Post-office summer job and Naval Air rework facility (Norfolk)

Tom's path to working in Backofen's lab. Includes the Norfolk Naval Air rework facility rebuilding Vietnam-era jet engines as a $1.92/hr job. Function in the lecture: setup for "I decided to take a real research job and ended up with Backofen."

After graduating high school, I got a job with the post office in Virginia Beach. I had to fill out a form and scored better than ninety-two percent, and so they hired me. One of the best jobs I ever had — $3.35 an hour. Typical wage for a student back then was a buck an hour. I was getting paid whatever a postman makes. I spent that whole summer driving around Virginia Beach in a station wagon delivering special deliveries. Actually, it was only the second half of the summer, when they found that I was trustworthy and I wouldn't just stop for a coffee and stay there for four hours. Back then a special delivery letter was an extra thirty-five cents in postage. They paid me $24 a day to deliver twelve letters in Virginia Beach that had $3.60 — if you want to know why the post office was losing money, I can explain it to you someday.