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WHEN I WALK AROUND my neighborhood, I see beautiful and expensive automobiles parked on the street. When I look at the garages where these cars should be parked, they’re full of stuff. I just can’t understand why someone would spend thousands of dollars on a vehicle and let it be exposed to theft, vandalism and severe weather, while their garage is used as a storage unit.
Even though I can still fit both our cars in our garage, I’m also guilty of using it for storing things I no longer have any use for. What do I have in our garage? Among the things you’ll find are hundreds of vinyl records, boxes of baseball cards, my late dog’s bowl and leash, and a 1978 payroll stub.
I admit most of the items are purely sentimental, but the old payroll stub isn’t. There’s a reason I held on to it for all these years. It wasn’t because of the huge amount of money I was making at the time. In fact, I was earning just $5.16 an hour, not a whole lot more than 1978’s federal minimum wage of $2.65—and less than I was earning in my previous job.
Still, when I received that payroll check, I knew it was something special. I didn’t just have a new job. For the first time as a college graduate with a history degree, I had a chance for a career. I’d just been hired by a large aerospace corporation with plenty of opportunities for advancement in an industry with seemingly unlimited growth potential.
I knew it would lead to a brighter future—and it did. The lesson I learned back then: When you’re starting out, sometimes the best job offer is the one that pays less.
I was so eager to prove to my parents that I could make it as a newspaper journalist after graduating with my degree from Penn State in 1978 that I took the first offer, a weekly in a Pittsburgh suburb that paid just $2.75 an hour. It was more two hours from home so I had to get an efficiency apartment. In retrospect, I wish I had kept looking but the summer had passed and I worried Dad was right. I had chosen a glutted field with bad pay and worse hours. Luckily within just a few months, the editor (the only other full-time news person) left, and the general manager gave me the job with a $30 weekly increase! I was now at $3.50 an hour! I still have that pay stub! I learned everything about newspapers for the next 15 months until I found another newspaper job. And I loved living in the big city!
My first newspaper job — at age 19, before going to college — was at a tiny, biweekly newspaper in Potomac, Maryland. The pay was minimal, but the education I got was invaluable.
I did not find that job until 40, and then it changed my life.
Twice in my work career I took pay cuts to take jobs that I felt offered better experience and a better career. Both times it paid off. I probably had a better career than if I had taken the highest offer in either instance.