Hi-ho, Hi-ho! It's off to work we went!

Magazine readers recall the jobs they had as Horned Frogs.

I worked in the Audio Visual Center, which mostly involved lugging 18-mm projectors to classrooms and threading the film. For this I was paid the princely sum of 25 cents an hour.
Donald Wertz '66

I interned for Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum. The wonderful people in the education department were so kind to me - even carefully reviewing my resume, which I still use as a base today.
Carolyn Dalton '97

I dug shallow trenches with a shovel so forms could be laid to pour cement for the seats in the south end zone. I made $1 an hour. The cement forms were joined with bleacher seats to complete south end zone seating. I was glad to make that money. I played football four years and varsity golf three years and I didn't have a lot of time to work and earn money.
Doyle Malone '50

I was a cashier at the cafeteria. Each semester on-campus students were issued meal tickets totaling $180. We had to hole-punch the meal ticket cards for the meals. The cards would shred and fray as the semester passed. Sometimes, meals had to be punched from four or five very used cards. Guys ran out early and so girls made money on the side selling their unused cards to the guys.
Kay Ledbetter-Donovan '66

My job was working on the costumes for drama, ballet, etc. in old Landreth on a work/ drama scholarship. I received no pay, just work hours in exchange for a drama scholarship. I met my future husband, Bill Walker '56, in the green room at Landreth.
Marci Martin Walker '57

When I changed my major to biology I asked Dr. Willis Hewitt for a job. He smiled and led me to a very small washroom with barely enough room for an autoclave and a deep sink. The sink was full of hundreds of foul-smelling little glass bottles used in the genetics lab to raise fruit flies. My task - should I accept - would be to spotlessly clean the bottles, removing all traces of the agar culture along with the bodies of the tiny red and white-eyed fruit flies. This was obviously not a job for anyone with a weak stomach. I asked Dr. Hewitt when he wanted me to start; he said, "How about now?" Soon outfitted with goggles and a rubber apron, I grabbed a long bottle-brush and went to work. My senses quickly numbed to the agar odor - a smell I'll never forget for the rest of my life. If I had any doubt that this was absolutely the worst job in the department, it vanished with the smirks, grins and smiles on the faces of grad students and professors alike who all came by to stick their heads into my washroom. It turned out to be the best job for meeting everyone in the department and fortunately, I didn't have to stay in the washroom for long!
Larry Barnes '68

I donated plasma twice a week at the plasma center on Berry Street and it paid about $50. There were a handful of TCU students and other hoodlums from the area. Once or twice they missed my veins and I ended up with bruises. Once I got a job on campus I quit going to my "office," as I called it.
Jacob Langford '05

I worked in the registrar's office for 25 cents an hour before transferring to night school so I could work full time at General Dynamics and help with the war effort. I spent my work time making transcripts for boys going in the service.
Wilhelmina Shields Gladden '44

I remember working over Christmas for a survey group out of Killeen. I was a ranch hand working among cows in the fields of central Texas. I also worked at Greek Hills Dining Hall - we had a good crew there. Frank A. also worked there as well as Hector J. Where are you guys?
Larry Locha '81

I was a residential adviser for two years at Brachman and Colby dorms. I made $100 a month answering the switchboards and answering young ladies' questions. We had two attempted suicides, drug overdoses, a dorm fire and a good old-fashioned panty raid!
Nancy Burkey Benold '75

I worked as a 3-to-11 p.m. orderly at All Saints Hospital. Since I took 18 credit hours in the fall and spring, and 12 hours in the summer, I had little time for doing my homework. Sometimes I worked on it until the wee hours of the morning. I also got $105 per month from the GI Bill. I had to do that to support my wife and new baby.
John Flinn '52

I was a cholera lab assistant, freshman chemistry grader and lab assistant in charge of freshman biology make-up labs on Saturdays. I enjoyed the work and it benefited me as a pre-dental major who instead became a science teacher.
Sharon Johnson Bullis Walker '65

