Why Wayne Newton's Is Bigger Than Yours

Some people have big ones; some people have little ones. Women have been shorted on them. Nobody really wants to know--but, on the other hand, everybody does want to know--how his stacks up next to the other fellow's. It's not so much the size of them as what you do with them and what goes along with them. (Sure!) There is a taboo against revealing them.

Salaries.

Not sexual organs. That's a different matter. For instance: If inflation in, say, sports had hit sexual organs the way it has hit salaries, there would be utterly no justification for requiring women reporters to conduct interviews outside men's locker rooms. Because every time you opened the door to a men's locker room, sexual organs would bob out into the hall.

Here is the deal: Playboy has offered me a sum of money (none of your business how much; anyway, less than Burt Reynolds makes per hour--but I am taller than Burt Reynolds) to reflect upon some figures (see the box on page 180) put together by David Harrop, author of World Paychecks: Who Makes What, Where and Why. And I am going to, though it opens up a can of worms.

In his book, Harrop tells us, for instance, that a New York City sanitation worker makes three times as much as the chief of staff of the Indian army (and yet the chief keeps his office picked up); that the president of Sri Lanka makes $243 a year (plus perks); that a consultant to a multinational corporation can make $2000 a day; that Paul McCartney earned, or anyway took in, $48,200,000 in 1980. (One record-company exec to another: "There's good news and bad news. The good news is, Elvis is dead and his albums are selling like hot cakes. The bad news is, Glenn Miller has just reappeared and wants all his royalties.")

What Harrop has done for Playboy is to divide various people's annual incomes by 2080 (52 weeks times 40 hours) to ascertain their hourly wage. Since the average drug pusher (estimated $72.11 an hour), for instance, probably does not punch a time clock, that methodology can be quibbled with, but it does point up some startling contrasts. I think we can get down to the nub of this whole discussion by noting that, according to Harrop's figures, Wayne Newton makes $5769.23 an hour and the average general-duty nurse, $5.93.

Wayne Newton is the economic (if not the musical) equivalent of 972.89 nurses! What does that say about American values? How can we justify a Vegas warbler's making almost 100,000 percent more per hour than a Florence Nightingale?

One way of looking at it, of course, is this: If it were the other way around, you might wake up in a hospital, feeling bad enough already, and there, leaning over your bed, would be Wayne Newton, all in white.

But a great deal remains to be said. I have been reading Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, both Adam Smiths, George Gilder, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ayn Rand and Kropotkin industriously, and watching Lee Iacocca on television whenever I take a break, and I have come up with no easy answers. I do have one concrete proposal: that the average IRS agent's income ($10.81 per hour, according to Harrop) be changed to a certain fixed percentage of mine after taxes. Eighty percent, say. Thus, if I make $40,129 and am allowed enough deductions to keep $40,000 of that, the agent gets $32,000 (low enough so he doesn't lose his edge against the fat cats but high enough that he can take me out to lunch). The objection might be made that since $32,000 a year works out to $15.38 an hour, my proposal would increase the cost of Government. Let it be amended, then, to apply only to that agent each year who gets to handle my return. In which case, what the heck, make it 90 percent.

•

I have other, more complex, thoughts to share--or, actually (this economic thinking takes hold after a while), to sell.

When sports attorney Bob Woolf was trying--successfully, as it turned out--to win basketball star Larry Bird as a client, he made a pitch to Bird, who was then still a student at Indiana State, and a group of Terre Haute men whom Bird had asked to advise him. "I was telling them about how much certain athletes were making, just to give them an idea of what we might expect for Bird's contract," Woolf later told The New York Times. "Then I mentioned Tommy John, the Yankee pitcher. Well, John is from Terre Haute. And these men said, 'Yeah, what does Tommy John make?'

"Then Larry ... interrupted. He said, 'Excuse me, Mr. Woolf, but Tommy John is a friend of mine. And I'd rather not know what he makes.' "

Probably, Bird's remark caused the Terre Hauteans in the room to mutter, "Darn!" But those men would have been loath to tell one another their own salaries, and if John had been present, no one would have been so rude as to ask him his. Most people don't know what their closest friends' salaries are. When I tell anyone my stipend for a given piece of work, even, I feel like a flasher. Why is that?

