How 75 Years of Help Wanted Ads Tell the Story of Gambino’s and the Wider World

In celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Joe Gambino’s Bakery, we scoured local newspaper archives to see what we could learn about our past. One window into that past was through Help Wanted ads. They tell us a lot about our bakery, as well as how much our world has changed these last seven-and-a-half decades.

It’s a special time for us here at Gambino’s! Not only is it king cake season, but it’s also the start of our 75th anniversary year.

Back in 1949, Joe Gambino reopened the bakery he had purchased from Beulah Ledner — creator of our famous doberge cake — under his own name. Seventy-five years later, Joe Gambino’s Bakery is still going strong by balancing our line-up of beloved favorites with our desire to evolve and innovate. This way, we can ensure we’ll be around for another 75 years!

We see 2024 as a year of celebration. We want to commemorate all we’ve accomplished as well as all we hope to do in the future. As part of that celebration, this blog is going to be a place where we can look back at our history — the wins, the challenges, and the moments that have defined us. Sometimes those moments are serious, sometimes they are inspiring, sometimes they are heartbreaking…and oftentimes they are hilarious. We want to remember them all and that begins with this post.

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This bakery couldn’t function without a talented and professional staff. That’s just as true today as it was three-quarters of a century ago. What’s different is the way we find that talent. There’s no doubt our society is reflected in the language we use to advertise job openings.

We found some old advertisements for positions at our bakery, and we thought it would be fun to look through the years at how those advertisements have changed. Some are hard to believe!

The first ad we could find dates back to our inaugural year. On October 18, 1949 we were on the hunt for not just any bakers, but for a team of “all around cake Bakers.” It takes a special type of baker to work at Gambino’s, and it looks like that was true 75 years ago, too! Are you all-around enough?

If you thought you were, you’d be applying straight to the big man — Joe Gambino himself!

Of course, there are just some jobs a man can’t do. At least that seemed to be the thinking across many businesses in the middle of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1960s, Gambino’s joined the trend, advertising specifically by gender. For the sales team, that almost always meant women.

But it could be worse. Look at the ad below ours by another company. “Attractive women” only, they wrote. 

Can you imagine seeing that in an ad today?

By 1966, we added a clarifier to our saleslady ads. Now we wanted our salesladies to be “Mature.” And, based on other ads, it seems like the reference is meant more as an age identifier as opposed to a characteristic.

The 1960s were also a notoriously difficult time of racial divide in America. While segregation was coming to an end, you would still see jobs advertising positions based on race. Here’s one of several examples during that period when Gambino’s attempted to fill a job with a particular race. It’s a practice many companies regrettably took part in and, in this case, back in July 1968, we were looking specifically for a white woman to fill an office clerk position. Unlike the previous ad, this one is looking for a specific age range, too.

And here, on January 13, 1969, as was common at the time, our company’s leaders at the time stated their preferences for the position more plainly.

Of course, it was also common to ask for “colored” applicants for certain positions. For example, here’s an ad from 1967 by an inn on Bourbon Street.

Here’s one line-up of ads in the paper from August 12, 1964 that captures a little bit of everything from that time period. Look at those salaries. $2 per week or $40 per hour. Woo-wee!

If you wanted to be a baker at Gambino’s in the 1970s, getting one of our highly coveted baking positions wasn’t easy. The right candidate needed to already have experience with coffee cakes, donuts, pastries, bread rolls, and more.

Would you have had what it takes? Fortunately, if the answer was yes, we were paying you a top salary.

As our business grew, we also were in need of a “Good Oven Man.” Were they meant to fix our ovens? To observe the items in the oven, making sure they baked properly? To procure new ovens for us? We’re not sure, but as long as you were “Good,” we needed you!

(And certainly this was a better job than training to be an investigator or traveling full-time in a company car, right?)

In 1972, we began looking for someone to run our delivery routes, and our overall delivery system. This was decades before GPS, so one requirement was that our “good man” needed to know his way around the city!

Do you remember what it was like to navigate without GPS?

This is one of our favorites, because to be honest, what guy doesn’t want to be an “All Around Man?” 

Did we find the right person? Hopefully. They needed to do everything from running errands to cleaning up and maintaining the premises. These are things we still prioritize to this day, and we accomplish them thanks to a team of all around men and women!

And good news. On October 13, 1976, we finally switched from “Sales Lady” to “Sales Person.” Now more people could enjoy those sweet benefits we advertised!

As history marched on, technology progressed. In January of 1978, just below our ad for a “neat, mature-minded” office person, another company was looking for a computer operator.

The world was changing.

And Gambino’s was changing, too. During the 1980s and 1990s, king cake was becoming more popular and our king cake business was skyrocketing. 

Each Carnival season we needed to make sure we were fully staffed with cake icers (and cake cutters) to get us through Mardi Gras and beyond.

Here’s one ad from December 31, 1999 (aka the eve of Y2K) where we’re trying to staff up in time for Carnival.

Our bakery continued to grow, expanding to several locations around New Orleans, the West Bank, and even to Baton Rouge.

In fact, some of our locations grew beyond bakeries — they also had a cafe. This ad from July 31, 2005 sought to fill some of those cafe positions.

You might have noticed that ad was from less than a month before Hurricane Katrina devastated the region.

Gambino’s and many of its stores were fortunate to return following the storm, but one thing that didn’t return were our ads looking for employees via the newspaper.

The world changes and we adapt. We have new ways to find the employees that make up the future of Gambino’s, but it’s still fun to look back at the way we used to do it.

Looking back, we found a lot more than just “Help Wanted” advertisements. We found a piece of history — both of our bakery, as well as the world in which it exists.