CAREER START : Odd Jobs Are Road to Happiness Far From the Beaten Path

Ken Gladish waits tables at a Claim Jumper restaurant in Buena Park so he can afford to work his other job: flight instructor.

People who spend up to $5,000 learning to fly might have trouble believing that most flight instructors don’t make that much money. But you won’t get rich working for a small company like General Aviation Co. at tiny Fullerton Airport. For one thing, you don’t even get paid if you’re not teaching.

Gladish, 27, has to be a salesman as well; he’s got to talk the people who walk into the flight school into going ahead with lessons. “You try not to mention how much it’s gonna cost right at the beginning.”

Why teach flying?

“Because it’s another world up there,” he says. “You get a whole new perspective on what California’s about. You hassle around in traffic all day, and then suddenly you pop up into the air and you can see the ocean and Catalina Island, and how beautiful it all is.”

Gladish moved to Orange County from Pennsylvania by way of Arizona, where he spent four years learning about planes and flying at an aeronautics school.

He’s been teaching at General Aviation since May. Eventually, he wants to build up enough hours on different planes to land a job with a commercial airline. Those jobs are tough to get, though, so in the meantime there’s teaching.

It takes a minimum of 40 hours of flying just to be able to pass the test for a pilot’s license. He has four students now; most of them are business people who “are tired of driving to places like Fresno,” he says. “They’re thinking it might be easier and more fun to fly there.”

Scott Kelley was working the Jungle River Cruise one day last summer when the Disneyland ride set a one-day record. That day, 30,720 hot, cranky tourists got on the boats to watch the mechanical apes, elephants and headhunters that line the banks of the “river” that runs through the middle of Disneyland’s “jungle.”

Kelley, 24, is one of the guys in the safari suits and pith helmets who pilot the boats around the jungle ride and tell hokey jokes. He’s been piloting the jungle ride off and on for more than four years.

Like most Disneyland “cast members”--Disney’s term for employees who meet the public--Kelley must conform to a rigid dress code that dictates details of personal appearance. Even the presentation that pilots like Kelley give as part of the jungle ride are carefully scripted. “They give us a standard-operating-procedure spiel,” he says. “If you made up new jokes you might offend some people.”

Disneyland likes to move people around from one ride to another to keep “cast members” from getting stale. Eventually, Kelley says, he’d like to get off the rides and find a job in park management.

For now, the hardest part of the job is staying friendly and enthusiastic for the thousands of visitors that take the jungle ride daily. “Even if this is your 40th time around the jungle cruise that day, you’ve got to act like it’s your first.”

So it’s Uncle Ralph’s birthday and you can’t think of a thing to get him. How about sending a magician to his office? Or a Michael Jackson look-alike? Or maybe he’d like a stripper.

You can get all those people from Kit Kat Krazy Kapers, whose advertisements promise to “Liven Up That Special Occasion With Top Quality Entertainment.”

Kitty Fisher, 44, was a professional torch singer--1940s ballads were a specialty--who decided to give up life on the road to marry and settle in Redlands a little over 10 years ago. Looking around for something to do, she decided to start a singing telegram business.

But this was the ‘80s, and people wanted something a little less dated: They wanted strippers.

Now, 40 different acts work for Kit Kat: singers, belly dancers, ventriloquists, Polynesian dancers, celebrity look-alikes--Elvira and Dolly Parton are big favorites--and of course those strippers. Kit Kat is so busy that 25 of these acts do this full time. Birthday parties provide most of the business, but there are also retirement parties, bachelor parties, wedding receptions and grand openings.

A singing telegram from Kit Kat costs a minimum of $65, and a stripper, $155. She does say that the recession has put a 25% dent in the business.

Despite her background, Fisher has yet to answer a call for a singing telegram.

“I’m too busy here in the office,” she says. “I miss singing sometimes, though.”

Is Elvis still knocking around somewhere, maybe shopping for Cadillacs? Or dropping by McDonald’s for a cheeseburger, humming a line from “Blue Suede Shoes” as he studies the menu?

Probably not. But why--asks Paul R. Weast--does the handwriting on Presley’s medical examiner’s certificate looks a lot like Elvis’?

Weast is a handwriting analyst and document examiner in Anaheim. A retired salesman from Buffalo, N.Y., Weast, 71, moved to California in the ‘60s and got interested in graphology--analyzing handwriting--in the 1970s. His business, Analysis by Paul, has been around since the late 1970s and he has, by his own count, worked on 900 cases, testifying in court on more than a dozen.

By far the splashiest case Weast ever got was a guest shot this summer on a two-hour national television show about Elvis Presley hosted by actor Bill Bixby. Weast had analyzed a handwritten note for a free-lance photographer who was trying to track down Elvis--it turned out not to be Presley’s handwriting--and the photographer put him in touch with the author of a book called “The Elvis Files.” The author sent Weast a copy of the medical examiner’s certificate on Elvis’ death, and Weast says a few of the words written on the certificate--including Presley’s name--are astonishingly similar to Presley’s own handwriting.

That bit of information, relayed over the nation’s airwaves, got the supermarket tabloids into the act.

Does he think Elvis is alive?

“I have no idea,” Weast says. “But the amount of evidence makes me think something fishy happened. I don’t think he died when they said he did.”