The Worst Jobs of My Life

My working life started right after graduation from high school in 1940 when I was 18 years old. I had worked as a waitress and an upstaris maid during the summer, spent a year in nurses training before getting a job at a factory. I can’t recall the name of the company I worked for, but it was located in historic Simsbury, Connecticut.

After I decided I would be a menace to the medical profession as a nurse, I left nursing school and went to live with my sister in Simsbury, Connecticut. I found a job in a jute mill that I think made burlap sacks before they switched to war work. When World War II broke out, the small factory converted to making primacord, a kind of explosive rope designed to blow ditches. Most of the primacord was sent out in rolls, but a certain amount was cut into two-foot lengths that had an explosive cap on one end.

My job was to attach the cap. I would grab a piece of primacord with my left hand, stick one end of it into a little hole on a device in front of me, and with my right hand I would pull a handle down leaving the explosive cap neatly crimped around one end. Over and over and over! Robots weren’t invented yet so they had to rely on idiots like me. I was told to be sure the primacord was pushed all the way into the hole, or it might blow up. I don’t think so, because I crimped that primacord every wrong way possible and it didn’t blow. I worked there for about six months.

The next awful job I had was right after I left Simsbury, and returned to live with my parents about 20 miles north of Bridgeport, where I found employment at a General Electric factory. I had to walk more than two miles to the highway, ride an inter-city bus to Bridgeport, and then switch to a city bus to reach the factory.

I was set to work sitting at a little machine where I was to bevel the inside edges of spacers. They were about one inch long, one inch in diameter, and about 1/3^rd inch thick. I had to take the spacer in my fingers, hold it briefly against a rotating cutter to bevel the inside edge. Over, and over, and over! There was no fear of blowing myself up to keep me awake. My eyes would cross, feel like they were full of sand, and I would doze off. I used to stop for a couple of minutes as if I was going to the bathroom, but instead

stagger out a back door to get handfuls of snow to rub on my face. Awgh! I was so glad to be transferred to the assembly line, although that was almost as bad.

A few weeks later they moved me again to winding armatures, and I liked that much better. That actually took a little skill. After a couple of months, they sent me to a six-week course at trade school where I learned to run all the different kinds of machines used in a machine shop. I could set up a lathe for metal work, and use cutters, drill presses, shapers, read blue prints, and use a micrometer.

I did well in trade school, but I don’t remember what job General Electric had in mind for me next, because two months earlier, right after my 20^th birthday, I had signed up to join the Navy Waves, and I was called up immediately after the end of the trade school course. General Electric was not pleased, but I was off to war, or thought I was.