Humble beginnings: Angelenos’ first jobs

Antonio R. Villaraigosa

Mayor of Los Angeles

The stretch along Broadway near 7th was clearly the best territory. May Co. was nearby, and more men in suits frequented that part of the street. They tended to be better tippers when they got their shoes shined.

I knew this, but so did every other shoe-shine boy in downtown. So competition for a prime place to set up your shoe-shine box was always a fight. Sometimes literally. If the bigger boys couldn’t scare you off your spot with hard words, they weren’t above delivering a few hard blows.

So I made sure I got down there early before the bigger kids, taking the bus from City Terrace to downtown. And if the elbows were too sharp at 7th and Broadway, I’d move down toward 5th near the Newberry’s. Business could be good down there sometimes too.

I started shining shoes when I was 5, with a shoe-shine box I built myself. My mom was my “angel investor,” giving me the “startup capital” to buy my first polishes and brushes. After that, the money I earned went to buy more supplies or into savings.

If I wasn’t downtown polishing wingtips, then I was in the neighborhood pestering the barbers to let me sweep up or asking the guys at the hardware store to let me break down the cardboard boxes.

I also sold La Opinion in front of the Olympic Auditorium. I trudged up and down the hills of City Terrace delivering papers. At Cathedral High School, I worked in the bookstore, I was a janitor and I washed dishes in the brothers’ rectory. I worked at Safeway and held down a job at Save More Salvage. I worked doing landscaping on the freeways and was a painter/carpenter for Caltrans.

And I saved. I had two layaway plans, one at Sig’s and one at Zellman’s, and bought my own clothes from the time I was 12. I bought my first car when I was 16 with my own money saved up over the years. My mom got her “return on investment.” I bought her a $12 lavender dress for her birthday when I was 12. That felt like a lot of money back then, and the dress was beautiful.

Robert Gupta

First violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic

I’ve always thought my first job was a total fluke, a strike of lightning. Finishing up at grad school, I was deeply conflicted, trying to choose between a life in music or in science. I’d been lucky enough to land research internships at two incredible neurobiology laboratories after a pre-med undergraduate degree, and I was beginning to harbor a burgeoning passion for examining how the brain responds to music. But it was the music I craved. I had played the violin from a very young age, and my heart and fingers cried out for a musical life. At 19, on a whim, I decided to shoot for the impossible and audition for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

It was my first audition, and I found out months later that more than 300 people had applied for the position. Over three days, I went through several rounds at Disney Hall, playing behind a screen, seemingly alone in that beautiful, magical space. Somehow, I found myself in the final round, for which the screen was removed. I watched as then-music director Esa-Pekka Salonen bounded down the steps of the concert hall toward me and grasped my hand.

But it wasn’t over yet. I was called back for a grueling trial week, playing concerts at the very front of the section, right behind the concertmasters. After my third concert, I was called into Esa-Pekka’s office, and he offered me the job. I didn’t hesitate. The conflict between music and science had dissipated. This was what I had dreamed about, had aimed for. I couldn’t believe it.

Last month, I turned 24, and I almost feel as if I’ve finished my growing up with this wonderful orchestra (although I’m sure to some I’ll always be the “baby”). The band has become my family and my home, and has guided me in developing my own personal artistry, which then feeds back into the ensemble, into the music produced by a pantheon of amazing musicians with whom I am deeply privileged to share the stage.

Earlier this year, I realized a dream during a Philharmonic tour — to play in the Musikverein in Vienna —moreover, to play Mahler’s Ninth, in Mahler’s own city, his own hall. And that dream wasn’t mine alone. I shared it with just about every other musician on stage, including the maestro. We had tears in our eyes during the last movement.

