The Sunday after graduating from high school a cousin picked me up at my parents home in Forbes and took me to see a friend of her family that operated several short order restaurants in St. Joe. After a short interview, I was hired to go to work the next morning. I would be working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week for two dollars a day. I then went to the YMCA to rent a sleeping room. I unpacked my little suitcase, went downstairs to check out the reading room and meet some of my neighbors, mostly older men.

Before six the next morning I checked in with the only other employee who had been told I was coming. He was friendly and had me involved in the routine by the time the boss arrived. The days were long and by Thursday I realized this job was not for me. Friday morning I deliberately came in late just before the boss arrived. I told him I was quitting. He did some storming around saying he could get dishwashers for a dollar a day. He went to the cash register, came back with four bills he poked in my hand and showed me the kitchen door. When I looked at the four bills, I found a five and four ones!

I took the Burlington train home to Forbes for the weekend and was back at the Y on Sunday night. On Monday morning the maid came back in before I left to look for a new job. When she found out I was not employed she urged me to go see the manager of Rainbo Bakery who was on the board at the Y. I got an interview and was hired to go to work the next day. After four months at Rainbo I left for better pay at Chase Candy Co. Six months later I was transferred from the shipping department to the warehouse. Four hundred pound bags of sugar were just too much for a kid that only weighed 110 pounds. I got a job right away at C.D. Smith Drug Co. as an order clerk.

I met a very nice young lady at the church Christmas social. She had a room at the YWCA dormitory on 10th just south of Civic Center Park. A member at church began teasing me “he lived at the YMCA and she lived at the YWCA and a park was in between”. Well, it was true. Next spring after my 20th birthday I proposed kneeling on the grass by one of those park benches. On Aug. 17, Carl Sahlin and Janice Wilson were married in a new brick church at 15th and Jules just a few blocks from the YMCA and YWCA. It was the first marriage in that new building.

We left the St. Joe area for employment as teachers (I had a provisional certificate) a year at Macon, Ga., and part of a year at McMinnville, Tenn. Morning sickness became all day sickness and the doctor advised we return to St. Joe to the doctor who had previously performed two thyroid operations on Janice. A healthy baby boy arrived six months later.

Carl Sahlin

San Bernardino, Calif.