. Sandwich-maker at Mr. Dunderbak's in Tampa, Florida. I was fifteen years old and knew nothing useful. They taught me to make sandwiches quickly. My fave sanwich to make was called the Blue Blue Max (corned beef, weinkraut, swiss cheese & 1000 Island dressing on the bottom with pastrami, blue cheese dressing, lettuce & tomato on top.) It was about ten years before I learned that the sandwich was named for a German military medal. And, no, I never tasted the more than 100 different beers Mr. Dunderbak's sold.
4. Painter's helper. My brother Mark, owner of Karnes Painting in Cupertino, Califoria hired me to sand cabinets so he could paint them. I think I was 16 years old.
5. Soldier. I enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve when I was 17 years old. (My parents would not sign the papers to let me join the Marine Corps or the Regular Army.) I did basic combat training at Ft. Dix, New Jersey. (That is the same place my grandfather, Clovis Cagle, did his basic combat training during the First World War.) I served as a Chaplain Assistant in the 349th Combat Support Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. At that time it was the only hospital unit in the U.S. Army with combat honors. (During WWII all the doctors, nurses, medics, pharmicists, clerks, ambulance drivers, mechanics, and cooks fixed bayonets and repelled the Imperial Army of Japan in order to defend the patients in hospital.)
6-10. During the year I was a reservist I had a few jobs. I worked as an electrician's helper (I dug ditches and pulled wire, mostly. It was a fun job.), a night watchman, a clerk at a gorcery store, and a machine operator at a bindery. The jobs at the grocery store and as a night watchman were concurrent. I was fired from both for sleeping on the job. I learned a lesson from that: a person should not work 16 hours per day. That same year I got a Christmas job at Barnie's Coffee and Tea. It was a wonderful job and I learned so much; all about the different coffee and tea growing regions all around the world, how to operate those giant pressurized steam machines for making espresso (Today Starbuck's uses push-button machines but in 1986 a barista had to build up pressure and adjust the knobs by touch and sound), the differences between Kenya AAA, Indonesia Blue Sumatra, and Kona Extra Fancy coffee beans.
11. In 1987 I got an appointment to the Regular Army's 101st Airborne Division. I was thrilled. I did so many amzing and wonderful things there I can not decribe them all but perhaps the most fun I had in that division was as a mail clerk: I rode a motorcycle, had mail in my saddle bags, and a SAW on my back.
12-14. When I got out of the army in 1990 I, really, did not know what to do. I got a job as the over-night manager of a Cirle K store in Atascadero, California for a little while but I had to move north to Sunnyvale, California early in 1991 because my marriage fell apart and I was afraid I migh have to kill my wife's lover. I got a job as a night auditor at a hotel for a few months but soon after that went to work as a bookkeeper for by brother Ken and my brother-in-law Dan at their company CGI Paininting in Mountain View, California.
15-16. During the 4 years and 10 months I was a bookkeeper at CGI Painting I also worked as a security guard at Space Systems/Loral. OH! I almost forgot that I worked as a bounty hunter's helper during that same time. I thought it would be exciting but I realized pretty quickly that I didn't want to shoot someone because he missed a court date for a stolen car. Also, the bounty hunter I was working for wasn't very good, so we didn't make much money.
17. After that I got a job collecting bills for Viking Freight in San Jose, California. It was, I thought, the end of my life. I was broke (my sister bought me a shirt to wear to work), my kids were living with their drug addict mother, and about 6 weeks after they hired me, Viking fired me. I do not blame them because I really had no idea what I was doing.
18. Fortunatley, I knew I wasn't long for Viking Freight and applied for a job as the Assistant Manager of The Oaks Theater in Cupertino, California. (During the 1990s my frinds and I used to go to the Oaks all the time. I am surprised it is gone now.) I worked there for a few months. Steve Wozniak was a regular. He would bring his kids to see movies there 3 or 4 times a month.
19. Then I had a job as an expediter for McMillan Electric in San Francisco. Wow, I was horrible at that job. I didn't know the first thing about what I was doing. But niether did my boss. And niether did his boss. I never should have been hired. Within six months I was fired, my boss was fired, and his boss was fired.
20. Then, one day, after I had been living with and cooking for my friends George and Aaron one of them suggested I get a job cooking. Having watched a lot of Jacques Pepin and his daughter Claudine on George and Aaron's television I knew I wasn't a good enough to work in a restaurant kitchen I did the next best thing: I got a job at a Williams-Sonomoa retail store in San Francisco. WOW! What fun that was. I got to know the chef at McCormick and Kuletto's(He would get angry several time a month and throw his 8" All-Clad Master-Chef pan against the wall and I would sell him a new one.), the drummer from Cake (he is a total foodie and liked torts more than cakes),and Michael Bauer, the long time San Francisco restaurant critic.