Contrary to what some may believe, an orchestra is not just a group of people celebrating an archaic form of music. Being in the orchestra has placed me squarely within a diverse community of listeners and followers, who live very much in the here and now. Through the L.A. Phil, I met my friend Nathaniel Ayers, a formerly homeless musician who struggles with mental illness, and I experienced through him an epiphany about why I became a musician. I’ve started a concert series, the Street Symphony, which brings free classical music to the homeless and mentally ill living in places like skid row. Music is a communication that goes deeper than words; it registers fundamentally with the psyche and spirit, and it can be healing and redemptive. I know our current music director, our shining beacon of classical music, Gustavo Dudamel, feels the same way, and is determined to have an orchestra whose music embraces our community.

Every so often, I’ll look up during a concert in our own magnificent hall, and I’m filled with the same sense of wonder I had when I walked out on that stage for the first time at 19. We play for one of the greatest, most culturally aware audiences in the world, and an orchestra like ours could only exist for this audience, and for this city. Los Angeles makes us the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

I can’t imagine a better first job.

Michelle Huneven

Author of “Blame” and other novels

In the summer of 1972, I dropped out of college in Iowa and moved to North Carolina to live with my boyfriend in an old farmhouse between the towns of Siler City and Pittsboro, about 25 miles from Chapel Hill.

I soon found a job waiting tables at Ruth’s Hickory Mountain Restaurant and coffee shop in Siler City. I would be paid $1.60 an hour, plus tips. Meals were deducted from my paycheck. My boss, Ruth Partin, was blind, and her husband Al had no arms; he’d lost them by accidentally grabbing a live wire when the restaurant was under construction. On the restaurant’s free postcards, Ruth had written crookedly in the message area: Come have a meal with the handicap. It’s good eatin’.

Love may have landed me in the rural American South, but it didn’t shield me from the combined hit of culture shock and the rigors of my first eight-hour shift. I came home so footsore and freaked out, I cried myself to sleep.

But I went back the next day and for many more after that. I served 20-ounce glasses of ice tea so sweet my teeth ached when I tried to drink it. The house delicacy was “ham biscuits” — a salty, gamy scrap of fried country ham in a biscuit. (Tourists from the North routinely sent them back, saying that the ham was rotten.) Also popular were fish platters: shrimp, stuffed crab and catfish, all battered, that were taken from the freezer, deep-fried and then served with fries and hush puppies. The Carolina barbecue — chopped pork — came on a bun with slaw. A hamburger “all the way” meant mustard, slaw, onions and chili.

A tall sad waitress named Marie showed me the ropes; once, she took me home to see her living room set: She’d remove the plastic, she said, when she paid it off in 19 months. My other pal was Daites, the dishwasher, a jokey, froggy-voiced old guy who was paid in room and board only; if he got hold of cash, he’d vanish on a bender.

Ruth sat long hours at the cash register, greeting customers and counting the till by feel, now and then calling out to one of us, “Is this a ten? A twenty?”

“Yes Miss Ruth.”

Once I settled in, I was asked to feed Al; it was one of the few things the two of them couldn’t manage together. (They got around well enough; she’d hook a hand in his waistband and he’d lead the way; he had a special foot-driven car.) As I forked food into his mouth, Al and I were equally embarrassed by the intimate, infantilizing nature of the exchange. He rudely barked what he wanted next; we avoided each other’s eyes.

I didn’t last long at Ruth’s Hickory Mountain Restaurant. I wanted shorter shifts — more time to write. I found a new job in Chapel Hill at a fast-food restaurant called Kwikee Take Out, where my boss was a wild, hilarious Greek named Tommy — but that is another story.

Jonathan Gold

Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic for LA Weekly

When I was 17, a freshman at UCLA and eager to do something, anything, that didn’t involve shelving books at a library, I stumbled into a work-study position at the Century City Cultural Commission. The group’s office consisted of two people and three phones in a glassed-in nook on the mezzanine of a bank building. I was issued a tape dispenser, a stapler, a box of paper clips — and a warning not to make toll calls without permission. Then I was left alone; to do what, I wasn’t sure.

