@lyxzen @missy @rambo My first real job started when I was around 16. I worked for the same company that my parents worked in, hand-sewing shoes. It was actually a pretty big business up here for quite a while. My first job there was hand-stitching the sides of the shoes to the tongue of the shoe.
You're basically sewing with 2 needles at the same time, then pulling it tight, then repeating until the finishing cross stitches. By the end of the summer I'd have to bandage up my fingers because of how raw and swelled they were getting. I was never as good as some of the old hands were, but I did ok. After a few summers of that, I did some press-cutting of the soles of the shoes. I did better at that. My final job there was cutting out all of the varied pieces of the shoes from the whole leather hide. I think that was probably the job I did the best at. These are some finished products.
The soles in the last pic were the type I would cut. It was a very hot factory, during the summer, and you were on your feet in one place the entire day. Well, except for a couple 15 minute breaks and 1/2 lunch. Not the most glamorous job, but when you're a kid, money is money. They would give you a certain $$ amount per hour, but if you were fast, they would pay you by piece-rate. Some people there could do up to $15 per hour. That's a lot of money for northern Maine, in the 80's.