5 Stars Who Got Their Starts As Janitors

5 Stephen King

King’s career is a rags-to-riches story, on several levels. We could point out that when he wrote his first novel, he was living in a trailer park. We could point out that he had so little faith in himself that he dropped his completed draft in that trailer’s trash bin, and it only survived because his wife fished it out.

Or, we could point out that, at the time, King was working as a school janitor. His job cleaning the girls’ locker room was, unsurprisingly, the first time he’d ever been in a girls’ locker room, and something he saw there surprised him: two metal boxes affixed to the wall. He asked the other janitor, Harry, what they were for. “Pussy plugs,” replied Harry. “For them certain days of the month.” 

This new connection in his mind between tampons and locker rooms inspired the opening scene of Carrie — and inspired all of Carrie. He didn’t start wanting to write about telekinesis. The opening idea was a girl getting her period in the locker room. 

He thought he might sell it as a short story for $2,000, which would be fairly optimistic for a new writer, even today, half a century later. Instead, a publisher gave him an advance of $400,000. King hasn't disclosed what share of this Harry demanded, but it must have been at least 60 percent. 

4 The Inventor of the Game Boy

When Gunpei Yokoi worked as a janitor at Nintendo, the company didn’t yet make video games. That was fortunate. There was no way a janitor tinkering with spare parts could end up with a video game. But janitor Yokoi did tinker together a novelty extendable hand, which Nintendo soon sold as a toy called the Ultra Hand. 

Now recruited into the company’s toy division, Yokoi churned out a bunch of ideas, including a remote-controlled vacuum cleaner (he was still a janitor at heart). In 1974, Nintendo started making video games, and Yokoi found himself a part of this as well, making him one of the first video game designers in history.

Yokoi was behind such games as Donkey Kong and Metroid. Over in the hardware department, he came up with the Game Boy, inspired by seeing a businessman hitting the keys of a calculator. He came up with the Nintendo Game & Watch as well, and he came up with the very concept of a directional pad, which remains on all game controllers today. 

He also invented the Virtual Boy, an early VR device that’s remembered as a failure. But if Yokoi’s life wasn’t cut short in 1997 by a car accident, we trust he would have fixed that and got people playing in VR 20 years ahead of schedule. 

3 Kurt Cobain

Cobain dropped out of Aberdeen High School just a couple weeks before Graduation Day, as he didn’t have enough credits to graduate and didn’t relish being held back. A couple years later, he returned — not to get his diploma but to work at the school as a janitor. “Basically, he cleaned toilets,” Nirvana’s bassist would later say. “That’s how he paid for (our) demo.”

The famous music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” features a whole lot of shots of a high school janitor jamming to the music. That’s a nod to Cobain’s own janitorial stint.

The janitor in that video was played by an actor named Tony De La Rosa. Weird Al’s parody of the song, “Smells Like Nirvana,” also features a janitor in the video, played once again by Tony De La Rosa. The Weird Al video was nominated for the coveted Best Male Video MTV Music Award, which is a greater honor than any Nirvana video received.

2 The Head of Goldman Sachs

We want these stories to inspire hope in you all, telling you there’s no limit to what you can achieve. But we don’t want to instill false hope. For example, we’re not going to say you can walk into Goldman Sachs today and get a job as a janitor and then work your way up to head of the company.

However, one guy did just that. He was Sidney Weinberg, who joined the company as either an assistant janitor or an assistant to the janitor; sources disagree on which. From here, he got promoted to the mail room. He’d arrived at this job without even a high school diploma, but the company now sent him to college — to improve his handwriting. 

Now armed with an education, and military experience from serving in World War I, he returned to the company as a trader. He worked his way up from there, and when the financial world collapsed in 1929, Weinberg was around to sweep in and fill a hole at the top of the company. 

That sounds like luck made him head of Goldman Sachs, and it did. But we must also credit some level of genius, especially given that he held on to that top position for the next 40 years. Traditionally, an apprentice investment banker usurps the master’s position by murdering him, so Weinberg faced many threats but fought off them all. 

1 The Inventor of the Vacuum Cleaner

Earlier, we mentioned that Gunpei Yokoi channeled his experience as a janitor into designing a toy vacuum cleaner for kids. The very first home vacuum cleaner was designed by a janitor as well.

The device had had predecessors. Earlier, motorized cleaning machines blew air instead of sucking air. Then someone invented a device that sucked, and it was so huge that it needed to be pulled by horses. It stood outside while hoses connected it to the home’s interior.

James Spangler then took the revolutionary step of creating a vacuum cleaner that inhaled air and also was small enough to maneuver indoors. Spangler cleaned a department store for a living, which gave him the knowhow to decide what sort of tool the world’s janitors would most appreciate. His “upright vacuum cleaner” from 1907 remained the template for all related devices for many years.

Spangler’s name would be synonymous with vacuum cleaners — if he were able to market and sell the device himself. He couldn’t, so that honor went to the man he sold the device to, William Hoover.

Oh, and if you think that technically means Spangler never became a “star,” fine. Jim Carrey, Dennis Rodman, Jon Bon Jovi and the Pope were all janitors, too. We just like the vacuum cleaner story more. 

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