Summer Jobs Every Teenager Had in the '60s and '70s That Don't Exist Anymore

Picture a 16-year-old counting out their first week's wages on a kitchen table — a small stack of bills earned by showing up, doing the job, and not complaining about the heat. In the 1960s and '70s, that scene played out in households all across the country. Summer employment for teenagers wasn't a structured program or a resume line. It was a cultural expectation. Parents who'd lived through the Depression or World War II didn't see idle summers as a gift. They saw them as a missed opportunity. You worked because work was what responsible people did, and starting that habit at 15 or 16 was considered a reasonable head start on life. The jobs themselves were unglamorous — and that was almost the point.

If you grew up near an A&W or a Sonic predecessor in the 1960s, you remember the carhop — a teenager in a uniform gliding out to your car on roller skates, balancing a tray of root beer floats like it was nothing. At the peak of drive-in culture, more than 4,000 drive-in theaters operated across the United States, and countless drive-in restaurants employed teenagers to do exactly this work. It took real skill. You had to hook the tray onto a half-open car window, make change without spilling anything, and keep a smile through a July afternoon in full sun. As suburban shopping habits shifted and drive-through windows replaced carhop service at most chains, the job faded fast. A few Sonic locations still use carhops today, but the roller skates are mostly gone — and the era that made the job iconic is long over.

It might be hard to imagine now, but through most of the 1970s, you didn't pump your own gas. You pulled in, and a teenager came out to do it for you. He'd fill the tank, wash the windshield with a squeegee, check the oil if you asked, and take your money — all before you'd finished your cigarette. Full-service gas stations were the only option in most states until the mid-1970s, and teenage boys in particular flooded into those jobs every summer. The 1973 oil crisis pushed stations to cut costs, and self-serve pumps began spreading rapidly after that. Oregon and New Jersey held out the longest — Oregon only allowed self-serve as recently as 2023. For everyone else, the gas station attendant became a memory, and a generation of teenagers lost one of their most reliable summer employers.

Before fast food colonized every corner of American life, the drugstore soda fountain was the place to be on a hot afternoon. And behind that gleaming counter, there was usually a teenager — scooping ice cream, mixing phosphates, and building a cherry Coke by adding syrup and carbonated water in just the right order. Woolworth's alone ran soda fountains in hundreds of stores nationwide, employing thousands of teenage soda jerks at their peak. The job had a social prestige that's hard to explain now. You knew everyone who walked in. You remembered their orders. There was craft to it — a good milkshake required technique, not just a button press. When Woolworth's closed its lunch counters in 1997 and drugstore chains replaced their fountains with photo labs and greeting card aisles, something genuinely irreplaceable walked out the door with them.

In the early 1960s, a teenager — almost always a girl — could land a summer job at the local telephone exchange sitting in front of a switchboard, plugging patch cables into sockets to connect callers. It was precise, fast-paced work. You had to speak clearly, stay calm when someone was upset, and keep a mental map of which lines went where. Direct-dial telephone systems made human operators largely obsolete through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, and the transition happened faster than most people remember. One summer you might have a job; the next summer, the board was half-automated. For many teenage girls, this was their first experience with a desk, a headset, and the feeling of being genuinely useful in a professional setting — a feeling that disappeared along with the cords and plugs that made it possible.

This one surprises people. Riding along on a milkman's route was a legitimate summer job for teenagers in the 1960s, and it was more common than you might think. You'd jump off the truck while it was still rolling, grab a wire carrier of glass bottles, run them to the front step, collect the empties, and be back on the truck before the driver had moved twenty feet. Home milk delivery peaked in the late 1960s, when roughly a third of American households still received doorstep service. The work started before sunrise and wrapped up by mid-morning, which left the rest of the day free — not a bad arrangement for a teenager. As supermarkets made home delivery seem unnecessary and glass bottles gave way to cardboard cartons, the routes shrank and eventually vanished. Today, home milk delivery is a niche subscription service. Back then, it was a neighborhood institution.

