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I shall first dispose of several seasonal, one or two day-at-a-time jobs that wre popular with teenage boys in general at the time:

1) Whenever there was a very heavy snow storm, the New York Central would hire snow shovelers by the day to clear the DeWitt Yards. I forget the pay but it seems to me that it may have been as much as $5 per day which was a fabulous amount at that time and under the circumstances. So we'd take the trolley out to East Syracuse and hire out and get extremely affluent suddenly, even if there was only one day's work. We'd shovel the snow onto a flatcar and after doing that for eight hours, you knew you'd done something but we were young and strong and it was probably excellent exercise.

2) I don't recall what the necessary circumstances are, but occasionally the Halcomb Steel Co. would hire help for Sunday work only. It was common labor and you'd do most anything requiring neither skill nor experience but it was another opportunity to pick up a few bucks occasionally. I remember one occasion when I was assigned to throwing scrap steel into the maw of an electric furnace, a job designed to singe your beard, only I didn't have any to singe.

3) A real bonanza came each September with the State Fair if you could land a job as a ticket-runner at one of the main gates where automobiles could drive into the fairgrounds. The job was to get money from the driver, run to the ticket window, procure the requisite number of tickets, and return to the car with the tickets and the change. The change was the most important part of the transaction because it was usually from the change that you were given your tip for service rendered. The tip could be anything from a nickel to a dollar -- a man gave me a dollar once and I nearly keeled over! But the Fair lasted a week or ten days and in that time, you could pick up maybe $20 to $30 depending on your luck.

4) To complete the record, I'll mention again, Christmas clerking at L. Vinney's, the big, men's clothing store. You'd do this Saturdays and you might get in two or three days of work. I don't recall the pay but I think you got so much a day plus a percentage of your sales to lend a little incentive to the operation. I think I did this a couple of years; I recall working at the glove counter on one occasion. This Vinney work was well regarded and you'd find even the sons of the reasonably affluent working there at holiday time; the jobs were very much in demand.