Non-Academic Jobs

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Childhood and Manual Labor

My mother engrained into my cultural genome that
Arbeit macht das leben suss
which means "Work makes life sweet". As soon as I was old enough, I began delivering newspapers before dawn from my bicycle and babysitting on weekends after dusk. In my first full-time summer job the 'Dutch Pantry Family Restaurant' in Bowie, Maryland had me
  1. fill tray with dirty dishes
  2. feed through the dishwasher
  3. empty tray
  4. return to first step
The algorithm never stops and nor did I.
pay check from Dutch Pantry
My paycheck from the Dutch Pantry for the week ending July 23, 1967. I worked 46 hours and took home $44.26. Click on the image to open new page with fully readable version.
The next summer I worked full-time as a ditch digger on a road gang.

Retired and Hard Money Lending

As my inability to compete in research with my younger academic colleagues became apparent, I wondered how to put my substantial savings to work when I retired. When my neighbor died and his estate auctioned his home, I bought it because I loved the eight, hilltop acres on which his mansion sat. When a few years later another neighbor begged me to sell him the propety, I acquiesced and at the closing table, the real estate lawyer invited me to work with him to invest my profit from that sale into 'hard money loans'. Thus, my introduction to a new line of work which might be glorified with the label 'private money banker'.

The work was interesting in many ways but followed a general pattern:

renovated home
Photos before and after renovation of a tiny, 2-bedroom home in the country in 2013.
The above photos are for a tiny, 2-bedroom home in the country whose purchase and renovation I financed for $50,000 in 2013 before I learned to move into the DC market and do a home loan only when the loan amount exceeded $500,000. While the business could have been handled in a cold, hands-off way, my experience involved frequent ups and downs emotionally, financially, and physically. I had to foreclose on some borrowers and sometimes the borrowers were scoundrels who would force my hand into court battles where I represented myself in yet another lesson in life -- the court system lesson. Overall though, I enjoyed the work, made 20% per year in interest on my lent money, and endorsed the two, very different mottos:
Making the world better, one house at a time
and
The Rich get Richer; the Poor, Poorer.

I lent money to people throughout the United States who bought real estate, renovated it, and sold it. My primary stomping grounds where Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Once when attending a 'real estate investors meeting', I complained to the man sitting next to me that I missed the reward of publishing papers that would be archived and potentially leave a mark for the long-term. He said his archive was the land records of any country where he did a deal. You can track my lending business through the land records. Attached is the first page of a download from the Baltimore City Land Records public website. Other counties have records of other deals. Some of my records are under my name but some are under LLCs that I created, my IRA, or other entities whose money was mine.

Land Records
One page of Land Records from Baltimore City. Click on the image to open new page with fully readable version.

List

In reverse chronological order, my jobs outside univerity:

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