How They Earned Their First Dollar

In the first half of the twentieth century Sandusky newspapers often featured articles which gave an account of how prominent area residents earned their first dollar. Eugene McFall told reporters in the Dec. 17, 1904 Sandusky Daily Register that he earned his first dollar at A. J. Mowry’s general store in Milan. McFall was general manager of the Sandusky Steamboat and Peninsula Steamboat companies in 1904.

“My First Dollar: How I Earned It” was title of a column by F. Holt for the Sandusky Star Journal in 1921.
Sheriff John B. Taylor, pictured above, went to work at a Sandusky wheel company at the age of 13, where he received payment of forty cents a day. Most of his money went to help support his mother and the rest of the Taylor family. Sheriff Taylor later introduced the science of fingerprinting to Erie County.
John Himmelein was Mayor of Sandusky in 1921 and owned three theaters. He told Mr. Holt that his first job was washing bottles for the Kelleys Island Wine Company. He spent his first dollar at the county fair. F. Holt reports “Probably it was the thrills he experienced in every show on the fair grounds that put the show business bug in his ear…”
G.A. Boeckling, who managed Cedar Point in the twenties, said his first dollar was earned in Michigan City, Indiana, where he was the bookkeeper and janitor of a dry goods store. Boeckling said that “the proudest moment of his life” came when he bought Mother Boeckling a kerosene lamp with the first money he ever earned.

You can read many more human interest stories about Sandusky residents at the Archives Research Center of the Sandusky Library, which houses several decades of Sandusky newspapers on microfilm.