The pin boy had one of the most physically demanding — and genuinely dangerous — teenage jobs of the mid-twentieth century. You crouched at the end of a bowling lane in a low pit, waited for the ball to come through, cleared the fallen pins by hand, reset the standing ones, and got out of the way before the next ball arrived. Fast bowlers gave you almost no time. Bowlers who appreciated a quick reset would tip, which made the job worth taking. But automatic pinsetters began replacing pin boys through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, and by the time the decade was over, most alleys had converted entirely. It was one of the earliest examples of a machine doing a teenager's job faster and cheaper — a preview of what automation would eventually do to dozens of other entry-level roles.

Movie theater projection booths were small, warm, and loud — and for a certain kind of teenager, they were the best possible place to spend a summer. As a projectionist's assistant, you learned to thread 35mm film through a gate without tearing it, manage the carbon arc lamps that lit the screen, and swap reels mid-film so smoothly that the audience never noticed the cut. Union rules protected projection booth jobs fiercely, which made them coveted and relatively well-paid for teenage work. Learning the equipment took real patience, and the responsibility of keeping a full house entertained was something you felt. Digital projection began rolling out in the early 2000s and eliminated the need for human projectionists almost entirely. The booth is still there in most theaters — but it runs itself now, and no teenager is threading anything.

Not every summer job in this era came with a uniform and a lunch counter. For teenagers in the rural Southeast, summer often meant tobacco fields — sticky, hot, backbreaking work that paid by the pound and left your hands stained dark by noon. In California's Central Valley, fruit picking drew teenagers alongside migrant workers, all of them working piece-rate under the open sky. This was the reality for a large portion of working-class and rural teenagers whose summers looked nothing like a carhop stand or a projection booth. There was no social prestige attached. You worked because your family needed the money, or because the farm down the road was the only employer within ten miles. Mechanized harvesting equipment and shifting agricultural economics gradually reduced the need for seasonal teenage labor — but for those who lived it, those summers are anything but forgotten.

It wasn't one thing that wiped out the teenage summer job landscape — it was several forces arriving at roughly the same time. Automation eliminated pin boys and telephone operators. Self-serve culture ended the gas station attendant. Chains replaced local drugstores and their soda fountains with standardized layouts that didn't need a skilled counter kid. Liability law changes and rising insurance costs also played a real role. Businesses that once thought nothing of putting a 16-year-old on roller skates with a tray of hot food, or letting a teenager manage a carbon arc lamp, began reconsidering what risks they were willing to take on. Minimum wage increases made some entry-level positions less attractive to small employers. None of these forces acted alone — but together, within about twenty years, they reshaped the entire landscape of what a teenager could reasonably expect to do for summer money.

Ask someone who spent a summer as a carhop or a gas station attendant what they took away from the job, and they rarely mention the money first. They talk about learning to read a customer's mood in three seconds flat. About handling a complaint from a grown adult when you were 17 and had no script to follow. About making change in your head because the register didn't tell you the answer. These were adult workplaces, and teenagers were expected to perform like adults — not interns being supervised, but actual contributors who'd be missed if they didn't show up. Today's teen gig economy runs through apps that track every move and automate most decisions. That's not necessarily worse — but it is genuinely different. The informal education that came from being thrown into a real job and trusted to figure it out is harder to replicate when an algorithm is managing your shift.

Teenagers still mow lawns, lifeguard at community pools, and counsel at summer camps. Those jobs have survived because they depend on something a machine can't easily replace — a human being physically present, paying attention, showing up. In that sense, the tradition continues. But the specific feeling of a '60s or '70s summer job — the smell of a soda fountain, the weight of a glass milk bottle carrier, the sound of pins scattering in a bowling alley pit — belongs to a world that closed up quietly and didn't leave a forwarding address. What those jobs gave teenagers was a sense that their labor mattered in a tangible, immediate way. Someone's windshield was clean because you cleaned it. Someone's root beer float arrived because you skated it out. That directness is worth remembering, even if the jobs themselves are long gone.