Manitoba Provincial Highway 83 turns into US Highway 83
at the North Dakota border crossing called Westhope/Coulter, and
continues on its 1,885 mile journey southward through six states on its
way to Brownsville, Texas. The first leg of the road traverses the
North Dakota tundra for sixty-nine miles until it begins its descent
down Minot's North Hill, where one used to find the Minot Outdoor
Theater (now defunct), North Hill Bowl (my home away from home), Minot
International Airport (busier now than ever), and the Ramada Inn (since
changed to the Grand International, but still the spot for one of the
prettiest nighttime views the state has to offer). At the foot of North
Hill lies Bishop Ryan High School (my alma mater) and Minot
State University (fka Minot State College). The highway, also called
"Broadway," flattens out and continues over the Souris River and the Great
Northern Railway (nka BNSF for Burlington Northern & Santa Fe)
tracks. Running past the west edge of downtown Minot, 83 eventually
begins its climb up South Hill for a few more miles until it shoots out
of town for Lake Sakagawea (fka the Garrison Reservoir), Bismarck (the
state capital), Strasburg (home town of the famous band leader, Lawrence
Welk), and points beyond. As you drive along the 269 miles over which
Highway 83 traverses the Peace Garden State, you will see farms,
prairies and ranches, glimpses of the Missouri River, and if you look
closely, missile silos. North Dakota farms and ranches are typically
miles apart from each other, as are the towns. Sometimes, it seems, so
are the cars, as one can drive through an entire county and come upon
less than a half dozen vehicles. When you fly over North Dakota at
night, you wonder if anybody's down there.
It is sometimes said that there
are two ways you can tell a native Minoter. One is that she will
pronounce the city as "MY-nit" instead of "MY-not." The other is the
constant referral to the two aforementioned Hills as landmarks. The
city of Minot should have been named "Valley City," in recognition of
being in the Souris River Valley, with much of it tucked between North
Hill and South Hill, but by the time Minot was founded in 1886, that
name had already been taken by Valley City, 208 miles to the southeast,
twelve years earlier.
Minot was named after Henry Minot, an investor in the
Great Northern and a close friend of that company's originator, James J.
Hill. Since its inception, Minot has always been a railroad town. As a
hub for freight trains heading for the mountains and the Pacific coast,
its population grew so quickly with railroad workers (not to mention
saloon owners, hookers and innkeepers) that it became known as the
"Magic City," a nickname still in place to this day. When I went to
high school there in the mid-sixties, Minot, with a population of
36,000, was the third largest city in the state, trailing only
megalopolis Fargo and Grand Forks. Since then, Minot's population has
grown by 5,000, partially due to the recent oil boom southwest of town,
but has been surpassed by Bismarck, relegating the Magic City to fourth
place. The closest interstate highway is 120 miles away, so Minot's
growth is a testament to its attractive way of life, among other things.
Many towns which were bypassed by major highways, especially
interstates, did not fare nearly as well.
Now that you have a little background on my town --
yes, I still like to call it that -- it's time for me to get into the
main topic of my post, viz., my career as a bagger and stock boy at
Piggly Wiggly. The title of my post includes "South Hill" so that, when
my life's story is written (cough, cough!), there will be no confusion
over which of Minot's two Piggly Wiggly stores employed me. It would
be an easy mistake to make, thinking that I worked at the PW on US
Highway 2, over by the State Fairgrounds on the east side of town,
because I lived in a development just two blocks away called Green
Valley. (I know what you're thinking and yes, I agree; it sounds like
the name of a soap opera, or even an institution of some sort.) "My" PW
was about a mile south of downtown, on the lower slope of South Hill.
Along with Newberry's Department Store, PW was an anchor tenant in the
Town & Country Shopping Center.
