My First Job

My first job was during the summer of 1973 when I was 15. I worked for a company called Western Folder for $2 per hour. Western Folder distributed travel folders to travel agents across the United States. Once a month a new mailing would go out to all of them with order forms for various travel folders for airlines (mainly). When the orders came in, we would fill them and get them ready for UPS shipment.

The company resided in Addison, Illinois in a strip building in which there were many small businesses. I recall two interesting episodes.

At this time, UPS did not ship to all states. They would not ship anything to Montana, for instance. We didn't always pay close enough attention to where we were shipping things and inevitably, some Montana packages got in the truck for UPS. One day, the UPS driver came by and was quite ticked off about this - surprisingly so, I thought since we were actually his customer! He came in ranting and raving about these packages with Montana addresses and that they didn't deliver there. Then he randomly picked up a package that we had just put together and lo and behold, it was to another Montana address. What were the odds of this?

On another occasion, one of the managers pretended to be a travel agent and filled out an order and let it go through our system. He selected one folder from each page in the order form. We spotted this order and wrapped the package extra fancy. I don't recall the details but it was quite funny. Not sure he thought it was so funny, though.

I see via the internet that this company still exists. The company is actually much older than 33 years; it goes back to 1922 according to the web page. It says that they have been doing this travel folder business for almost 35 years so I guess I was there close to when they started doing that.