I had an absolute dream job while in TCU - no set hours or certain days, just get the job done each week restocking shelves in several grocery stores with H.J. Heinz pickles, ketchup, baby food and soups. My only daily trek was to the commissary at the then-Carswell Air Force Base. They were like ravenous wolves and you never let the shelves get empty.
Larry Ackers '62

If it hadn't been for Dr. Jack Suggs of Brite promising me a job in 1960 when I was a sophomore in high school, I would never have believed that attending TCU was an option for me. I lived in Alice, Texas, then - which seemed soooo far away from TCU both in distance and possibilities.
Dr. Suggs was writing a book and he asked me to type various passages of books he was using as reference on note cards. This was before computers or any auto-correcting features on typewriters. It wasn't a problem except when the reference book was in German, with the little squiggles above some of the letters.
Penny Redwood Fruth '66

Throughout undergrad and graduate school, I took care of a darling little girl named Kimberlyn. She went everywhere with me, including the Fort Worth Zoo and Mortar Board meetings without a complaint! (All it took was some yogurt-covered pretzels from Staples.) The week after I graduated with my master's, she served as my flower girl at Robert Carr Chapel. Now she is old enough to watch my three children!
Jennifer Burgess Hammock '92 (MS '94)

In 1968, during my senior year at TCU, the university library was converting the growing collection from the Dewey Decimal System of classification to the Library of Congress system. I, with a handful of other coeds, worked various part-time schedules in a corner of technical services and typed the new numbers onto plastic strips, then cut and ironed them over the old numbers using small squares of Teflon material and special, cute little irons. We earned the minimum wage of the day, 75 cents an hour, and were happy to get it.
Mollie Houp Elliott '69

As a sophomore, I worked at the Spudnut - a popular breakfast place on the "drag." Later, I worked in the TCU library and later still, in the foreign language department. None of the work was overtaxing, rather it provided opportunities to meet new people, make new friends and help my parents by earning a bit of spending money.
Ann Swearingen Schieferstein '56

I worked in the basket room at the Little Gym. For two years I also served as the Central Office Secretary for the Texas Recreation Federation for College Women under Dr. Maybell Tinkle, who managed this organization from her office in the Women's Physical Education Department at TCU. During my senior year, I worked off campus as the Health and Recreation Director for the Fort Worth YWCA while also attending classes.
Betty Rowland '52

I made and packaged cottage cheese for Boswell Dairy. I also packed ice cream. Also, I worked for a Venetian blind company, taking down and repairing then re-hanging blinds. Our biggest job was the Tarrant County Courthouse. I also flew airplanes at the Dallas Naval Air Station as a weekend warrior Naval aviator.
Dr. Earl Moore '51

I worked one summer for Ross Bailey in the Athletic Department. He had me and some friends paint the iron fence around the new Lupton stadium. Eight hours a day of brown paint on tiny bars. But we got to paint the purple on the "TCU" as well.
Cody Jenschke '05

I worked in the TCU bookstore when it was in the basement of the Ad Building along with the cafeteria and post office. We were up to date: We sold bottled drinks out of an ice-filled cooler. It was war time. Young men in the Navy V-12 program went to classes with civilians. Pilots in the Air Force stationed at Eagle Lake lived in Jarvis Hall.
Marjorie McKinney Jones '44

I worked in the Daily Skiff Print Shop from August 1971 through May 1975, for Charlie Eubanks. When I started, the print shop still used the Linotype machine to set type for the newspaper. When I returned after Christmas break, the print shop was in Dan Rogers and had all new computer typesetting equipment. We typed the articles on computers that created machine-readable tape to feed the typesetting machine. Camera-ready copy came out, and after it dried, we cut and pasted the articles and the windows for pictures, headlines and ads onto page dummies, which went to the printer. That job supplied me with spending money all four years I was at TCU. I guess typesetting is all done on desktop computers now.
Jo Johnston Yates '75

I cleaned and repaired swimming pools and also mowed lawns and raked leaves. Believe it or not, I still enjoy mowing the lawn because it reminds me of my time at TCU. Sounds weird, but I have a good association with yard work.
Norman Burghardt '86

Share your college jobs with us or comment about this article at tcumagazine@tcu.edu.