Courtesy of New York City Sanitation Department

One of my first engineering jobs out of college was as an intern with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where I sized heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning ductwork for the 42nd Street Bus Terminal. I also manually laid it out on vellum--this was, after all, the pre-CAD 1960s, when engineers toiled on drafting boards rather than computers.

Now--some 35 years later, when I have reason to use the bus terminal--I often wonder whether any remnants of my primitive designs remain.

Not all first jobs are in a career path of choice. I also had nonengineering summer jobs in college, such as:

• Sweeping the streets with a pushcart and broom. Besides teaching me humility, the job taught me how to endure boredom. The route took 2 hours to clean, but the workday was 8.
• Cutting ragweed in city-owned lots. Never mind that I suffered from hay fever. I was afraid of losing the job, so I wheezed my way through the summer of 1957 and spent sleepless nights suffering from asthma attacks.
• Timing skycaps at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport during the graveyard shift. The biggest challenge was finding public transportation at that hour of the night from northern New Jersey to eastern Queens.
• Mapping sewer lines with a divining rod. (The alternative was to descend into the manhole.)
• Operating a jackhammer. A 135-pound weakling at the time, I soon discovered that the pneumatic tool had a mind of its own.
• All of these memories were brought to mind by an article in The New York Times on the first-job experiences of CEOs. George M. C. Fisher of Eastman Kodak picked strawberries so conscientiously at the age of eight that they were not fit for sale, completely lacking stems and leaves. Scott G. McNealy of Sun Microsystems pushed a broom around the lot of Roger Penske's Chevrolet dealership in downtown Detroit. I wonder if his sweeping artistry differed from mine. As I recall, you pushed the broom lightly with pistonlike strokes.

What significance do first jobs have for any of us today? "You remember how you wanted to be dealt with and what motivated you," said Donald Lowman, a senior partner at Towers Perring, in the Times article. "You don't have that appreciation unless you've lived it."

In a recent profile of Intel's Andy Grove in Fortune, mention was made of his earning $250 a week in his first industry job 36 years ago. Actually, an annual salary of $13,000 was big bucks for the engineering class of 1960.

Those of us who endured the routine work and menial pay of summer jobs then and now have to admit that the learning experience was valuable, even if it took a toll on one's pride and self-respect. People still laugh when I mention the bus-terminal job. (A recent database search of the popular press indicated that "bus terminal" and "sleaze" occurred in the same paragraph 10 times in the last two years, probably due to the terminal's location and public access.)

The street-sweeping job obviously gets laughs as well, but at least if someone asks me if "business is picking up," I don't respond in literal terms.

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© 1996 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers