Stories in this playlist were collected in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street traveling exhibition "The Way Worked" and were digitized for distribution by the MuseWeb Foundation.

Stories about Working in America

This story was collected in conjunction with the national traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked" by the Museum on Main Street program at the Smithsonian Institution. It is part of the "Be Here: Main Street" collection, intended to capture Americans' stories about their neighborhoods, waterways, towns, traditions, and personal experiences. 

“I was a telephone operator in Chanute, Kansas, in 1960 and ’61 when they actually went dial. And, it was very interesting, and I did night relief, so I worked from midnight to six in the morning by myself, and you ran the whole town’s telephone service, and it was the old days where you plugged in a number and said ‘number, please,’ and they gave you a number and you rang it. I also made long distance calls at night. There weren’t a lot but there were some, and that was quite interesting, living in a small town. I did that my senior year until we went dial. It was wonderful. You met a lot of people you felt like you knew even though you didn’t. Thank you.”

Asset ID: 7094


"Detail of Telephone Switchboard" photo by Kim Rollins. Flickr Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cirocco/8512344560/in/photolist-dYcZto-eb6ThT-pZyenK-5BaNkN-eb6TdK-4zxCPi-bHVf1H-ebcvJw-bw8sBX-dhNAH4-gfm1vR-fqxZkF-qWgmkq-ebcuYQ-buTPuw-ae9GXQ-gQAVFq-7y6Tjr-7pFJzD-4xsska-D1Juu4-psjtXr-wUDEas-wEmocq-aDgfCe-8Reb3T-e4ctEY-5qcLy-dYcZnj-64kBTh-fA3qxW-a9HWeg-7f1S3v-8xyhGy-7V6s9K-5J7cG4-bu9CsV-btNgeX-m5wTs-5DUdQH-4pwySm-8ivHzQ-6Potjt-565RZt-bnHBXo-57TUiU-Ftn9-9j2enw-p4J28y-bn8mTn

Being a Telephone Operator in Chanute, Kansas

This story was collected in conjunction with the Museum on Main Street program at the Smithsonian Institution. It is part of the "Be Here: Main Street" collection, intended to capture Americans' stories about their neighborhoods, waterways, towns, traditions, and personal experiences. 

"As a high school student in the, this would have been in the late sixties or early seventies, I worked summers at the local newspaper in Waterville, Maine. I was an inserter. What an inserter is is a job that probably doesn't even exist today. It's the person that used to put the sections of the newspaper together. You do this night after night for three or four hours and I think we got paid about .85 cents an hour and you had the roughest sort of people ever that you could imagine. These were the people that probably couldn't find work anywhere else mixed in with kids that want to go on to college, so you had quite a collaboration of folks. It was a rough group.

I remember one day that somebody actually threw somebody through a window because they got upset with them. The same person a couple of weeks later they tied up and set out in the mail sack with newspapers of somewhere else. You kind of tried to keep to yourself and wanted to make sure that you didn't get yourself in any trouble because you knew that the ramifications might not be so good. It was a good learning experience that you realize that all different types of people, so it is something that has always stuck with me for the rest of my life."

Photo by Heather Shelton

Asset ID: 7204

First Job: Being a Newspaper Inserter in Waterboro, Maine

This story was collected in conjunction with the national traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked" by the Museum on Main Street program at the Smithsonian Institution. It is part of the "Be Here: Main Street" collection, intended to capture Americans' stories about their neighborhoods, waterways, towns, traditions, and personal experiences.

"At age sixteen my parents decided that I needed to get a job. I was forced to work at Monsanto corn research facility in Gothenburg, Nebraska. On my first day there I was flat out irritated. I didn't want to work at all, much less outdoors in the hot sun with only one of my friends. I was excited for getting money, but the means by which I would have to do this was not appealing to in the slightest. Even from the start we all knew how awful it was going to be.

Lunch time seemed like it would never come. We had been doing one activity the entire time. Shoot bagging, a droning boring activity. It was getting increasingly hotter and the sun was beating down trying its hardest to make us all combust, or just burn really bad.

After lunch, time seemed to go even slower if possible. We turned to harder, more strenuous jobs. Work became more painful. Now it was just torture. The lucky underage kids were sent home due to child labor laws, leaving everyone sixteen and older in the field. 

By this time we had worked three hours longer than they had told us we would have to, so we were all frustrated. Despite these dreadful ideas, eventually we were told to head back to the bus. Six o'clock is when were finally let off on our first day of work. Our ears, faces and necks would never be the same due to extreme sun burn. A cold shower would never feel better. Eight dollars an hour just didn't seem like it was enough. I swore to myself that I would never return to this forsaken place. 