Although there were several neighborhood grocery
stores spread throughout the city, there were only two supermarkets, the
PW on South Hill, and our arch rival, Red Owl, perched near the crest
of South Hill about seven blocks up Broadway. I would venture a guess
that almost 80% of the grocery business in Minot went to those two
stores. It was a friendly rivalry, I guess, but I used to get irked at
Pook when she'd buy her meat at Red Owl. She claimed The Pig had better
produce and The Owl had better meat. Of course my mock revulsion
toward the Red Owl product did not keep me from eating it.
I got the job at The Pig the same way I got my
first-ever job at Arlan's Department Store in Bettendorf, Iowa. The
Marquis was a cash register salesman for NCR, and when a new store
opened up in his territory he not only sold them the registers but also
trained the cashiers so that they'd be in mid-season form come opening
day. Unlike the Arlan's gig, when The Marquis had to lie about my age
-- 16 instead of 14 -- to get me hired, this time I was offered
employment as a real sixteen year old. And unlike many teenagers of
yesteryear and today, I usually took my father's advice. Maybe the fact
that he was right almost all of the time had something to do with that.
His advice was this: When a new store opens, the manager is going to
hire at least twice as much help as he needs. One reason is that
customers' first impressions count for a lot, and the manager is going
to want the peace of mind that comes with having enough employees on
hand to give excellent customer service. But the second reason for
over-staffing is that he will be observing who the best workers are
versus the slackers. If you want the job to last beyond Grand Opening
Week, you need to be in that first category.
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Half the
people who were working there that first week never made it into the
next month. Chalk another one up for The Marquis!
A week or so before the Grand Opening, all of the newly hired stock boys
and baggers were handed instructional booklets showing the proper way
to bag groceries. This twelve page, multi-color book was produced by
the corporate headquarters in Tennessee. Remembering my father's
advice, I studied that little instructional as if I were cramming for a
final exam. I can still recite some of the precepts: when the customer
puts her groceries on the runner in front of the cashier, estimate how
many bags you're going to need so you can balance the weight of the
items evenly among the bags; put the cans on the bottom for a firm base;
build the walls (of the bag) with boxes; place the fragile stuff on
top. Almost everything went into a regular size grocery bag, but of
course since bags cost money and the store ran on an extremely thin
profit margin -- an alleged fact drilled into the employees every week
-- we crammed as much as we could into each bag, within the "rules."
(An aside: Every time I see how Cub and Target send their shoppers home
with a multitude of little plastic bags, each filled with just a few
items, I am disgusted.)
Equally as important as abiding by the governing
precepts described above, the Cardinal Rule was that the bagger
absolutely had to be finished with the bagging of a customer's groceries
before the cashier started ringing up the next customer's goods. One
of the worst things that can happen at the end of a check-out lane is
mixing groceries from two different shoppers, resulting in unhappy
customers and a miffed cashier, who now has her check-out waiting line
extended while the groceries get sorted out. A key to Cardinal Rule
compliance was not only the speed of the bagger but the speed of the
cashier. Keep in mind that this was long before the invention of bar
codes and scanners, so the cashier had to find the price sticker or
stamp on each item and manually enter that on her cash register. Speed
was of the essence because the easiest way to figure out exactly how you
(the bagger) were going to divvy up the items among the several bags
was to have all the "rung-up" items sitting in front of you at the end
of the lane. A slow cashier gummed up the works, resulting in the bag
boy having to unload and reload many bags due to the late arrival of
several items. It should be apparent from what I've written that in
order to provide good customer service, teamwork between the cashier and
the bagger was essential. Each needed the other to do a good job;
otherwise they both looked bad.
In view of the foregoing, you might say that I
scored the Daily Double as a bag boy at The Pig. On those days when we
worked the same shift, I made it a point to be the bagger at the end of
Debbie Pitts' check-out lane. Debbie was not only the most proficient
cashier at The Pig, but also the youngest and the prettiest. She was a
sophomore at the same high school in which I was a junior. Somehow
standing at the end of a checkout lane for hours at a time did not seem
so bad when Debbie was the cashier. She was the first North Dakota girl
I ever had a crush on, a fact I have never revealed until now. To
think she was only a few feet away for several hours a week, and on top
of that, the store paid me for the privilege! The epitome of my first
year at Piggly Wiggly occurred at closing time one night, when Debbie
asked me for a ride home. I could not believe my good fortune, although
it was trimmed a little when it turned out she lived relatively close
to the store. I was hoping she lived at the Air Force Base, about a
twenty-five minute ride away.
