All of us have a first job. In fact, we often have more than one: our first job as teens (or even pre-teens) and our first job as adults and as college graduates.
For College namesake Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), his “first” first job was picking cotton. Ten years old at the time, he had a clear objective: to save up for a hunting rifle. When he graduated in 1889 from the City College of New York (precursor to today’s Baruch College), economic times were tough. So though it wasn’t his dream job, Bernard Baruch became an office boy with a wholesale glass company for $3 a week. Thirty years later, Baruch was a financier, self-made millionaire, and advisor to heads of state.
What makes Bernard Baruch’s history remarkable is what makes many of your first job stories equally amazing—where you started and what you made from those beginnings.
10 Alumni, 10 Stories: Unique Tales and Common Themes
What makes for a great first job story? Is it ambition at an early age, or is it self-discovery and lessons learned? Of course, it could be the celebrities or winged merchandise encountered along the way. You decide.
To become a paperboy for The Courier Post, Daniel Clark (MBA ’05) had to lie about his age, saying he was 12 when he was only 10. The enterprising kid wound up with the biggest paper route in town, making deliveries seven days a week by bicycle. “I earned about $50 per week, which is a fortune when you are 10 years old,” he remembers. What he liked best: being outdoors and getting to know all of the people on his route. What he liked least: collecting payments. Clark is currently a finance professional with expertise in private equity, leveraged buyouts, and litigation finance.
Deliveries are also part of Howard J. Schneider’s first job tale. Every Sunday morning, the 11-year-old entrepreneur delivered bagels, cream cheese, and lox to his neighbors in the Forest Park Co-op in Queens. “The bagel business was in all nine buildings, which housed about 900 families,” says Schneider (’74). “Cold calling for new customers was not my favorite part of the job, but I learned to overcome that fear. I also learned that there were no excuses come Sunday morning when I had to get up and deliver before my customers arose. And I learned my 7 times table, as each bagel sold for 7 cents.” Today Schneider is sole practitioner of Litigation Support Group, Inc., in Coral Gables, Florida. “I still like eating bagels,” he adds.
Some alumni flocked to first jobs on farms.
When he was 13 years old, Philip Honig (’58) shoveled chicken manure at a small farm in Massachusetts one summer (the rest of the year he lived in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx). “Four of us lifted the coop off the ground and moved it aside. We then shoveled the, um, manure onto a flatbed truck and distributed it onto several fields of crops.” For this work, he received meals. “Who else from Baruch can start his or her resume with such a job?” asks the retired CPA.
As unlikely as it seems, two other alumni shared similar stories, including Laban C. Hill (’86), who, at 12 years old, also shoveled manure, for a landscaping company in Memphis, Tennessee. Today Hill is an author. His newest children’s book, When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop (Roaring Brook Press, 2013), has been honored by Time magazine and the American Library Association.