However, it occurred to me that many farmers had to work like that every day and they probably didn't complain like this. In the end, I decided that if they could do it so could I, and so began the hardest three weeks of my life."

Asset ID: 7182

Teen's First Job At Monsanto Corn Research Facility, Nebraska

This story was collected in conjunction with the national traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked" by the Museum on Main Street program at the Smithsonian Institution. It is part of the "Be Here: Main Street" collection, intended to capture Americans' stories about their neighborhoods, waterways, towns, traditions, and personal experiences. 

"My favorite memory of growing up in a small town has to do with the many jobs that I had in this town. I started selling TV guides for three cents each, I worked up to washing homes, walking dogs, baby sitting, working in a bakery, being able to take home all of the uneaten bakery goods. 

But more than that I remember my friends working together, and we would have goals, and we'd meet those goals, which were nothing more than earning a few pennies to go to the local theater, or to have an adventure. We were always out having adventures, not in the house, but outside. Parents were very aware of us but yet not in control as today, we were able to go out, nine o'clock in the morning and come home at six o'clock in the evening if we wanted to. We were told, 'Don't be late for dinner." And we never were."

Asset ID: 7206

First Jobs and Earning Pennies for the Theater

Recorded in Alpena, Michigan

"Favorite memory of living in a small town?

My favorite memory of living in a small town is that I moved there from Detroit to a town called Ossineke, Michigan. My parents bought the town bar. I married and raised five children there.

I also worked at the Sanborn Elementary School for 25 years. Many years of those, I was the librarian, which was an awesome job. I loved to read and loved to encourage children to read, other people to read. Being in a small town community, people get together and help each other out in times of need. There's just nothing like living in a small town, and I wouldn't change it for anything."

Part of the "Stories from Main Street" project--an effort to collect stories about small-town life across the United States. The project was the brainchild of the Smithsonian's "Museum on Main Street" program, an initiative that brings traveling exhibitions about subjects of national importance to small towns across America.

Asset ID: 7066

Small-town Life in Ossineke, Michigan (Population 938)

This story was submitted by Linda D. of Big Piney, Wyoming.

"My very first job was as a key punch operator at a work study program in high school. Key punch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards in specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator, who in this case, was me. In many data processing applications, the punched cards were verified by a card verifier, who keyed exacted the same data a second time, checking to see if the second keying and punched data were the same. 

There was a great demand for key-punch operators, usually women, who worked full time on key punch machines, often with large key punch departments with dozens or hundreds of other operators--all performing data input. And, where I worked in Farmington, Connecticut, it was a very large facility. Key punches and punched cards were still commonly used for both data and program entry through the 1970s but were rapidly made obsolete by changes in the entry paradigm by the availability of inexpensive CRT computer terminals. Eliminating the step of transferring punched cards to tape or disc, with the added benefit of saving the cost of the cards themselves, allowed for improved checking and correction during the entry process. 

The development of video display terminals, interactive time share systems and later personal computers, allowed those who originated the data or program to enter it directly instead of writing it on forms to be entered by key punch operators. These cards were used for data by organizations such as the US Census Bureau and US Social Security Administration as well as for such diverse compilations as hydrographic data for navigation charts, in textile mills for programming looms as well as for entering time card information. Key punching was the kind of work that allowed one to shift their brain into autopilot. 

When one got good enough at keying, there was little thought required because the fingers would automatically move to the keys based on the numbers the eyes saw. In other words, it provided good experience and also let me know that being tied to a machine was not the kind of job I would be looking for after graduation."

This story was collected in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program and its national traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked" when it was on view in Big Piney, Wyoming in 2018. This story is part of the "Be Here: Main Street" story collection, intended to capture Americans' stories about their neighborhoods, waterways, towns, traditions, and personal experiences.

Photo of Key Punch Machine by Jkbw (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Asset ID: 7650

Working as a Key Punch Operator in Connecticut--Linda D.

The "Be Here" storytelling project, in conjunction with the Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum, and the Smithsonian's Stories from Main Street initiative, is an effort to gather and distribute stories about community life and places across the United States. The first version of this project began in 2011 with the Stories from Main Street storytelling initiative,  the brainchild of the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street (MoMS) team. Today, the Peale is partnering with Museum on Main Street to continue the storytelling campaign, often connected thematically to MoMS' traveling exhibitions about topics like work history, waterways, food culture, traditional music, hometown sports, etc. Anyone with an interest in life in America’s towns and communities can add their own experiences to the archive.

The "Be Here" program is an effort to diversify the voices of American cultural stories, stories especially about places that are important to people. To leave a story, download the "Be Here Stories" app on the App Store. Learn more at https://www.thepealecenter.org/bherebmore/

Working as a Key Punch Operator in Connecticut--Linda D.

Be Here Stories | Stories from Main Street