The Fran Kubelik edition. One of my favorite movies is The Apartment (1960). Jack Lemmon is a drone at a huge insurance company and becomes smitten with Shirley MacLaine -- aka Fran Kubelik -- who works as an elevator operator.That romantic scenario couldn't happen today because elevators are self operating. Here are 13 other jobs from days gone by that Fran couldn't have today.
1. Typist in a typing pool
2. Switchboard operator
3. Keypunch operator
4. Inside the kiosk at Fotomat
5. Counter girl at a video rental store
6. Projectionist in a movie theater
7. Lector, who read aloud to factory workers to keep them entertained (popular in Florida's cigar factories)
8. Factory floor timekeeper, who timed employee production manually with a stopwatch
9. Milkman
10. Streetcar conductor
11. Pinsetter at a bowling alley
13. Car hop, a waitress who brings food to diners in their cars at drive-in restaurants
Please join us for THURSDAY THIRTEEN. Click here to play along, and to see other interesting compilations of 13 things.
Sad to see some of that gone. We do have a car hop in our small town and even a drive-inn movie theater in the town over from us.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever seen that movie. I'm intrigued!
ReplyDeleteThe times they are a'changing. Eventually there will be no checkout clerks, either. And I hate the self-checkouts.
ReplyDeleteThere are still a couple drive ins around. I've been to them in the last few years. (One in 2020 when we wanted to get out.) But yeah, mostly those are gone.
ReplyDeleteThe street cars and cable cars in San Francisco still have conductors. I remember big city restrooms having attendants. Then the ones that had coin slots to unlock them. My mother would sometimes have me slide under the door and let her in! I think she didn't have change, as she wasn't the sort to skirt the law! In Europe in the late 60s they even handed out toilet tissue, and not much of it!
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