First Job by Tom Kelly It was not a formal apprenticeship, but I actually had my first job in the publishing industry around 1938 and 1939 as a young lad of eight or nine years old, working as a pick-up vendor for the popular Depression era magazines The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Liberty, and Ladies Home Journal which I peddled door-to-door, and on the Garden District streets of New Orleans. I still relish the unique and refreshing smell of ink and paper that filled the air when those bundles were popped open. And as a third and fourth grader at the Live Oak Elementary School on Seventh Street, below Magazine toward the Mississippi River, I began avidly reading that era's version of Reader's Digest, one of the few cultural luxuries my parents afforded on the scant finances available from the odd jobs my father labored at while working as a seminarian to earn his Master's Degree at the Baptist Bible Institute on Washington Avenue--forerunner of the present day New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary now located out in the Gentilly neighborhood along Lake Pontchartrain--to become a Southern Baptist preacher and back-up school teacher. I read the Digest, and the newly popular Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman comic books, which my street mates and I surreptitiously read when we could sneak a free look in the racks at the Katz&Besthoff (later K&B) drug store at the corner of Magazine and Washington. On the rare occasion when one of us had a nickel or dime to actually buy a copy, it was passed around and swapped until it was in tatters. Surreptitious, because the drugstore manager would eventually shoo us out of the store, and also because several of our parents, being religion oriented from the seminary connections, were not sure that those books weren't sinful. We read them anyway, and hang the consequences. We'd get Saved later. I began also about that time reading the Bible, picked up from the pew racks at the old Coliseum Place Baptist Church way downtown on Camp Street, while waiting for the Sunday morning sermon. Instead of just plopping the book open to begin reading randomly in the middle of some obscure prophecy or Old Testament national disaster or other, I started at Chapter One, Verse One in Genesis--after first reading the introductory business about King James of England deciding around 1600 to have a new Bible written--around the same time old William Shakespeare was writing all those plays that continue even today to trouble high school English scholars. I wondered then about a talking serpent, Methuselah's real age, and all those animals in the Ark. I had seen real animals, both in the wild and domesticated, up close and personal living on a sand hill farm in my pre-New Orleans early childhood in the Gaar's Mill community of rural Winn Parish in northern Louisiana, where social life revolved around regular Sunday meetings at the old Harmony Grove Baptist Church, situated on land that my grandfather carved out from his nearby farmstead and sold to the congregation for five dollars, and where he and a host of his progeny and kin lie buried in the nearby churchyard. Up until age five, I was a regular attender there with my parents, accepting at face value the Bible stories in the pre-school "Card Class," related by devout ladies who showed us the accompanying pictures, including the one with God at the top of the starry stairway up in the clouds, talking down to Moses. Jacob? But now I was a Junior Boy in the Baptist Sunday School at Coliseum Place; I could read, and the first questions crept in. Like one of the famous Bible ladies of the New Testament, I "pondered these things in my heart," and occasionally still do--but in today's Baptist catechism, one isn't encouraged to raise such questions. You too? Pssshhh; never mind. The magazine sales business took me and my buddies into places and situations that would leave today's children of a similar age, and their parents, gasping in shock while thumbing their digital game boxes or clicking up the next episode of SpongeBob. But no one in my household then seemed alarmed or concerned, as we roamed streets both familiar and not, in packs of three or four, or seven or eight, flashing the latest front covers and offering our wares for sale for a dime a copy, if memory serves. Maybe it was a nickel. And by selling out our entire allotment, we could each come marching home with perhaps fifty cents net, most of which we might spend enroute at a candy counter or a bakery for a favorite snack. The territory we claimed lay roughly between Jackson and Napoleon Avenues, from St. Charles to the river. All of us lived in the neighborhood between Magazine and Prytania, from around Fourth to maybe Sixth, bisected by Washington Avenue, where the main front gate of BBI led into the campus between Camp and Chestnut. As we rambled about, we often passed the front door of something called "Commander's Palace," of which we knew not the slightest. Neither I nor anyone I knew was ever inside the door until many years later, when as a member of the state Press Association, or some committee or other with business in The City, I enjoyed some mighty high class dining while rubbing elbows with folks the kind of whom I did not know existed back in that period of my apprenticeship. As time went on, I began to learn that traveling and selling in packs often had negative results. Possible customers often either avoided the herd, or tried to move the herd on down the street when it caused a commotion in a public place. For instance, we discovered that a steady stream of people came and went through the front doors of a place called Touro Infirmary, a couple of long blocks south of St. Charles Ave. toward the river, facing a street called Foucher. As the herd pestered guests and staff entering and leaving Touro for occasional magazine sales, a belligerent looking nurse type came to the door several times to order us off the premises. I got the message on about the third disinvitation, and strolled up Foucher to the corner of St. Charles, taking a stand in the neutral ground between the street car line and the traffic lane. When a trolley stopped at the intersection, I walked down the side of the car, flashed my covers, and usually made at least one sale per stop. When the street traffic stopped for the red light, I meandered out into the right of way between the waiting cars, flashing covers. People bought. In a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes, I was sold out, and returned regularly to "my" corner with increasing numbers of copies to sale. Never failed to clean me out. Lesson: An exclusive territory is pure gold in the publishing business. Next: Whatever happened to Coliseum Place Baptist Church? Hint--It wasn't all about Katrina. |