Early Jobs of Famous People

Its interesting to know what some of the famous and successful people

did for a living at the starting of their carrier.

Rod Stewart 

is the youngest of five children and was born in Highgate, North London

to parents who owned a newsagents shop there. Minutes before Stewart

was born, a German V-2 rocket scored a direct hit on Highgate Police

Station just down the street. Rod Stewart had trials with the football clubs 

Celtic, and Brentford (based in West London). He then worked as a grave 

digger. He soon switched to a career in music joining folk singer Wizz Jones 

in the early 1960s as a street singer travelling around Europe; this resulted

 in his being deported from Spain for vagrancy.

Michael Dell, the diswasher

Michael Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Computer Corp., was a dishwasher

at a Chinese restaurant earning $2.30 an hour. He is grateful for his early

experience: ?The best part was the wisdom of the restaurant owner, which

I could capture if I came to work a little early. He took great pride in his work

and cared about every customer who came through his door.?

Sean Diddy Combs: paperboy

Diddy?s first job as a paperboy at 12 years old may have been a humble

beginning for the hip-hop mogul, but he?s since soared from lowly to loaded.

Oprah Winfrey, the young reporter

Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to a Baptist family. Her

parents were unmarried teenagers. Winfrey?s grandmother taught her to

read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she

was nicknamed ?The Preacher? for her ability to recite Bible verses. Winfrey

was self-helping her way to the top long before the world ever heard of 

Dr. Phil. Arriving at a radio station to collect a watch she had won through 

a promotional contest, a 16-year-old Winfrey read for producers and secured

 herself a spot as an on-air reporter earning $100 per week.

Teri Hatcher, the Cheerleader

An only child, she was sexually abused from the age of 5 by Richard Hayes

Stone, an uncle by marriage who was later divorced by Hatcher?s aunt. 
Hatcher began her performing career as a young girl taking ballet lessons 
at the San Juan Girls? Ballet Studio in downtown Los Altos, California. She 
later studied acting at the American Conservatory Theater. One of her early 
jobs (in 1984) was as a cheerleader with the San Francisco 49ers.

Hitler, the postcard painter

As a child, Adolf Hitler attended a monastery school and harbored dreams of

becoming a priest, but he dropped out after his father?s death in 1903. By 
then, Hitler had a new career in mind: professional artist. And though the 
F?hrer?s precise but emotionless landscapes showed moderate promise, 
he was rejected twice from Vienna?s Academy of Fine Arts. Bitter, poor, and 
lonely, young Adolf moved between boardinghouses and hostels, earning a 
meager living painting postcards. Oddly enough, he might have been just 
another failed artist had it not been for World War I. Turning in his paintbrush 
for a pistol, Hitler volunteered as a runner for the German army. Turns out he 
enjoyed that world war so much that, a few decades later, he decided to start
 another one.

Sylvester Stalone, the lion cage cleaner

Sylvester Stalone, always the tough guy, was once employed as a lion cage

cleaner. At fifteen, his classmates voted him the one ?most likely to end up in 
the electric chair.? In the 1960s, Stallone attended the University of Miami for 
three years. He came within a few credit hours of graduation, before he decided 
to drop out and pursue an acting career. Stallone?s career began with the
leading role, Stud, in a hard-core pornographic film called Party at Kitty and 
Stud?s. The film was originally hard core and depicted sexual acts, but after 
Stallone?s later success, the film was re-cut to soft-core and re-packaged as 
Italian Stallion (a reference to Rocky Balboa?s nickname). The hardcore footage 
is apparently lost.

Dan Brown, the High School Teacher

Prior to papering the world many times over with his best-selling art historical

novel, The Da Vinci Code, Brown sculpted young minds as a high school English
teacher.

Jennifer Lopez, the Legal Assistant

Long before Jennifer Lopez sang, danced and acted her way to superstardom, she

briefly traded in her velour tracksuit for a suit of the pin-striped variety while
working at a law office.

Benito Mussolini, the Writer

Before becoming the world?s first fascist dictator, Mussolini worked for a socialist

paper, Il Popolo d?Italia, for which he wrote a serial later published as a novel. 
The Cardinal?s Mistress tells the tragic story of, you guessed it, a 17th-century 
cardinal and his mistress. And boy is it bad. It?s the sort of book where ?terrible 
groan[s] burst forth from? characters? breasts, and characters ask one another 
to ?cast a ray of your light into my darkened soul.?

Fidel Castro, the frustrated Ballplayer

Persistent rumors would have you believe that old Fidel was a talented baseball

player who once tried out for a major-league team in America ? which is completely 
untrue. The fact is, Castro did play a little ball back in school: he seems to have 
been the losing pitcher in a 1946 intramural game between the University of 
Havana?s business and law schools. But the point there is that he was in law 
school not so much to win ball games as to study law. Castro graduated and 
practiced in Havana between 1950 and 1952, when he failed miserably in his 
first attempted coup d??tat. After a brief stint in prison and a few years exiled 
in Mexico and the United States, Castro and his family finally took control of Cuba
in 1959.