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Workmen's compensation laws had not yet been passed in Pennsylvania. With McDonald's wages halted, the family looked for means of support. Mary McDonald took in washing and baked bread. David and his younger brother Joseph delivered papers. No matter how low their funds got, Mary McDonald insisted they remember one thing: they were lace-curtain Irish, not shanty Irish. Accordingly, she sent the boys off to St. Stephen's parochial school to get all the education they could. Their clothes were patched but clean. At St. Stephen's, David was a top student in his class. He sang soprano in the boys' choir, tried to master the violin but admitted defeat. After parochial school he went to Holy Cross High School for a two-year commercial course, walked the three miles between home and school to save carfare.
David was burning with enterprise when he left Holy Cross in 1918 and got his first job as a clerk in the Jones & Laughlin polishing mill. The work paid 22¢ an hour; he soon found another job where the hourly rate was 36¢. When an opportunity arose to become a machinist's helper at the mill, he took it. Then in 1922 he returned to white-collar work as typist-switchboard operator at $80 a month for Wheeling Steel Products Co. Three nights a week, for three hours a night, he went to Duquesne University to study accounting.
"Who Is Phil Murray?" The course of his life was turned by a street-corner meeting. One evening in September 1923, when he was lounging outside a drugstore, a friend, Mark Stanton, sauntered up. Stanton remarked he had just turned down a promising job as secretary to a young labor leader named Phil Murray. Asked McDonald: "Who is Phil Murray?" Even when he found out, he was more taken by the salary−$225 a month, three times his current earnings. Through a friend who knew Murray, David set up a job interview, hurried home to brush up on his shorthand. His mother read articles out of a newspaper; David, sitting beside her in the parlor, took them down.
After a few days of practice, young Dave set out for the Columbia Bank Building, found the office of the United Mine Workers, introduced himself to Vice President Murray. Murray was impressed by the youth's speed on the typewriter. A Roman Catholic himself, Murray was equally impressed when McDonald told him he had organized the Holy Cross High School Alumni Association, was busy organizing the Pittsburgh Catholic Alumni Association. McDonald was hired. Two days later he reported for work, found himself with Murray on a train headed for a New York conference of mine union officials. In a hotel lobby, he was led up to be introduced to the president of the union, John L. Lewis.