Coming in a very distant second in my list of
enjoyable times at The Pig that first year would be the watermelon
delivery days. The trailer of the truck which carried the melons to our
store would be too long to be able to maneuver up to our loading dock
in the back, so the driver would pull up on the sidewalk in front of the
store. This inevitably occurred mid-afternoon, when the daytime
employees were wrapping up their shifts, and the evening employees had
just arrived to start theirs. All hands were on deck to unload the
truck, and all other activity within the store came to a temporary
standstill. The male employees would form a conveyor line from the end
of the truck, across the sidewalk and through the front door, all the
way to the produce department in the back. We would stand about six or
seven feet away from each other and horizontally toss the melons, most of which were
relatively heavy, to the next guy in the line. Sometimes the melons
were wet and slippery, and even if they weren't, we usually ended up
splattering four or five of them either on the outside pavement (the
lesser of two evils) or the store's floor before we had emptied the
truck. The ritual was a lot of fun, and even though it was heavy
lifting, the respite from dealing with the customers was a blessing.
The third thing which merits mentioning as an unusual, if not
pleasurable, activity involved a bit of what you might label "espionage."
The break room, invisible to the customers, was in the rear of the
building, behind a wall separating the butchers' meat counter from the
warehouse/storage room (the "storeroom"). On that wall was a two- way
mirror which allowed the employees in the break room to look straight
down the aisle containing small items such as toiletries,
over-the-counter medicines, cosmetics and candy bars. To the customers
in that aisle, all they saw was what appeared to them as a regular
mirror. The employees had an ongoing contest to see who could spot the
most shoplifters in a given month. It does not speak well for our
store's customers to report that there was at least one incident of shoplifting each month. Almost every one of the culprits
was reported by a store employee simply eating her lunch while
simultaneously looking through the mirror. I only did the "I Spy" thing a few times, and never caught anybody shoplifting. Most of my breaks were spent loitering in Newberry's record department, wondering if I should spend $4 of my hard-earned wages on the latest album from a British Invasion band.
I don't wish to give the impression that life at The
Pig was always the best of times. To paraphrase Dickens, it could also
be the worst of times, including one scary incident when I actually
thought I might die. But before describing that nightmare, I must
briefly mention a couple of other unpleasantries. I wrote above that it
would be par for the course to accidentally drop watermelons when we
were unloading the delivery truck. And every once in awhile someone
would break a bottle of milk or pop. Although the result was a mess,
those were nothing compared to the time I knocked a large glass bottle
of shampoo off the shelf. Talk about "cleanup in Aisle 3!" I could not
sweep up the glass because the shards were stuck to the shampoo. I
tried using a wet mop, but the shampoo simply soaped up and foamed up on
the floor from the water, thus creating a bigger problem than when I
started. I was afraid someone was going to slip, fall and cut herself.
It took me almost twenty minutes to clean off the floor, and even with
that effort it still wasn't dry.
Another unpleasantry was the after-hours meetings
that our store manager, Jerry Cochrane, used to call every few months.
These were command performances, so even if we were not scheduled to
work that night, we still had to show up. We did not get paid for our
attendance. In fact, if we had worked the night shift we were
instructed to clock out before the meeting started. I expressed my
displeasure with this arrangement to The Marquis, who opined that
Cochrane's practice of conducting such unpaid meetings was undoubtedly
against the law. However, fearing retaliation and being a weenie at
heart, I never registered a complaint with management. As an aside, I
will tell you that I have always hated meetings from that time forward
throughout my working career.
