How would you earn a living?

[Renault]

Hard Soldiering and Hard Fun.......what more can one ask for! Long gone are the days when "top" would arrive to formation visibly hung-over, puffing away then proceed to smoke the entire Company on a run. I idolized those guys but they are growing extinct.

Yup! Our old Top was a Chosin survivor. That ol' alcoholic was tougher that bridge spikes!

 

[31 Model A]

My first TO&E unit after boot camp and AIT had a 1SG named Nicola P Niccolucci. He was that cigar chewing WWII combat veteran from the Bronx. We all called him Big Nick. There was a big chalk bulletin board outside the orderly room and when he posted something, he signed it, Big Nick. Our CO was Captain William D Georgia, battlefield commissioned Korean vet and we called him GOD and that's how he signed the bulletin board also. Big Nick taught this young NCO a lot and I've always been proud of the fact that I experienced the "Old Army" from those of our greatest generation. Ran into Cpt Georgia in Nam, he had did some college which then he was promoted to Major, Big Nick retired and I'm sure is telling those above, "that's not a threat, that's a promise" his favorite line when you came before him for counseling. Big Nick was that Top Soldier all during my career and still is today.

Yup! Our old Top was a Chosin survivor. That ol' alcoholic was tougher that bridge spikes!

 

[MikeKardec]

Even with adjusting for inflation, that is a very tough way to make a living. I'll stick to finance and trading and keep writing as a side job in the 1930s just as a I do today.

In the 1930s you had three markets for magazine fiction. The "literary" magazines which were occasionally prestigious and mostly paid you in free copies and bragging rights. Many were associated with colleges, some were not. The cream of the crop was "Story Magazine" which I believe was a quarterly and may have paid. My dad sold only one story to Story and that was in 1938, just before he started keeping careful financial records.

Then there were the pulps. A cent a word was common. Dad got bumped to 1 1/2 cents in 1947. He wrote mostly for the Standard group which included Thrilling Adventure, all the "Thrilling" titles and many others. They were sort of the mid to bottom half of the pulp market. The reason writers often chose the pulps as their first stop was because they had a lot of open slots for stories and paid on acceptance ... and the "slicks" (the next category) paid on publication. A magazine might delay publication of a story a LONG time looking for an edition with the right page count or themes. One of the best known of the pulps was Black Mask ... I'm looking at a $79 sale to them in 1949. I don't have a count but it's not paying over 2 cents a word.

The Slick magazines, named for their attractive to advertisers slick paper, were magazines like the Saturday Evening Post but you could there were fewer of them and you could be delayed nearly forever waiting for a publication slot to come up ... they were very picky about the proper mix of stories. On the other hand you could move out of your one room apartment if you were good enough and wrote the right sort of stuff to get published regularly. The best of all possible worlds was a serialized novel in the slicks. This paid serious change. A records check shows $15,000 from the Post in the early 1950s for what would later be resold as a 150 to 180 page paperback.

If you knew what you were doing (or still know what your doing) you sold the magazine "First North American Serial Rights Only" ... this meant that you could resell that story to your hearts content to other magazines or to a book publisher. LOTS of pulp stories were published under different titles by different magazines trying to make you believe that they had been the first publisher.

Here's an overview in actual numbers but with no word count: 1946 average pulp short story $55 to $90, long pulp short story $180. A "magazine novel" (novella) $600. By 1953 the average numbers had doubled and the longer work had gone up by 30% or so, mostly because of Dad's greater success ... but the pulp business was circling the drain, being done away with by paperbacks and TV. Soon thousands of old pulp writers were competing for the few slots left in the Slicks and it is in this period that some of the best short stories in literary history were published in those same slicks. The competition was fierce.

In the late 1940s, if Dad could sell 50 stories a year he could live in his own little apartment in LA. He did not drive. By the early fifties he'd figured out how to make some sales to the film and TV business (TV anthologies ate up short stories in those days) and was expanding his novellas into paperback novels. That earned him a bigger and nicer apartment right off the Sunset Strip, a nice wardrobe, and occasional trips to NYC. He was also sending money to his parents in the 1940s but they were both dead by the early fifties.

Three to four novels a year for the next 20 years bought upper middle class. I work with his stuff every day and I STILL have a hard time getting my head around that ... three to four novels a YEAR!

Magazines have never paid all that well. I ran a short story mag in the 1990s with a subscription of close to 180k and we essentially paid 1940s pulp rates. It was pretty pitiful pay yet not profitable enough for our publisher not to sell us off to another group ... I hit the ground running when that happened!

 

[Harp]

... that I experienced the "Old Army" from those of our greatest generation.

I can remember the first sergeant standing at company formation and offering a crisp $20 bill to any one who wished
to kick some problematic malcontent's sorry ass. Article 15s and all other unnecessary formal charges would never be
filed, the IG never was an issue, and Top had the company wrapped around his waist like a money belt.

 

[MissNathalieVintage]

I would still be a secretary just like I am today or I would have the same job Kathrine Hepburn had in the movie Desk Set.
I’d live in a women’s only apartment building and the men would only be allowed to visit downstairs in the lobby. As for transportation I would walk, public bus, or take the train just as I do today.