"Money is what all business is about," writes Michael Korda in his book Power!, "and therefore it retains all the power of the central mystery of a religious cult.... In no single area of adult life do the rules of childhood apply so strictly as in raises.... If you ask how much someone else is getting, you will be told, 'That doesn't apply,' or 'It's not your business,' just as something other children were permitted to do was never a sufficient reason for being allowed to do the same thing ourselves. You will also be told to 'be reasonable,' 'be patient' and to 'try to understand our problems,' advice liberally given to children by parents, teachers and headmasters and designed to make them feel guilty for even asking."

What if workers Jones and Smith go behind the boss's back and say, "I'll tell you mine if you'll tell me yours"--and find that Jones's is substantially greater than Smith's? It is a queasy, intimate moment. Jones feels like a teacher's pet, no longer able to gripe about the system along with the other kids, and Smith feels cheaply gotten. Of course, if Jones and Smith look at the big picture and consider what an agricultural worker in Cameroun makes ($40 a year), they both ought to feel like pigs. (It is not known whether or not any agricultural worker in Cameroun knows what Wayne Newton makes.)

There are deeper than strictly economic reasons why the average person draws a veil over his or her emolument. Freud associated money with excrement, the first medium of exchange. "Feces are the infant's first gift, a part of his own body which he will give up only on persuasion by someone he loves." (And then he grows up, becomes salaried, and money is what he gets for kowtowing to Mr. Dithers.)

See, I told you this isn't about sexual organs. That is to say, not about sexual organs alone. In Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown argues that money represents, to the human psyche, not only b.m. but also death, guilt, magic, the child, Satan, the sacred, separation anxiety, "the aggressive fantasy of becoming father of oneself" and, too, the (detached) penis. Is it any wonder that we don't wave our incomes around lightly?

Even if you think of money as just paper, beads, smackers, mazula, simoleons or something to bathe in, the way Scrooge McDuck does, the whole science of economics is strange enough. But if you regard your pay check as an excremental dead magical baby-Devil holy estranged pushy autopaternal pecker, then you wonder whether the bottom line (as they say) of economics was not drawn best by David Stockman: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."

In fact, at one point in my researches, I decided, Fuck it, I'm a Marxist.

A Marxist even though I would personally rather be alienated, as Marx said capitalist workers are, than herd sheep, which is more or less--as I understand it--what precapitalist workers did. That is just the way I am.

And a Marxist even though I discovered, in Marx for Beginners, that "Marx remained in London for the rest of his life, in the direst poverty (three of his children died through lack of medicines), continuing to write revolutionary books and articles."

Wait a minute, I thought when I read that. Why couldn't a man with Marx's education and moneyed background dabble in capitalism or burglary or sell his whiskers or write a thriller under a pseudonym or something to keep his kids alive? However, I didn't want to make the kind of judgment my father did in refusing to read the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe on the grounds that Poe had married a teenager and devoted himself to debauchery while allowing her to die of consumption. That was unfair to Poe, I later learned; and, at any rate, my father didn't read the poetry of anybody else, either.

Marxism applies far more directly to the matter of children dying in poverty than capitalism ever did, at least until Marx came along. And Marx made clear one reason nice people don't vaunt their (continued on page 180)Wayne Newton's Is Bigger(continued from page 118) salaries: Salaries are not only inequitable, they're unnatural.

Capitalism, Marx said, is obsessed with money as a thing in itself, though in itself it is useless and won't get you into heaven, which Marx didn't believe in, anyway. (Marxists pride themselves on their materialism and call capitalism idealistic because it supposes that man's just reward cometh not on this earth. Capitalists argue that their system has provided the greatest material rewards and that Marxism's vision of universal earthly parity is too idealistic. My own idea of heaven is one of ideal materialism: being married to a nurse who makes $5769.23 an hour.)

