When I arrived in New York City in 1938, I was met by my Uncle Kurt Simson and, for the first few weeks, had bed and board at his apartment with him, his wife, and their baby daughter, Esther. My parents had expected me to find a job, but neither they nor I were fully aware of the extent of the depression, so getting a job for a just twenty year old without any work experience was a problem.
One day I found an advert in the paper for a “work opportunity” which turned out to be Electrolux vacuums. When I went to the address given in the paper, I saw that it was to be a sales job. The sales price of the vacuum was something like $150, of which $70 was to be paid to the salesman. The task was to ring bells of houses and apartments with a quick spiel “How would you like a demonstration cleaning one or two rooms with this wonderful Electrolux machine?” So I carried the heavy unit all day on the subway and on buses trying to persuade some woman in her apartment to let me demonstrate the machine’s virtues. I remember doing so at several homes and mostly was told, “When we have the money we will buy one on deferred payment.” The fact was that, in monthly installments, the whole unit would have cost $130 of which the salesman would ultimately receive almost half. But since I viewed installment payments as being against the interest of buyers, I would advise people that they would do better to wait until they had the money. With my old-world ethics and because hardly anyone had the money to buy the unit outright, I made no sales, but cleaned many homes for free.
So that’s the story of my first “job” in America.
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