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Jim and Gladys Hill live in Waco, Texas.
I was born in 1925 in a small town near Burlington, Iowa. My earliest recollections are of the Great Depression era. My father was one of the lucky people who had a job—ten hours a day, six and a half days a week—of furiously paced labor that never produced quite enough money to pay all the bills.
At the age of nine, I obtained a job selling the Saturday Evening Post from door to door. It sold for five cents and I kept one and a half cents of it. I made enough money to pay the modest book rental fee at school and sometimes the dime it took to get into the western movie matinee on Saturday afternoon—two cowboy shows, a cartoon, and an episode of a serial. I am of the opinion that my grandson will never experience entertainment like it!
At the age of eleven, I obtained a paper route, from which I earned more than
a dollar a week. In 1936 that seemed a magnificent sum. I built up the route,
and when I left it four years later, it was earning over four dollars a week.
After junior year in high school, at the age of 16, I dropped out of school,
lied about my age, and obtained a job turning gloves right-side-out in a glove
factory. The gloves were sewn with the seams on the inside, and I used a treadle-operated
steam press that turned them right-side-out and pressed them at the same time.
The piecework rate of 10 cents per dozen pairs earned enough money (about $16
a week) to enable me to leave home and become self-sufficient.
I enlisted in the Coast Guard in February 1943 while still a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday. I served for a while on a buoy tender in the Caribbean before being assigned to the LST 791 crew being formed up at Camp Bradford, Virginia in the summer of 1944.
After my discharge from the U.S.C.G.R. as a water tender 3rd Class (March of 1946), I took the merchant marine engineers’ license exam and made a number of voyages before leaving seafaring to attend engineering college under the GI Bill (in the spring of 1948). I left college without getting the engineering degree—to accept a job running a power house at a gold mine in Saudi Arabia.
Upon my return, a year and a half later, I resumed my education for awhile, but left to take another job. This time I went to Greenland and Labrador to build power houses for the DEW (Distant Early Warning) radar system across the Arctic Ocean from the Soviet Union.
Powerhouses completed, I came back to the U.S. and spent between two and ten
years each on a variety of jobs: test engineer, application engineer, instructor
in factory service school, design engineer, and a few more. Along the way, I
acquired a wife and a son, a night school engineering degree, and passed the
exam for registration as a professional engineer in four states.
In 1984, at the age of 59, I quit a job as chief engineer for an oil field drilling
rig manufacturer to spend the last 13 years of my engineering career as an independent
“contract engineer” working on short-term assignments for firms needing
temporary engineering assistance. It was the most interesting and profitable
period of my working life. Some ten jobs in seven states included everything
from the space shuttle main engine to household cooking ranges.
I retired in 1997 on my 72nd birthday. Since retiring, I have written a novel about an engineer who worked on the Great Pyramid. As of this writing (December 1999), it remains unpublished.