Instead of working directly for their own needs, Marx said, people under capitalism sell their labor for money to exploitative types who invest the vigorish in pork futures. (Little Richard is somewhat different. Little Richard works for money but also for Jesus; and recently, I am told, he stopped in the middle of a recording session and turned his back on the Christian businessmen who were standing by, prepared to move his product. Dismayed, the businessmen approached him warily. "Little Richard shall not sing another note!" he cried. "Until he gets some bobby-cue!" Marx didn't anticipate Little Richard.)

So people become alienated from their work (as well as their pork); it's just something they do for a buck--or, if they are Secretary of the Interior James Watt, for $33.47 an hour and the chance to dispossess little bunnies and bluebirds. Marx felt that people should be able to work for their own enjoyment.

Yeah, I thought. Why should I have to write all this stuff about money and then sit home, waiting for the check, and then take it to the bank and stand in line and get some cash, and so on, in order to be able to buy some barbecue? When I could eat barbecue for a living.

Be at a party, and somebody says, "What business you in?"

"I'm in barbecue eating."

"That right?"

"Yep. What's your field?"

"I'm in baby-animal petting. Just got back from the Coast, took the red-eye in. I was petting Weimaraner pups out there."

But then I realized it couldn't be that simple. To make a living eating barbecue, I'd probably have to raise pigs. Which, although it would require less legwork than raising sheep, I wouldn't enjoy. (There is another question of exploitation here, with regard to the fact that barbecue demands a lot of a pig. On the other hand, if it weren't for barbecue, there would be a lot less demand for pigs.) And I doubt I could raise pigs and also find the time to make halfway decent beer, so I'd have to trade a pig to somebody else who was good at beer, and what is a six-pack worth in pork? You're comparing apples and oranges there. Before you know it, you're reduced to printing up little certificates, each one of them worth a pig, and minting little coins, each one worth a chitlin' or a quarter, and soon you have to have bankers and economists and The Kiplinger Tax Letter.

Of course, Kropotkin said no, the way to go about things would be for people to produce what they enjoyed producing, and it would all go into a common storehouse from which all people would take what they enjoyed using. I believe, in fact, that the Hutterites do organize things that way. My hat is off to them.

But if everybody in the world were a Hutterite, that would be a big storehouse. You'd show up with a herd of pigs and stand in line behind a lot of other pigs and pigherds, and sheep and shepherds, and litters of kittens and guys trying to pass themselves off as catherds....

"There's no such thing as a catherd."

"Yeah? Who says?"

"Why don't you just get your cat spayed, man?"

"Because she and I happen to enjoy producing kittens."

And radishes and radishers, and hats and milliners, and burly designated hitters bearing bundles of runs batted in, and bales of ziti schlepped in by somebody who just got a new pasta machine--and your pigs are trying to get at the ziti and the radishes and the hats and even, for some reason, the sheep--and when you finally get to the head of the line, the people on storehouse duty (who would rather be out producing movies) are saying, "Pigs! More pigs! Where we going to put all these pigs?"

"I don't know. I just want some beer, right away, please."

"All right.... Hey! Where you going?"

"Back to the beer department."

"No, you don't. You'll get everything out of order. We already got 20,000 fishing worms and a flock of geese loose back there. Hey, Vernon! Bring this guy out some beer."

And Vernon would be back there yelling, "I only got two hands!" but he'd be getting around to it, and then you'd remember:

"Oh, and one of those little deals for connecting a washing-machine hose."

"What do you mean, 'little deals'?"

"You know, those little round strips of metal with the holes in them and a screw that you tighten...."

"Aw, no. That's over in hardware. Hardware is in the Philippines."

"The Philippines! How'm I going to get to the Philippines?"

"Go on over to the 18th Street annex and pick up a plane ticket. Take all you'd enjoy using."

"How'm I going to get to the airport?"

"Go over to the Third Avenue entrance and requisition a cab. Couple of 'em, if you like."

"I don't want any cabs! And I don't want any plane tickets! I want one of those little washing-machine-hose deals. I got to get back home and eat barbecue."

Of course, everybody in the world isn't a Hutterite. Everybody in the world is all kinds of things. There are people who enjoy producing terrible poetry, and there are people who enjoy using radio aerials to hit people with.

Call me a pessimist, but I don't care how well that warehouse was run, there would be terrorists kidnaping people from it and guys in white sheets burning crosses in front of it. And pretty soon the storehouse would be out of beer when you wanted it, so you'd be issued little chits to make sure you could get some beer when it came in, and then, after a while, you'd be saying, "Hey, give me some more chits."

"What do you want more chits for?"

"What do you mean, what do I want more for? 'Cause I'd enjoy using 'em."

"Well, we're out of chits."

"Out of chits! How can you be out of chits? I only got.... How many chits does Vernon get?"

"That doesn't apply. And it's none of your business."

•

Maybe it is just my upbringing, but I keep going back to the fall of man. There Adam and Eve were, in the primordial free storehouse, the Garden of Eden. Just don't eat the apple of knowledge, right? Is that too much to ask? In Russia, you don't get to read Playboy or the Bible; in Eden, you don't get to eat the apple.

Here comes the snake (representing the root of evil, Satan, death, guilt, bad shit and--hey, why not?--the detached penis), boogity, boogity. Make a long story short, Eve and Adam bite the apple. And start comparing figures. And feel wrong, somehow, and put on fig leaves. Which lead to pants.

This is crucial. Because one of the simple enjoyments of being an infant is carelessly taking a dump. But outside Eden, babies wear pants.

And the parent has to change the pants. This is not work that the parent does for enjoyment. The parent does not go into these pants the way the parent would go into the Kropotkinite storehouse. And yet the parent--who doesn't want the baby to get irregular and start hollering--counts on something being there. Unpins the diaper and says, "Uhhuh. I thought this was what I'd find. Whew!"

The infant notes an ambivalence. Something primo about this stuff--the parent carries it off somewhere, must save it for special occasions--but something unsavory about it, too. Hm, the infant starts thinking, I can turn out this shit forever. But what exactly is the deal here?

Then the parents start teaching the baby to save it. He's been enjoying it, using it to bring loved ones to his bedside, playing mud pie with it when he's bored. Now they want him to hold it in until he can deposit it into a shiny, impersonal facility very like a bank. Everybody is proud of him when he does this, and then--floosh!--the stuff is gone. And the part of him that produced it gets covered back up, along with other things, by his pants (which in due time will have, in the rear, a wallet pocket).

So. It is little wonder that we don't wear our salaries on our sleeves. It is little wonder that people develop an aversion to the New York Yankees when their owner keeps saying, in effect, "Hey, I give these guys a whole lot of money. So I expect them to take a whole lot of shit and produce." And yet it is little wonder that people tend to rate themselves and other people by how much money they themselves make and by how much the others must make; the way they spend it, you'd think it was water.

Money is, in fact, a mess, and the more inflated and recessed it gets, the more the media are full of it and the more absurd the quantities become (the Government now is talking trillions) and the more compelled people feel to think in terms of it.

Furthermore, this feces/Devil/death/child/penis material is distributed around the world in such a way that millions of people starve, and yet a number of people now, even outside (well outside) rock 'n' roll, make more than $1,000,000 a year. One of the prices you have to pay for being a corporate bigwig is that the SEC requires that the bacon you bring home be made public. The whole world knows, therefore, that J. Peter Grace, chief executive of W. R. Grace and Company, made $1,486,000 last year--and $1,000,000 of that was a "special bonus," presumably designed to make him feel better about the fact that David Tendler, cochairman of Phibro Corp., was compensated to the tune of $2,669,000. Hey, I'm not saying I would get indignant if a board of which I was cochairman were to call me in and say, "How does $2,669,000 sound?" Probably, I would just say, "Well.... And this year, can I take the company slogan off the side of my Rolls?" But if I were a Corp., I'd be embarrassed to have to compensate somebody that much for working for me.

"A man's got to live," John Belushi said, tongue in cheek, when told of the millions that were pouring into his pocket from movie work, which he was afraid was crap, organized around moguls' focus on the moola. Trying to stay tongue in cheek, he blew as much of it as humanly possible on shit that Edenized, bloated and killed him.

The first time I ever thought much about salary was when I happened to find out, sometime during puberty, that my father was making the same ($30,000) as Yogi Berra. That astonished me. I had always figured my father could make anything he wanted to (he made me a Bunsen burner once), but I had never seen him and Yogi Berra in the same light. I wondered whether I would ever have an income of that size. (Now, of course, $30,000 is less than the minimum major-league-baseball salary and is about what it would take to keep my family of four out of the poorhouse if under Reagan there were a poorhouse.)

My father was a wholesome capitalist. His first love was home building; his father was a carpenter-contractor with authoritative busted fingers and a knack for eyeballing square footage. But my father came of age in the Depression, so his father steered him clear of construction. Eventually, he got into the savings-and-loan business, taking care of people's savings and lending them to other people to build houses with. He didn't love money (didn't even enjoy spending it) the way he loved wood, but he loved building his institution. There is no taboo against comparing annual statements. He wasn't getting a cut or anything, but he was always after more assets for his institution. "We're getting our share," one of his colleagues told him.

"We want part of somebody else's share," he replied, and he said they were going to get it. My mother--though leisure to her meant putting her feet up for one minute--said he was going to strive himself to death. They both turned out to be right.

My father, however, would have printed a picture of Joe Stalin on every one of his savers' passbooks if for some reason there had been no other way to get medicine for his dying children. Of course, we would have heard about it for the rest of our lives, via my mother: "There sits your father, who had to become the only Bolshevik in the entire Southeast so you could have Aureomycin, and you can't behave in Sunday school?" (I might hold something like that over my children, too. Not only is money guilt but guilt is money in the bank.) But I am confident that he would have done it, and not only because my mother would have made him do it. Do something.

My father was a solid, tithing, fundraising Methodist. But he had a Faustian streak, striving, demanding, delving into the black arts of money breeding. He wouldn't have listened to the theory that money represents dung and the Devil (though that was the way Martin Luther felt), but if Mephistopheles had come to my father with a plan to double Decatur Federal's assets, I think my father would have heard him out with an eye toward finding some Methodist adaptation of whatever asset-doubling strategy the Devil had in mind. My mother wouldn't have wanted to know about it. She was pessimistic about worldly schemes. She was into feeding, tending, fostering, teaching and singing sadly about the garden of prayer, not overreaching.

The median salary for women in this country in 1982 was $131 a week lower than men's. One reason is that women--for whatever tangled reasons of tradition, psychology, physiology and oppression--tend to have less Faustian jobs than men. And Faustian is where the money is.

Harrop points out in his book that all over the world--in capitalist countries, Communist countries and countries too poor to be either one--mining workers make substantially more than agricultural workers. I'll tell you why: Mining is a more Faustian activity. Adam and Eve, before they were alienated, were small farmers. In modern economics, small farmers can't thrive (they are almost obsolete in this country; and in Russia, farm workers are the most dismally rewarded people in a nation of dismal rewards), because thriving is a matter of big numbers. Of biting off more than you can chew. Of doing something aggressive, alchemical, snaky, infernal, like capitalizing on the nest-building instinct or going underground after minerals that can be made to glitter and burn.

Of course nurses don't make serious money. They're in the tending-and-nourishing line. Money is for flashy, brazen work in Las Vegas--for wowing people who play games with chips of raw money.

I forsook Marxism, though. I could go for Marxism as long as it meant overthrowing a junta, but I don't want to live under it. Marx was right about capitalism's money fetish, but there is also such a thing as being obsessed with an ism. Marxism, in conflating morality and wherewithal, cuts no slack for those who disbelieve in Marxism or in economics or in whoever is in charge. In this country of checkered privilege--where you can make a nice dollar off of misery in crooked nursing homes or, less viciously and less cozily, by snatching gold chains from people's necks--you can sell copies of The Communist Manifesto; and if you can make a buck at it, capitalism has to hand it to you.

The problem with a just system of income is, who runs the Bureau of Economic Justice? According to Harrop's figures, the average book earns its author $2.29 an hour. My books, for instance, earn nurse's money compared with Judith Krantz's. But merit underrated, by the market place or by a bedlam of critics, still has more bounce to it than merit officially, ideologically defined. I think I would feel as stifled living in, say, Cuba as I would working for a major corporation.

What the world seems to be moving toward along various potholed routes (Reaganomics or no Reaganomics) is various forms of what I still say Marx should have resorted to: catch-as-catch-can synthesis of capitalism and socialism. Maybe it will dawn on the world how absurd and yet deep-seated salary structures are. Maybe somebody will come up with a Belushi Memorial Ism, whereby everybody can fatten unabashedly or else authentically sing the blues.

Under whatever system, each person eats a peculiar hybrid knowledge apple. I, for instance, inherited something of my father's streak and also my mother's feeling that it is no bargain. I am left with a taste not for salary, because salary lets you know exactly what you can and can't afford; and not for capital, because capital leads to Republicanism; but for producing a piece of writing (more or less as a self-fathering pig produces pork) that I enjoy, because I think it's worth something, in return for a piece of money that I enjoy, because I think it's worth something else.

By money I enjoy, I mean what characters in Semi-Tough call "up-front whipout": money you spend. Spend it on pediatric medicine (including whatever it takes to finance the goddamn drug companies' lobby); spend it on barbecue; spend it on UNICEF and the A.C.L.U.; spend it on records and movies and books. Spend it on a savings-and-loan account, though that whole concept, I keep reading, is obsolete. (My father, may he strive in peace, also worked hard and well for Packard Motor Car Company and the Edsel: See Norman O. Brown on the notion of "a monument more enduring than bronze.") Spend it on staying out later than Faust.

Money, says a character in Portrait of a Lady, "is a terrible thing to follow but a charming thing to meet." Might as well acknowledge it the way you do death, guilt, magic, excreta, etc. I'll tell you the honest truth. I don't know what I make. Lord help me (if there is a heaven and I attain it, I'll share it with agricultural workers of Cameroun, who will take my lunch money every day), I just want to keep the feel of it in my pants.

"My idea of heaven is one of ideal materialism: being married to a nurse who makes $5769.23 an hour."

A Penny for Your Thoughts

if time is money, whose time is worth the most in this society? we asked a salary expert to break down earnings into hourly wages