Lest you think that I'm overstating Cochrane's
vindictiveness, consider the following. As you know, baseball has
always been my favorite sport, and the Mid-Summer Classic (aka All-Star
Game) of 1964 was hyped up to be a particularly good one. Mickey
Mantle, Harmon Killebrew, Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays (all future
Hall Of Famers) were just some of the many big names elected to play in the
game. I always had watched the All-Star Game on television, going back
to my Libertyville days, so I wanted to make sure that Cochrane wasn't
going to schedule me to work on that Tuesday night. I had been working
about thirty-two hours a week that summer, but the schedule was
different each week, including both day and evening shifts. I went up
to Coachrane two days before he was going to post the schedule for that
All-Star week, and asked him not to schedule me for that Tuesday night.
Coachrane barely looked at me and just grunted. I wasn't sure until
the day that week's schedule was up whether he was going to grant my
simple request. Well, he did not schedule me for that Tuesday. The bad
news is that he only gave me four hours for the entire week, and of
course those four were on Saturday night. To go from thirty-two hours
to four really was a financial hit for me. I guess Cochrane didn't
appreciate my asking him for a clear Tuesday night. What a guy.
And now for my horror story. Saturday nights were
notoriously slow at The Pig, and the staff level in the store was
minimal. On one such autumn night our assistant manager, a young guy
named Larry, let everyone except me leave minutes after the store
closed. Usually there was not a whole lot left for us to do "after
hours," because once things started winding down while the store was
open for business, the employees began stocking the shelves and sweeping
the floors, putting things in order for the next morning. The final
thing Larry asked me to do before I punched out was to go back to the
storeroom, break down all of the dozens of empty boxes, and throw them
into the incinerator. Even though I had now been working at the store
for seven or eight months, I had never performed this task before. Yet,
it seemed simple enough. Larry disappeared into the manager's office
near the front of the store, and I went to the back.
The incinerator was in the back corner of the
storeroom, on the opposite end from our loading dock. The incinerator
was segregated from the rest of the storeroom by a very thick, obviously
fireproof, metal wall which encapsulated the incinerator on two sides.
(The other two sides of the incinerator were up against the exterior
walls, comprised of cinder blocks.) It was as if the incinerator, which
was about six feet high, was in a fireproof closet. To gain access to
the aperture for the incinerator, one had to open a very heavy metal
door built into the wall of the closet, and once inside the closet, push a lever on the exterior of the incinerator which
opened the incinerator's metal aperture. The space between the outside
of the incinerator and the inside of the closet wall was less than two
feet, barely enough to turn around.
I broke down about a half dozen large boxes and made
my way to the incinerator for the first of what I figured would take me
eight or nine trips to finish the entire assigned task. The fire,
which had been burning throughout the day, was blazing. I opened the
closet door with boxes in hand, but I needed a third hand to operate the
aperture lever. In a split second as I reached for the lever, I heard
the closet's metal door slam shut behind me. I was trapped inside the
closet, as the door could not be opened from the inside! (I learned
later the inability to open the closet door from the inside was by
design, so that burglars could not gain access to the store by coming in
through the chimney in the middle of the night when there was no fire.)
The heat from the fire was unbearable, plus I was worried that the
boxes I'd brought with me inside the closet might catch on fire.
Panic set in while I banged on the closet door for
help. I knew Larry was way in the front of the store, perhaps with the
office door shut and the radio on. What if he forgot about me? He was
the only other person in the store. Since it was Saturday night, my
parents wouldn't miss me until I was a no show at home after midnight.
By that time I'd either be fried or suffocated. Other than a few scary
airplane rides I've been on, it was the only time in my life I really
thought I was going to die.
The nightmare ended about twenty minutes later when
Larry finally rescued me. If the same type of incident happened today,
the news-starved local TV stations probably would have made it their
lead item, and OSHA would have been on the scene the next day. I would
file suit for emotional distress based on the store's gross negligence,
conveniently forgetting my contributory negligence. Instead, it stayed
under the radar. That's how it was in 1964. Larry mumbled an apology
and Cochrane, as expected the next time I saw him, never said a word.
Months and seasons went by. Pretty soon I was a
high school senior. Now when I think back I wonder how I held down the
Piggly Wiggly job and still managed to get my homework done. There was a
ton of it, but I knew time management was expected once I got to
college. I usually worked most of my grocery store hours over the
weekend, and took on just a handful of night shifts a week.
I've already written about the highlight of my first
year at The Pig. Coincidentally, the highlight of my second year also
directly pertained to a girl, although this time it did not really have
much to do with my job at all. In late May of my senior year, 1965, I
finally got up the nerve to ask Corrine Damberger for a date, and to my
astonishment she said yes. If I had known that she would have said yes
on my first attempt, I would not have fiddled around for so long. We
went out on a couple of dates before the school year ended, but now that
it was summer I wondered if any of her friends were aware of our new
relationship. In a small town such as Minot and a small school such as
Ryan, there were few secrets. However, because we hadn't started dating
until summer vacation was practically upon us, maybe she never let her
friends know. I'm not sure why I cared about this. I guess my thought
was that if she had apprised her friends that we were going out, I could
deduct that she was interested in me to a larger extent than if she had
not. Who knows for sure how a seventeen year old thinks? We were
probably a legend in my own mind.
Be that as it may, the Big Moment for me occurred on
a Saturday afternoon in June. The store was crawling with customers,
and I was working my tail off at the front of the store. There was a
huge picture window which ran the length of the store front, and as I
was carrying bags from the cashier line to the drive-through pick-up,
there was Corrine, sitting on a bike on the sidewalk right in front of the
store, looking at me through the window. She was with Mary Louise Muus,
another classmate of ours, who was also on a bike. I was taken aback,
as Corrine lived in northwestern Minot, not a short distance for
biking to and up South Hill. I waved and smiled through the window, and
they did the same. There was no way I could take even a quick brake at
that instant to go out and visit. They briefly watched me for a moment
and then off they went, pedaling up South Hill. The whole encounter
could not have lasted more than thirty seconds. But that was enough for
me; I was on Cloud 9.
When I got off work I called my buddy, Tim Mueller,
who worked at Red Owl and was Mary Louise's boyfriend. He told me the
two girls had made their way up to his store, but just like me, he was
too busy to talk to them. It is sometimes said, "Timing is everything."
So true.
The rest of my last months and weeks at The Pig
passed unremarkably. More watermelons, more spying on customers, more
Saturday night shifts, and of course more bagging and shelf stocking. I
was dreading the day when I'd have to give my two week notice of
resignation to Cochrane, but I needed to be at Notre Dame on Labor Day weekend. Even though that All Star game request had
occurred more than a year ago, the memory of it had not disappeared from
my little brain. What if I gave him my notice and he did not schedule
me at all for those final two August weeks? That would be a lot of
missed dough for me, money I was counting on.
I did not feel I had any choice but to let him know
my intentions exactly two weeks from the day that I wanted to be my
last. I can still (forty-eight years later) remember the exact spot
where the dreaded, albeit short, conversation took place -- in the
middle of Aisle 1 right outside the manager's office. Somehow I got the
words out that two weeks from then would be my last day, because I was
heading off to college. Did he thank me for the year and a half of
service, for never calling in sick, never missing a scheduled shift or
never being late? Did he ask what my future plans were or where I was
going to school? Did he say it was nice having me around, that I would
be missed, or that I should be sure to stop in for a visit next time I
was back in town? Well, not exactly. Jerry simply was not wired that
way; he didn't have it in him. Instead, these were Jerry's words,
verbatim, as only Jerry could say, or even think of saying: "Don't
worry, John. We'll get some fat nine year old girl to replace you."
That was it. If that was his attempt at humor, he laid an egg. As I
wrote above, what a guy. On a positive note, and to be fair, he did not
short-change me for shifts during those last two weeks. But, following
our Aisle 1 tete-a-tete, we never spoke again.
You might say the postscript to my story was written
on June 25, 1976, the day I married Mary. When she was in high school in
Minneapolis, she worked at Red Owl.