 

[Fading Fast]

I would still be a secretary just like I am today or I would have the same job Kathrine Hepburn had in the movie Desk Set.
I’d live in a women’s only apartment building and the men would only be allowed to visit downstairs in the lobby. As for transportation I would walk, public bus, or take the train just as I do today.

"Desk Set" is a really good movie, but I haven't seen it in years and years. If memory serves, she had a very cool job as head of the research / fact-checking division for some kind of periodical - is that right? That movie doesn't get the notice it deserves. It's kind of funny that you mention that particular job - which was secure in the 1930s (the period we are talking about "going back to"), but the plot of the movie in the 1950s is that computers were going to make her job and her staff's jobs obsolete. Which, over time and in many ways, they did.

Also, in the 1980s, when I first moved to NYC, I dated a girl who lived in a women's only hotel (it was called a "hotel," but it was basically a small apartment rental building for women only). It was still decently maintained - and men were only allowed in the lobby - but you could tell the model was failing. I have no idea, but I can't believe any of them still exist today. I think, at least for that one, there was also an age limit on it as women had to be either younger than 30 or 25 (if my faulty memory can be trusted).

 

[Stanley Doble]

The New Yorker magazine was one of the top payers if not the top, in the thirties and forties. I saw a story about Harold Ross, the publisher. He had a group of favorite authors who appeared regularly, but he would not let anyone appear in his magazine oftener than every six weeks. At the same time, he was miffed if any of "his" authors sold a story to another magazine.

Someone pointed out to him that under his policy, the most anyone could make writing for the New Yorker was $3000 a year. He replied "why that's a ribbon clerk's salary".

 

[LizzieMaine]

$3000 a year was what a low-level executive, a small-town newspaper editor, or a just-starting-out doctor might expect to earn in the 1930s. A ribbon clerk would be extremely lucky to get $1500.

 

[Matt Crunk]

As recently as the late 80s, the (very)occasional curious observer would ask me if I had been in the navy. These days nearly every time I go to the store someone asks me if I work in a tattoo shop.

A job in a tattoo shop would have been much easier to land back then, although it's debatable whether it would be a more lucrative profession then or now. Today there's much more competition in the field, but there are also a lot more people getting tattooed, and paying much higher prices comparatively.

From the perspective of someone who's been around the business a lot longer than I have, World famous tattooist Lyle Tuttle told me at a convention once that in the 1950s and '60s, just about every tattooist in the country knew, or at least knew of, each other. He said by contrast, at a recent convention on the West Coast, he discovered seven new shops operating from his own hometown (San Francisco) that he'd never even heard of.

I'm not sure I'd even want to be a tattooist back in the day, as the hours were usually much longer (I've heard stories of the guys at "The Pike" working from Friday afternoon thru till Sunday morning non-stop on weekends when the ships were in), and the clientele a lot rougher. But I'm sure I would have been a visual artist of some kind. Since I've been working in the field long before the days of graphics computers, I don't think I'd find it that hard to transition back.

 

[Matt Crunk]

Law Enforcement basics have not changed much between then and now, so I'd have a job.

Except that it has gotten much more militarized, in both style and tactics. Most people had never even heard of S.W.A.T before that TV series aired in the 1970's. Today even smaller towns have some type of SWAT unit.

 

[Big J]

Oh, I don't know. I guess I'd go into prostitution, racketeering, boot-legging, or enforcing for the mob.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Except that it has gotten much more militarized, in both style and tactics. Most people had never even heard of S.W.A.T before that TV series aired in the 1970's. Today even smaller towns have some type of SWAT unit.

As well as practically every government agency you can think of. I wouldn't be surprised if the DMV had their own SWAT team.

 

[HeyMoe]

I wouldn't be surprised if the DMV had their own SWAT team.

Here in Vermont DMV enforcement officers are on the state tactical team.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You haven't seen action until you've seen the Marine Patrol Tactical Squad in action. DROP THOSE SHORT LOBSTERS THIS IS A RAID

 

[HudsonHawk]

Here in Vermont DMV enforcement officers are on the state tactical team.

DMV has enforcement? For what? Long lines getting driver's license renewal?

 

[HeyMoe]

DMV has enforcement? For what? Long lines getting driver's license renewal?

They patrol the interstate, mostly looking for truckers etc. They drive pick-ups

 

[Babydoll]

I'd probably be a housewife, but take in sewing on the side to make extra money. Kinda like what I do now. I crochet baby hats and sell them online. Great side business while I'm homeschooling our daughter this year!

 

[vitanola]

Oh, I don't know. I guess I'd go into prostitution, racketeering, boot-legging, or enforcing for the mob.

Somehow I'm not particularly surprised.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

They patrol the interstate, mostly looking for truckers etc. They drive pick-ups

View attachment 18371

But isn't that the function of the Highway Patrol or State Police?

 

[HeyMoe]

The State Police here are pretty strapped manpower wise. They do patrol the interstate but they also serve as town police for most of the towns in Vermont. As an example our local barracks has 16 towns in their service area. During the day they run two troopers on patrol for 16 towns. At night the have one on with others at home on call.

So we have DMV cops to help.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk