20 Jobs Teens Had Before 1960 That Would Never Fly Today

In the Pennsylvania anthracite coalfields, young breaker boys would sit above ground inside buildings called breakers, where they manually removed slate from the crushed coal with their bare hands for 10-hour days. Workers often suffered black lung disease, crushed fingers, and developed permanently hunched backs. Eventually, the practice of hiring children died out due to compulsory schooling laws, the introduction of mechanical slate separators in the 1910s and 1920s, and the passing of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which restricted child labor at the federal level.

I used to find bowling alleys magical. I could never comprehend how the knocked-down pins got swept up and placed back upright. But before there was an automated tool that got the job done, bowling pins had to be cleared from the lanes and replaced by teenage pinboys who worked in pits at the end of each lane. They’d have to dodge rolling bowling balls to collect and replace pins on the return track manually, which certainly puts modern complaints about bowling-alley shoes into perspective. In the late 1940s, American Machine and Foundry, a manufacturing firm, introduced an automatic pinspotter that reached mass production in 1952, although pinboys continued to work in the lanes throughout most of the ’50s before the machines took over.

The carhop job got its start in 1921 at Kirby’s Pig Stand, a drive-in in Dallas, Texas, where teenage boys hopped onto the running boards of arriving cars to claim customers. By the 1940s, however, most carhops were girls, who took the order while hanging a metal tray holder on the customer’s car window. Roller skates came onto the scene in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but many carhops still used ordinary shoes because they felt safer, and I can’t say I blame them for not wanting to balance somebody’s lunch on wheels.

The news butcher walked down the passenger cars, selling papers, candy, fruit, and cigars. “Butcher” was the period word for a peddler. At the age of twelve, future inventor Thomas Edison worked as a news butcher on the Grand Trunk Railway, beginning in 1859. He also operated a small chemistry lab in a baggage car. Selling candy wasn’t enough of a side hustle when you could apparently squeeze in a little chemistry too. Edison later said his deafness was caused by scarlet fever and by a conductor who yanked him aboard by the ears after his chemistry experiment set the baggage car on fire.

When the first telephone exchanges opened in the late 1870s, they hired teenage boys to plug patch cords into jacks to connect calls. But the boys were impatient and rude with customers, which turned out to be a surprisingly effective way to get an entire demographic fired. On September 1, 1878, Bell Telephone hired Emma Nutt as its first female operator, and the industry began favoring young women for their politeness and patience. Telephone companies rarely hired boys as operators again.

Somewhere between 1880 and 1940, steam donkeys (steam-powered winches) in Pacific Northwest logging camps dragged logs over underbrush and terrain the engineer operating the machine couldn’t see. To tell the operator when to pull and when to stop, a “whistle punk” would pull a wire connected to the donkey’s whistle, sounding off a series of coded blasts. “Punk” was logging slang for a young and untrained worker, and the wrong note could result in broken cables and an injured crew on the ground.

Between the 1920s and late 1950s, soda fountains at drugstores were where teens hung out. Soda jerks dispensed carbonated drinks from draft arms and concocted sundaes and malted milks while hurling fountain slang such as “burn one.” Despite a job title that sounds like a customer complaint, the word had nothing to do with rudeness, but rather referred to the jerking motion necessary to pull the draft handles. The advent of fast food chains taking over what used to be the pharmacy counter essentially put the job out of business by the late 1950s.

The early newsboys were not really employees; they purchased the bundles of newspapers with their own money in advance, and absorbed the cost of any that they did not sell. In 1899, newsboys in New York City went on strike in protest of increased bundle prices set by newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, resulting in the publishers having to repurchase unsold copies. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 exempted newspaper delivery from its restrictions. Over time, however, the door-to-door bundle-selling model gradually gave way to bike routes.

The Western Union Telegraph Company and others hired young boys in uniform, typically between the ages of 11 and 18, to carry paper telegrams on bicycles, including business communications, personal letters, and even reports of military casualties. The boys cycled through urban districts at night, often passing through bars and other places of vice. Lewis Hine, a photographer who documented child labor for reformers, photographed the messengers’ vulnerability to street violence and temptation, and his photographs contributed to age restrictions in labor laws in the 1930s.

Prior to the proliferation of motorized golf carts during the late 1950s, country clubs employed young teenage caddies, who could walk as much as 36 holes a day with the player’s bag over their shoulder, rake out bunkers, help read greens, and then collect tips from satisfied clients. At least all that walking could eventually pay off in a much bigger way: in 1930, golfer Chick Evans created the Evans Scholars Foundation, a scholarship program that provides full tuition and housing at college to high-achieving caddies.

Teenagers worked in department stores, hotels, and office buildings, operating manual hand levers that governed the elevator’s speed and level, and even calling out what was on sale on each floor for patrons. Automatic push-button elevators already existed, but major elevator operator strikes in New York City in 1945 and 1953 disrupted commerce and pushed building owners to switch faster. And by the end of the 1950s, most buildings were automatic.

Throughout New England and the South, textile mills hired teenage doffers, who scurried up and down the line of automated spinning frames, removing full bobbins of thread and replacing them with empty ones. Brown lung, a respiratory disease caused by inhaling cotton dust, was common among doffers working in humid, tightly sealed mill rooms. Doffers should not be confused with spinners, who repaired the broken threads that emerged from the moving machinery. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act severely restricted doffers’ employment as minors.

Before the advent of the electric refrigerator, people stored food in iceboxes, insulated boxes made of wood. Icemen’s teenage assistants delivered ice to residential customers by using iron tongs to lug 25- to 50-pound ice blocks up the stairs of tenements (multi-family apartment buildings) while wearing leather shoulder pads to absorb the water from melting ice. The number of residential ice deliveries plummeted after 1937, as the national sales of electric refrigerators surpassed those of iceboxes; however, home ice delivery persisted in the countryside and poor neighborhoods for many years afterward.

Prior to the introduction of cash registers at the point-of-sale, large-scale department stores funneled all financial transactions through a centralized bookkeeping office. Employees would ring a bell to call a youth courier, who would gather money from customers along with a sales receipt and take it to the accountant on another floor. He or she would return the change with a receipt. It was chaotic enough that the retail world shifted toward using overhead wire baskets and pneumatic tubes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Teenage bootblacks, or shoe shiners, carried portable wooden shoe-shine boxes or set up shop at sidewalks, train stations, or hotel lobby stands to clean and polish the leather shoes and boots of customers. They were not employees of anyone; they kept every penny they earned. For more than a century, from the 19th through the mid-20th century, these boys operated their own little enterprises one shoe at a time and competed for business in all types of weather.

Prior to the introduction of electric streetlights, cities were illuminated with gas lamps. Cities, as well as private utility companies, employed lamplighters. These were typically teenagers who, at dusk, walked a prescribed route using a long ignition pole or a small ladder, opened a valve to let the gas flow, ignited the burner, and cleaned the glass globe. They repeated the walk in the morning to extinguish the flame. The rapid conversion from gas to electric between 1890 and 1925 quickly led to the end of this occupation.

Milkmen delivered milk, butter, and cream to homes in glass bottles before daylight. Many adult milkmen hired teenage boys as helpers. These boys would jump off the truck or wagon at about 4 a.m., run up the steps of houses carrying wire crates of bottles, pick up empties and then run back to the truck. In the winter, ice on the crates meant danger underfoot. Then, it was time for school.

Rural teens were already expected to work on farms — harvesting crops, putting up hay, driving tractors, and feeding cows. So when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the federal law that limited child labor and hazardous jobs, it included exemptions allowing teenagers to continue in agriculture outside school hours. The result: agricultural labor would end up with lower age limits than the industrial and urban trades the law was built to restrict.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, movie palace operators employed uniformed teenage ushers and usherettes in brass-buttoned coats and pillbox hats, armed with flashlights to lead folks to their seats, tear their tickets, and silence rowdy sections. It was a coveted gig, not because of the wages, but because you got to see all the movies for free, enjoy the air-conditioning, and have everyone in your peer group check you out.

Casual, occasional use of “babysitting” appeared as early as 1937, but the term didn’t become a widespread teenage profession until after WWII, when young families began moving out of cities into brand-new suburbs far from grandparents and aunts, leaving them without anyone for evening care. Teenage girls stepped into the role for a little cash. The noun “baby-sitter” emerged in print in 1937; “babysit” as a verb appeared sometime between 1944 and 1947 and became standard vocabulary among teenagers in the 1950s.

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