21. One day during my lunch break at Williams-Sonoma I was reading (It was paper back then.) SF Weekly and saw an ad looking for someone to sell advertising. I applied and a week later I was selling ads at SF Weekly. My clients included West Marine, the U.S. Army, a bunch of private schools, a witch supply store, several psychics, a half dozen prostitutes, a couple of jewlers, and some restaurants (including Bucca di Beppo)
22-24. From there I went to San Jose Magazine (It no longer exists) where I established their classified advertising department, then San Jose Metro (It barely exists. When I worked there it had 80 to 100 pages now it is barely 24 pages.), then I made a jump to online adversting at a company called NetTaxi, a company started by the scion of the Bonano crime family. They don't do much anymore, there is a skelleton site at that URL bow but at onetime I had Princess Cruise Lines, a bunch of online casinos, Harvey's (It is part of Caesar's now.), Bacardi Rum, H. Upmann Cigars, Bombay Gin, Dodge Ram (Yes, Ram used to be an American company), a bunch of internet related companies such as McAfeeSkyy Vodka, and a a couple of universities. I didn't know it was mob related business until I went to a meeting of gambling executives in Palm Springs. When I got back to San Jose I asked my boss, "Are Joe and Bobby part of that Bonano Family." He said, "I don't want to say, but my resignation is effective Friday." So I resigned, too. (I do miss it though. Wow, it was nice to fly around the country and take clients out to eat in limousines, and have my boss come by and lay a stack of 100's on my desk every few days.)
25. From there I went to Homestead.com They were a weird company. They did not know what kind of company they were. I thought they were in the media business but they thought they were in the business of changing the world. They were were nice to me, even giving me a 60 cup coffee urn to keep in my cubicle and tickects to Giant's games. A few times they brought in a chef just to make me dinner because I was always there so late. What did I do that caused them to be so nice to me? I brought in the clients. Some of the clients I brought in were Godiva Chococolate (part of the Campbell's Soup), Frito-Lay, Clorox, and the NHL. But they never acted like advertisers were important. Then, one day, they told me they were getting rid of the whole advertising department and offered me two other jobs that had nothing to do with what I was good at. I took a few days to think about it and decided to quit.
26. I was unemployed for a about a 2 months but got a job selling Yellow Pages ads (There are still companies around that use the name "yellow pages" but they aren't the old official phone company yellow pages.) at ATT. Again I was selling advertising. There were always clashes. For example, I would sell an ad for 15 or 20% more than normal and they would freak out. "We're a regulated industry! You can't do that!" and "You can't work late! This is a union shop!" "Why are you here? You aren't schedlued to start for another hour?" It was total culture clash. Then 9/11 happened and almost half my clients cancelled all their advertising.
So, I went to a radio station owned by CBS. Oh, my gosh! What a horrible job that was. In 4 months I only recruited a handful of new advertisers (a shoestore, a jewelry store, Carol Doda's Champaigne and Lace lingerie store, a car dealership, and a few other local businesses) and half of them cancelled after a couple of weeks. It was the first time I felt like I was hurting my clients by getting them to advertise with me. Then my boss lied to me and the rest of the advertising department during a meeting and I called him on it. They fired me.
About a week later a guy I worked with at CBS got a job at AllDorm and asked me to work for him. Then he was fired and I was promoted. My team brought in so much business it was amazing. Dole, Pizza Hut, Carnival Cruises, Snickers, Volkswagen, Soloflexx, and others. But it was a struggling company and there was some kind of legal hassle between them and a competitor that resulted in the company disolving then a 2010 lawsuit between one of AllDorm's founders and that competitor. I left AllDorm when Anselm (Every time I have mentioned the little boy) was just two or three years old.
Then I went to work for Prodesse Property, the property management company my then wife was working for. I worked for Prodesse for a couple of years. It was fun managing a a big apartment complex but it wS in San Jose and my wife want to live closer to her new job at Stanford. So I quit and we moved to Mountain View. I spent the next two years homeschooling Anselm Samuel and my wife slipped into serious and scarry depression. (All kinds of horrible things happened during those couple of years.)
My next job was for another property management company managing a 25 unit apartment complex in Willow Glen and my wife got sicker and sicker. And with two kids and a sick wife I failed my employer. I was fired.
Sometime around this time I worked for my friend Jeff selling leads to car dealrs but I don't reember the name of the company. It was only for a couple of months.
Then I got a job selling cars. Sadly, I was selling Fiats which means I wasn't selling enough cars to make any money. My wifedivorced me and the car dealership closed and I got a job trying to sell group advertising to lawyers. It wasn't a good match and I left there to go door to door to door selling solar electricity to homeowners in the Tri-valley area. Very quickly I was promted twice but one day I went to work and my boss was at the front door handing out last paycheck to all the employees. We were out of business.
Then I got a job cleaning houses.
Then I got a job selling money for Westlake. I was doing okay but then they cut the commission rate and raised the lending requirements which drastically cut my income so I quit.
Then I got a job working in the membership office at the San Jose YMCA. It was a fun job. And perfect for me since I was living in a truck at the time and the showers were convenient.
Then, about 10 years ago, I took the test to be a substitute teacher. I worked for lots and lots of public schools (My fave were in Gilroy and Palo Alto.) but now, for the last year and a half, I have been working for an amazing private school in San Jose where I teach history, economics, AP U.S. Gov't, and (as of January 2024) chemistry.
Well, I think that is my whole career to this point.
23 hours ago