Story by Jon Stalnaker
AKA The Studebaker Dude
Wikipedia defines a side hustle as an additional job that a person takes in addition to their primary job in order to supplement their income, also informally called a side job or side gig. I saw another definition as a combination of the word side meaning not the main thing, and hustle meaning hurry, press ahead, to pursue something energetically. I think it’s a millennial term, we used to call it moonlighting. Maybe I’m just being an old man, since that is exactly what I am, but the word hustle to me has negative connotations. In my mind, hustles are what scam artists and schemers do to trick you out of your money. I can’t seem to get past that image. There are many definitions for the word hustle, but the one that sticks in my brain is fraud or swindle.
I’m not a stranger to moonlighting. (I’m old, let me use my own words) I started my working years in the 60s and 70s. $3 an hour was a respectable wage back then. You could buy a decent used car for a couple hundred bucks and rent an apartment for $100 a month. You could buy a decent house for 20 grand. It was in the 70s when everything went crazy. New car prices skyrocketed to five digits and houses added another digit as well. Wages grew to keep up with inflation but were slow to catch up. I worked many side jobs to make ends meet. Before all this mess started, a household could get by with just one wage earner. Before it became necessary for both spouses to work, we could get away with working a side job (or two).
One of my favorite side jobs was delivering pizza. I liked pizza and I knew the town very well as I worked for the post office. I knew all the streets and most shortcuts, and I was good at getting the pizza delivered on time. I was working for Dominos at the time when it was 30 minutes, or it was free. They later dropped it to $3 off and then it got down to just a “sorry about that.” I made time delivering the pizza using my brain and not the accelerator pedal. It was a great use of the knowledge that I gained delivering the mail. The hardest part about being a pizza delivery guy was remembering to grab the soda on the way out the door. Not everybody ordered the soda, so it was easy to miss it. If the delivery was a long distance away, having to make a round trip to the pizzeria and back really cut into my profit. I didn’t mind working that job as the pay was pretty good when you factored in the tips. I tried my hand at retail during Christmas at Sears, but I hated that job. Sales was not for me.
I was able to moonlight enough to earn my social security retirement. I worked for the Postal Service when it was still a civil service job. Civil Service jobs did not pay into social security, and I knew I would need it later in life if for nothing else but the Medicare. I also got a retirement job after retiring from the post office. My wife still had a few more years to work before she could retire, and I didn’t want to sit around with nothing to do. I had a volunteer job at the California Automobile Museum as a docent and a Studebaker historian and docent instructor, but that was just part time. My retirement job was as a Ready-Ride bus driver. Again, it was an opportunity for me to use my knowledge of the city streets that I gained while being the community Postmaster. Ready-Ride was an on-call bus service, so it was easy for me because I never had to look up where a particular address was. I loved that job and enjoyed talking with the passengers. It was that interaction with people that I missed the most when I retired from that job. That was a big reason why I started writing stories for my local newspaper. I saw it as a way to keep in touch with the community. And moving to Oklahoma gave me an opportunity to get involved in my community again. Thanks, Micah, for giving me my latest side hustle.
