8 Jobs You Were Born Too Late to Get

Family History
9 July 2014
by

switchboard operator
[Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives on Flickr]
Some jobs just aren’t meant to last. Technology trims a trade. Fashion fickleness frustrates growth. Reduced resources wreak havoc on an industry.

In the 21st century, no one’s surprised when automation and offshoring render occupations obsolete. But that process of creative destruction has always occurred. Steel replaces bone. Siri the talking iPhone replaces Sally the switchboard operator. And as a result, we regard with wonder and puzzlement the lost jobs of our forebears.

1. Lector

The lector (or “reader”) was a time-honored occupation that began in Cuba’s cigar-making factories and then made its way to the United States throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in Florida and New York. Workers pooled their wages to pay the lector to read to them. On a given day, the lector might read anything: Spanish-language newspapers, short stories, poems, novels, even English-language papers if his translation skills were sharp. Because lectors tended to be left-leaning and pro-labor, some were blamed by factory owners for their workers’ unionist views. By the 1920s, many owners got rid of the lectors and replaced them with radios, but for decades, the lector was one of the most prestigious jobs among Latino factory workers.

2. Iceman

There are, of course, still delivery workers who bring bags of ice to restaurants, grocery stores, and catering halls. But no one delivers lake ice, 25- to 100-pound blocks of frozen water hacked from icebound lakes and rivers in New England and other northern climes, stored under sawdust in ice houses to stay cool, and delivered by the iceman in his horse-drawn cart to kitchens across America. That job finally melted away with the mass production of home refrigerators in the 1940s. Even then, the dripping, apron-draped iceman had been living on borrowed time. After 1900, industrial refrigeration permitted the production of factory-produced ice. For the next 40 or so years, though, until home refrigerators became ubiquitous, families continued to display window signs telling icemen how many pounds of ice they needed delivered.

ice man
Being an “ice man” was a family business for the Aubers according to the 1880 census. (Image courtesy of Ancestry)

3. Telephone switchboard operator

Long before dial tones and Siri, a person who wanted to make a call had to start the conversation with “Operator can you connect me…” and the person on the other end of the line was a switchboard operator. For decades the iconic image of the operator was of a row of poufy-haired 1930s women physically putting calls through to exchanges like “Murray Hill 5-9975” (that was one of the Ricardos’ phone numbers on I Love Lucy). Later, people only needed an operator to make a collect call, but these days, while call centers exist, you’re more likely to get an automated operator asking you to dial or say a number than an actual live person. For a real-life operator, you usually have to be experiencing an emergency.

4. Log driver

In the days before industrial trucking, log drivers transported cut trees from forests downriver to mills. Beginning with each year’s spring thaw, these “river pigs” freed logs from sandbars, river rapids, and logjams. The men spent all day on water that was often near freezing, so to ease the cold and their own cracked skin, they greased their legs and waists with lard. The work was also dangerous. Bobbing logs made for unsteady work spaces, and a driver who fell through trunks faced a crushed limb or worse — if the trunks closed over him, he’d drown and his body might never resurface. For these risks, however, log drivers earned twice the pay of upriver lumberjacks ($2 versus $1 a day). The use of trucks in the 20th century allowed loggers to harvest trees without having to drive them downriver. That innovation, along with environmental laws, brought an end to this dangerous but lucrative business.

5. Theater organ player

Today, the latest action blockbuster requires a trip to the IMAX 3-D theater for the full cheek-rattling, sonic experience. But for the first 30 years of the 20th century, the state-of-the-art theater sound was the theater organ. Organists accompanied silent movies played in grand theatrical palaces on equally grand pipe organs. Some keyboards could even play sound effects such as car horns, bird whistles, and ocean surf. By 1930, several thousand theaters had installed organs. But in 1927, the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, premiered. As the Great Depression rolled around, theatergoers no longer wanted to hear, and theater owners no longer wanted to pay, theater organ players. As a result, many organists went on to accompany radio and early television shows on newly invented electric organs.

6. Whalebone worker

At its peak, the 19th-century whaling industry in the United States had more than 700 ships and tens of thousands of men aboard them. Fleets hunted the cetaceans for their oil, meat, and bones. Back home, whalebone workers, mostly women and girls, selected, polished, and shaped whalebone for corsets and umbrellas. But as women’s fashion shifted, as it always does, corsets became unpopular, and the demand for whalebone decreased. Eventually, steel replaced whalebone in corsets, just as petroleum eventually replaced whale oil in candles, lighting, and food.

7. Bone black maker

Beginning in the 1840s, settlers on the Great Plains began selling buffalo bones to bone black factories back east to process into gelatine, fertilizer, pigments, and charcoal used in sugar refineries. By 1885, one Michigan facility alone processed 13 percent of all buffalo bones and became the single biggest factory in Detroit, with 750 employees. And by 1896, just 11 years later, nearly every buffalo was gone, the species hunted to near extinction. That cataclysmic collapse in resources, combined with the discovery of more versatile oil-based pigments in the early part of the 20th century, shrank the bone black manufacturing industry to a single plant, today run by three people, that makes bone black for use in specialty pigments.

8. Feather dresser

For 40 years, from the 1880s to World War I, ostrich feathers graced the heads of every fashionable woman on both sides of the Atlantic. Ostrich feathers became so popular that at one point, their value per pound was almost equal to that of diamonds. In 1912, the Titanic went down carrying £20,000 in plumes. Supporting this feathery fad was a small army of young, female feather dressers who prepared feathers from ostriches and other birds for use in hats, quills, pens, mattresses, and other goods. In New York, the American center of ostrich feather manufacturing, most feather workshops were staffed by Russian Jewish women. Many of the workers in these unregulated factories suffered from tuberculosis. By World War I, the feather dresser trade blew away, undone by the the vicissitudes of fashion, oversupply, bird conservation efforts, and growing demand for innerspring mattresses that replaced feather beds.

—Sandie Angulo Chen

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