The commission, I suspect, had been formed with a broad mandate during the years of flush growth in Century City, as part of an attempt to give meaning to the office buildings and shopping malls sprouting out of the former Fox backlot. By the time I got there, the only activity the CCCC seemed actually to sponsor was a Wednesday-noon jazz series in a corner of the shopping center, which was to say an hour of local businessmen and attorneys playing Dixieland while a scattering of their friends ate food court sandwiches. I think I had been hired mostly to help set up the folding chairs.

But as a high school student, I had been fairly involved in the avant-garde music scene in Los Angeles, hanging out at the old Theater Vanguard on the western end of Melrose, attending the jazz concerts Lee Kaplan used to put on at the Century City Playhouse and taking the bus down to loft concerts off of Chesterfield Square. I knew jazz, I told my new bosses. I knew the best musicians in California. I could make the Wednesday concerts something Century City could be proud of, something that would make the newspapers and draw people in from all over town.

They insisted on keeping one Wednesday a month for the clarinet-playing OB-GYNs but reluctantly agreed to let me book the rest of the series. I was allotted $150 to pay the musicians each week, which I thought was insultingly low but seemed to be enough to draw talent. I got to spend afternoons chatting with my heroes instead of filing or answering the phones. And for the next few months, the shopping center became one of the most unlikely venues in Los Angeles for world-class improvisation.

The great Watts pianist Horace Tapscott played there, and Vinny Golia, and Nels and Alex Cline, James Newton and the solo bassist Roberto Miranda. The magnificent clarinet-trumpet duo of John Carter and Bobby Bradford, maybe the greatest improvisers in the history of L.A. jazz, played a couple of times. And while I had been half-expecting, maybe hoping for, the sort of dissonant abstraction most of these musicians were famous for, they judged the situation much better than I did, roaring through standards and throwing in be-bop flourishes. They were happy to be playing outside in the sunshine instead of in dark, smoky clubs.

A month later I was working in the library.

Gustavo Arellano

Managing editor of OC Weekly and writer of the satiric “Ask a Mexican!” column

The details are hazy, mostly because I’ve exiled them to that part of my brain that keeps the memories of beatings by bullies and sloppy nights, but my first job was selling insurance for air conditioners. Sophomore year in high school.

The company put us through training, and it really wasn’t too difficult. We had a script to read from, and pre-written answers to every conceivable excuse that someone might raise for not buying three years of limited warranty.

I had a one-month probation period; I lasted two weeks. My bosses, kind people in their early 30s, were surprised I was leaving so soon. I told them I needed to leave — the job was filling my evenings with nightmares and overwhelming my days. It was eating into my soul.

To paraphrase every high school boy’s favorite antihero, Holden Caulfield, I felt like a phony. But being a huckster influenced me profoundly. Even though I didn’t know what I wanted, career-wise, I knew it wasn’t going to be an office drone. I had worked for years alongside my dad, a truck driver, and I knew I didn’t want that either. I saw my cousins work in construction and knew I’d wilt. So I decided after quitting that first job to never stay at one that I didn’t love, even if that meant not making as much money as others.

And it’s a career move that has made my adult life a joyous one. Sure, I’m a newspaperman, and we all know how doomed that profession is, but I wake up excited every day. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote: “Those of us who are born journalists discover early in our lives, and often against our will, that our craft is not just a calling, a fate, a need or a job. It’s something we can’t avoid: It is a vice among friends.” Those words are great advice for all of us when considering whether we should work to live, or live to work.

Oh, and I did sell one man air-conditioner insurance. Poor sucker.

Gregory J. Boyle

Jesuit priest, executive director and founder of Homeboy Industries and author of “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.”

I’d had a paper route (for the Citizen News) and a paper corner (for the Herald Examiner), but my first real job was loading milk trucks. Summers and Saturdays, I paid for my high school tuition by working at Western Farms, a milk processing and distribution plant founded by my great-grandfather in 1913. Its motto was “Milk that is Milk.” Apparently in 1913, people weren’t that sure.

