In the past, working as an employee in the sixties and seventies was considered a good job. One of my former colleagues commented on this during a recent meeting with our group of friends. He mentioned that the employees during this time had it easy compared to those in later years. He explained that back then, they didn’t have advanced equipment like diesel-powered toggle control loaders or mechanized floor loading drives. Instead, we had to rely on manual labor to load planes such as the Viscount, Vanguard, DC-8 freighters, and Stretch DC-8s, which could hold around 200 passengers and their belongings. We also had to load these planes with heavy items like carpet and appliances, which was no easy feat. Despite the hard work, no one wanted our job because of the long shifts without weekends off for most of the year, and the forced overtime hours that we often had to work. My colleague remembered these times fondly because the overtime pay was what put food on their table, in the early times when we would have made as much money pumping gas at service stations.
