The Economy

At my first full-time journalism job in 1986, i made something like $11,000 for the year as the SE on an 8-person newsroom staff.

Our No. 2 guy, let's call him Ed, our news editor who had been there three years, was making $14,500 I believe. His wife had a job as a teacher at a Catholic school 25 miles away; she made about $12K.

They had a preschool daughter, and as it turned out, they qualified for food stamps. They had a pretty hectic daycare situation and his wife only had a 15-minute window available to pick up their daughter, so Ed ended up doing much of their family shopping.

As the news editor aka lead news writer in a town of about 10,000, Ed was a fairly recognizable face around town (for that matter, so was I). At any rate Ed happened to stop off at the grocery store to buy some weekly meals, and he was spotted by some of the loudmouth glad handing Kiwanis/Rotary Club guys, using food stamps to pay for food, in those days you got actual paper coupons, not a debit card type of thing.

Anyway, a couple days later at some kind of luncheon around town or out at the golf club, the Rotary/Kiwanis dudes roasted Mr. Publisher from our paper, "hey buddy boy, we saw that your news editor is on welfare, har de har har!!"

Mr. Publisher felt it looked very bad for our little Dumpsburg Daily for people to think we weren't paying enough for employees to be off food stamps.

Mr. Publisher's suggested solutions were, 1) that Ed order his wife to do the shopping in the town they were living 20 miles away, or 2) that Ed confine his shopping around our town to late night when Kiwanis/Rotary guys were unlikely to be in the stores, or 3) Ed make shopping trips to either of our two regionally adjacent "big towns" 30-40 miles away. He didn't offer to pay for gas.

Ed countered with a novel concept: "Why don't you pay us enough so we don't really qualify for food stamps??"

Mr. Publisher said he'd think about it. I think Ed did get a little bump in pay, enough to get him off food stamps, but he took off for a (much) better job in government PR a couple months later.

 

The way I remember it, we all laughed at Oliver Springs. And Oliver Springs laughed at Wartburg.
I covered games in Anderson, Knox, Blount, Sevier and Campbell Counties. But never anything west of Oak Ridge.

There was an old man who called in Coalfield basketball box scores. Took him about 15 minutes he spoke so deliberately. It was good ASMR, however (long before I knew what ASMR was).

 

Closest thing to a Christmas bonus I've ever got was at my first full-time job in 2004. Suburban weekly, editorial staff of two, made $9 an hour. The publishers, a husband and wife team, hosted a Christmas dinner for employees at their home. It was on a Friday, though, so of course there was high school basketball to cover. I wolfed down a plate of food, gratefully accepted a $50 gift card to the grocery store that shared a strip mall with our office, and ran off to work.

Six full-time jobs since and not a "bonus" in sight, even at much larger and better-funded papers. My current place did bring in Christmas carolers ... at 5 p.m. on a Thursday. The fourth verse of "Silent Night" had me seriously considering filing paperwork to complain about a hostile work environment.

 

My first year as a full-time employee (1977) I probably made $7500. Sent in my state tax return (it was a postcard at that time) and about two weeks later I got a check that was about double of my expected refund. The state guys discovered I qualified for some kind of low-income tax break I had not figured in on my return.

The paper didn't pay any benefits, so I didn't go to the dentist or the doctor in the whole 30 months I lived there. They did give us a full two weeks of pay as a bonus in July though, after the fiscal year, because they did well. Family-owned and I actually liked the ownership.

My next job paid considerably more and had benefits so I got a dentist. It was half family-owned, half by Lee, and the family was selling out. So about a month before the deal finalized, the editor called the sports staff (3 of us) in, told us he thought we were doing a great job, and gave us all a $50 a week raise. He just laughed and said the Lee guys would be paying it, not him.

I lived like a king on about $18-24K from 1979-84. I can't remember if we got a bonus, but they did throw a great Christmas party. Rent was dirt-cheap, state taxes were low, so was insurance. I fully-fund my IRA every year and also took 10% out of each check for the ESPP, which at that time in Lee was a helluva deal.

 

At my first paper job, after sharing a $400-a-month apartment with a co-worker for year, I struck out on my own and found a 2-BR half of a duplex for the same rent and lived there for almost 3 years before I bought my house. It wasn't in the jex either.

 

And nowadays, if newspapers still tried those shitty things, millions of people would be able to find out about it with today’s web technologies.

 

My first newspaper job in a small dying town in the mid-90s, I started at $285 a week. No OT pay, but occasionally, the group would put out advertising supplements that we would contribute some articles for and get some extra pay.

I ended up renting a one-BR apartment for $400 (including all utilities) in a house that had been divided into three apartments. It was a fairly nice apartment, although I was a little worried about affordability. I looked at some apartments that had been in the $300/month range, and they were much less nicer. My mother told me to take the financial bullet because if I had a rough day at work (and there were plenty of them), that I wouldn’t want to go home to a depressing apartment.

A little while ago, I looked up the house on Google Maps, and it looked rough. The landlord had died about 10 years ago or so, the place went through a couple of sales, and was last available on Zillow about three years ago. There were pics of my old apartment on there, and it looked pretty sad. Same kitchen floor as when I was there, albeit dirty and torn up. Same rug in the one bedroom,

I have some good memories of the place, as it was my first post-college apartment and future Mrs. S. and I were building our relationship, but looking at the pics now just is depressing.

 

My theory on apartment complexes is even the ones built to be nice don’t stay nice for long. Best you can do is find one early enough in the curve that you are hopefully ready to jump to the next place before it starts cratering.

 

In about 1990 when I was in Charleston, I was sort of a long-term house guest of some friends who lived in a duplex community. It was new, had all the bells and whistles, and catered to the yuppie crowd of the time. My wife and I were in two about 25 years later, and I wanted to show her where I lived. The place was a straight up dump.

 

I found a place that the landlord treated like their own and never raised the rent. They’d have a new appliance in a day after the old one broke. Yearly repainting of the walls. Impeccable landscaping. I clung to that place so dearly that I kept renting it for a year even after I moved in with my future wife to store my shit in.

 

I got $200 cash money in the company Christmas card last Friday. It was a nice. No taxes taken out - unlike our fiscal end of year bonus.

 

We had a joke going around because the the station would have to pay more when a higher minimum wage went into effect.