Job or Person Hourly Rate

Bus driver, San Francisco $ 10.09

Dave Winfield, outfielder, New York Yankees 721.15

General-duty nurse 5.93

George Shultz, Secretary of State 33.47

Plumber, Seattle 16.71

David Stockman, director, Office of Management and Budget 33.47

Musician, New York Philharmonic 13.25

Architect, chief of design 16.82

Barber 7.50

National Basketball Association (average salary) 104.80

Wayne Newton, entertainer (Las Vegas performances only) 5769.23

Bank teller 4.90

Donald C. Platten, chairman, Chemical New York Corporation (bank) 370.19

John J. O'Donnell, president, Airline Pilots' International Association 52.00

Shoe repairman 6.25

Lady Pink, New York graffiti-artist superstar 20.00

High-fashion model (average) 26.44

Truck driver, Chicago 11.56

Tom Brokaw, TV journalist 721.00

Word-processing operator (high average) 7.69

Corrections officer (Alabama prison guard) 7.71

Social worker (caseworker) 6.34

C. C. Garvin, Jr., chairman, Exxon 483.65

Bartender, Washington, D.C. 5.26

Drug pusher (estimated average, when successful) 72.11

Senior editor,Time magazine 33.65

Resident M.D. (first year) 7.59

James Watt, Secretary of the Interior 33.47

Flight attendant (Eastern Airlines, top salary) 11.79

Jackie Sherrill, football coach, Texas A&M University 137.98

Parachute packer 8.76

Private, first class, U.S. Army 3.81

Rawleigh Warner, Jr., chairman, Mobil Corporation 696.63

Top law-school graduate (starting salary at major firm) 21.63

Hollywood stunt man 43.26

Publicity director (book publishing) 13.79

Anesthesiologist (net) 45.19

Hotel telephone operator 6.30

Fork-lift operator, Philadelphia 8.17

Rabbi (average base salary) 13.46

Mikhail Baryshnikov, dancer 96.15

Coal miner 11.46

Logging-camp worker 8.81

Farm laborer (1980) 3.67

Christopher Reeve, actor 1442.30

Physical therapist (hospital staff) 9.61

Carpenter 12.90

Stockbroker (average) 28.84

Legal-aid lawyers (midrange) 14.42

Executive secretary 9.75

Numbers runner (estimate) 13.48

Burt Reynolds, actor (based on two films a year) 4807.69

C.P.A. (average) 12.50

Advertising creative director 43.26

Hotel manager (responsible for 300-500-bed hotel) 17.35

William F. Bolger, Postmaster General 33.47

Insurance agent (high average) 19.23

Reporter (large-city newspaper) 14.00

Lee Iacocca, chairman, Chrysler Corporation 174.03

Dentist (net) 31.25

Bowling-equipment repairman 9.06

Funeral director (Federal job) 13.94

Chiropractor 15.38

David Brinkley, TV journalist 360.57

Pharmacist (senior, hospital staff) 16.44

Cleaner or janitor, Denver (1980) 6.26

Supermarket cashier (nonunion) 7.53

Auctioneer 21.63

Author, books (average) 2.29

Callgirl (independent) 60.00

General John W. Vessey, Jr., chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff 27.64

State policeman, Texas 8.29

Steelworker (roller) 12.35

Automobile-assembly-line paint sprayer 9.91

Locomotive engineer (road passenger) 14.86

Director of data processing 17.34

Jim Palmer, pitcher, Baltimore Orioles 300.48

Screenwriter (based on two film treatments and screenplays in one year) 25.31

Petroleum engineer (ten years' experience) 18.02

Messenger 4.10

Gary Coleman, TV star 288.46

Travel-agency manager (high average) 9.13

Trustee, Duke Endowment 30.64

Educational Testing Service director 42.30

Tugboat operator 8.12

Lane Kirkland, president, A.F.L.-C.I.O. 52.88

Bucky Dent, shortstop, Texas Rangers 144.23

Internal Revenue Service agent (average) 10.81

Hotel cook, Detroit 5.06

TV-network researcher (after three years) 10.31

Real-estate agent (average, full time) 8.65

Dolls-games-and-toys-manufacturing worker 5.56

John McEnroe (tennis earnings) 476.44

Security guard, Dallas 6.85

Psychiatrist 27.88

Juggler (three performances a week) 9.37

Priest, Archdiocese of Los Angeles 1.73

Partner, major law firm 92.93

Professor, University of Maine 13.89

Secret Service agent (average, protective detail) 9.01

Bank robber (average, if successful, for one a year, 1980) 3.07

Auto mechanic, New York 11.52

Jet captain (average) 33.13

Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court 40.70

Guided-missiles-and-space-vehicles-manufacturing worker 9.98

Zookeeper, Providence, Rhode Island 6.47

Steven J. Ross, chairman, Warner Communications 939.48

Public school teacher (national average, kindergarten through 12th grade) 8.30

Sol C. Chaikin, president, International Ladies' Garment Workers Union 39.65

Costume-design assistant (Broadway show) 8.25

Women's-garment worker (coats, suits, skirts) 4.68

Katharine Graham, chairman, Washington Post Company 178.86

Meat-packing-plant worker 8.83

Major-league-baseball umpire (average) 15.38

Sugar Ray Leonard, boxer (1981) 8967.26