Every male Boyle worked his way through school at “The Plant,” as we called it, located on Grand Avenue and 31st Street. It was hard work, pushing a dolly loaded with crates of milk stacked six high and loading them onto trucks. The drivers were a colorful cast of characters, vying to tell ever-more-colorful stories and jokes. My brothers and cousins often imagined the vivid novel that could be written featuring this array of folksy, Runyonesque blue-collar workers.

My enduring memory — and the quintessential grace of this period for me — was showing up to work where my dad worked. I’d watch him and my uncles interacting with their employees and observe how decent they were. They were kind and clear, and the place was shaped by the integrity of their leadership. No worker was humiliated or demeaned or treated unfairly. I can’t remember how many times these weathered old truckers would come up to me, put their arms around me and point at my father in the distance, on the loading dock, and say, “Your dad is a great man.”

This mattered to me. To see how much other men admired my father caused me to reevaluate how I felt about him. It moved me, without question, from an adolescent who certainly didn’t think that “father knew best” to a man who was certain in the claim that the best man I ever knew was the first man I ever met.

Now, more than 40 years later, Western Farms is on the cusp of its 100th anniversary, and I am running the largest gang intervention, rehab and reentry program in the country, Homeboy Industries. But I haven’t forgotten the lesson I learned decades ago.

Today, I welcome the moments when the “homies” who work here walk their sons and daughters in to see me, asking if I can help them find work. I always say yes. There is often great estrangement between these fathers and their kids, the result of prison time, gang involvement and drug abuse. I want the homies’ kids to work alongside their fathers. It gives me a chance to sidle up to these youngsters, point admiringly at their dads and say: “Your father is a great man.”

Susan Feniger

Chef, restaurateur and founder of Street in Hollywood and, with Mary Sue Milliken, the Border Grill

When I was little my father, Yale, had a flower shop called the Flower Market on Central Avenue in Toledo, Ohio. I was 7, and I remember early in the morning, dragging large poinsettias out to the front of the shop so people would see them as they drove by.

But my real job was in the back. I sat on the big wood table where the women put together all of the corsages and flower arrangements. May and Bee worked there, and I was their pet. May was short, small, skinny and about 50, and Bee was huge and always wore flowered muumuus. It was 1960, and they had an AM station blaring Top 40 music while they laughed, chatted and worked.

My very important job was to put the pearl-ended pins in the corsages, and I thought I was very adult because they trusted me with a pin. Every once in a while they’d stop chatting and May would ask: “How many pins?” I’d have three little bags of pins done. She’d say: “Hurry up!” and they would laugh.

It wasn’t easy to put the pins all the way through the stems of the carnations. It took me forever. But I loved being there, surrounded by the nonstop motion, stacks of plastic bags, multi-colored ribbons, and the smell of flowers everywhere. It was amazing!

For all of my hard labor, I got paid a whopping $1 a day. And to this day, I can’t stand carnations!

Tommy Lasorda

Special advisor to the chairman and former manager of the Dodgers

I was born in 1927, and grew up a child of the Depression. My father worked six days a week in a stone quarry to provide for his wife and five sons. We were so poor that the soles of our shoes were so thin, when I stepped on a coin, I could tell you if it was heads or tails. But we never knew we were poor because our house was filled with so much love.

When I was 14 years old I had my first job. I worked for a man named Tom Ratts. He would drive a truck through our neighborhood selling 100-pound bags of potatoes. I would stand in the back of his truck with the potatoes, and when he sold a bag it was my job to carry it off the truck.

Working for Ratts was tough. I would show up at his house in the early morning. When I came in he had me sit at the table with him while he ate his eggs, sausage and toast in front of me, never offering me a bite. At the end of the long day hauling those heavy bags, my wage was just $1. Working as a kid was not an option. My four brothers and I all worked, and gave our earnings to our mother.

However, I was thankful to have the job. I felt like I was helping my father, whom I adored. My brothers and I were never afraid of hard work. We were proud to work hard and earn money because that was the example our father set. Although work in those days was scarce, he had too much pride to accept money from the government. He would work all day and night to provide for his family, and hopefully I inherited that work ethic from him.