Ohio Edison Ad – April 6, 1973

So you're in your mid-40s and your employer seems to be giving you less work to do, and with less visibility. You're no longer seen as one of the bright young stars of your company. Naturally, you begin to wonder if you're being phased out. So what do you do?

If you're our old pal Reddy Kilowatt and it's the early 1970s – a time when no one needed to be encouraged to use more electricity – you might start looking for a side hustle. That's the feeling I get when I see Reddy in the ad below, which ran in the Journal back on April 6, 1973.

Ol' Reddy seems to be working as a private security guard. Oh, he still had the same gig shilling for the electric utility that he had since 1926, but just barely. But now to make ends meet, at night he's sitting in a booth at the entrance to one of those gated housing developments, munching on potato chips while staring at a closed circuit TV monitor. Once an hour he wearily makes his rounds, wishing that yards were lit better so as to discourage miscreants.

At least if he did have to chase a perp, he had a built-in taser. 

But I think Reddy deserved better. He'd hang in there with the electrical utilities for several more decades before finally losing what little power he had left and calling it quits.

Today, he's happily retired in Barbados, working part-time for Barbados Light & Power Company Ltd.