Grandma Henke

Like most young girls, my first income was from babysitting other people’s children.   A good wage for babysitting back then was 25 cents an hour.  That is a dollar for four hours!  Sometimes, it was less if the parents couldn’t scrounge together enough change.   Babysitting included but was not limited to: tending from one to nine children (prolificity abounded in our little town of Draper … I made that word up), folding laundry, washing and drying the dishes, sweeping the floors and sometimes mopping the floors.     It wasn’t a very lucrative profession but fortunately young girls would often do it for free just because.   Young girls like to do those chores if their parents aren’t the ones asking them to do it.

Actually I was even younger for my first job, which involved picking big, green, juicy tomato worms off tomato plants in ours and our neighbors tomato patches.   A penny a worm would sometimes leave me with upwards of 25 cents on a good day.     I put the worms in jars and turned them in for my pay.   Thank goodness my job description didn’t require me to dispose of the worms.   

My first “real” job came when I was about 14 years old and began picking strawberries at Akagi’s farm in Draper.    I can’t remember the pay but it was per flat of strawberries.   Mr. Akagi would come around very early in the morning, around 5 AM it seems like, and pick us all up in his big flat bed truck.   We’d pick for about four hours and then he’d haul us all home.    It was a big deal at the end of the week to collect my wages, which were good for the time but probably never topped the lofty amount of $10 for a weeks work.   I felt rich, though, and loved counting and recounting the money I kept in a jar that I hid on the top shelf of my closet.   I used the money I earned to supplement my school clothes fund.

Kids earn more per hour babysitting now than I earned when I began to work for State Farm Insurance after I graduated from High School.    My starting wage back then for full time work as a file clerk in the claims department was $1.25 an hour.

When Lynn and I got married we lived on my earnings and Lynn’s part time wage of $1.25 an hour while attending college.  We got by like everyone else.    Our menu’s consisted of oatmeal, milk & eggs (from his parent’s), soups, Rice-a-roni, peanut butter sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, and vegetables and fruit from my parents garden.   Of course, we also had the luxury of living close to our parents and were encouraged to drop by around mealtime whenever we wanted.  

We used to buy small cans of tomato sauce for 5 cents a can on a super sale.  A pot of spaghetti, including ground beef, cost less than a dollar to make.   Macaroni and cheese were ten for a dollar, as was Rice-a-roni.   Now and then we could buy cans of vegetables ten for a dollar.  Frozen orange juice was always ten for a dollar.  Frozen lemonade was twenty for a dollar.  Our first food budget was less than $30.00 a month.   We didn’t go to many movies and maybe ate out once a month.

When Lynn graduated and was commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Army my employment came to an end with the birth of our first son, Warren, but our income went up.  Lynn’s income from the army was $380 a month, $110 in housing, and $50 for food.      We had some loans we were paying at that time … $8.00 a month to Sears for our washer and dryer, and $45.00 for our Renault10.   Medical was covered by the army.    We felt rich.