Me posing against the stone wall on the other side of the Farley road. I'm wearing the bright pink smock that was my uniform while I worked at Clarks. Just before I left there they switched to a sickly lime green color.
I'm also wearing an apple seed necklace. Mom made a lot of them. We ate a lot of apples.
This was my first paid job. I began as assistant dept. head of housewares and cashier. Then I got moved to sporting goods and that was my downfall. I had a man come with a boy about ten or eleven. He wanted to buy a gun for the kid. I asked him what he was going to do with a gun and he replied, shoot his brother. I refused to sell him a gun. They went to the manager's office and I got fired.
I'd had some adventures here before I got fired. When I first started working here I had to go up to the upper "loft" of the stock room. Up here were huge boxes with pillows and throw cushions in them as well as stock for other departments and ours. I was supposed to get some cushions out of the box. There were only a few and the box came up to my arm pits. I leaned over and tried to reach one and fell in. No matter that I went to church as a kid, I swore a lot. I swore then and yelled to see if I could get help because I couldn't get out of the box. The manager of the shoes department hauled me out of it. The whole store was soon laughing about it.
When I first got sent to sporting goods I wasn't thrilled. First off, the cash register was ancient. It had a handle you pulled down to make it work every time you punched the number keys. Then of course you hit total and the draw pops out, you make change and shut the drawer. Somehow the drawer took my fingers with it when it closed. I got pinched and I was bleeding. I couldn't leave my station to go to the office for Band-Aid's so I called on the phone to ask them to send me over a few. They wanted to know why and I told them. The manager said , "just don't bleed on the money." The manager at the time was George Millington. I never liked him. I had a department manager over me in sporting goods who was a young man, possibly a year or two older than me. He was dark and greasy looking. He had a real nasty habit of scratching his balls while he walked around. I'd never seen a guy do that before then. I was pretty naive. He embarrassed me and disgusted me. I have no idea what his name was but I was real glad to leave that place.
I think I went to Jupiter after that. I liked that place. It was an old building in the center of town and the people were nice. I left when there was a slow down and the last hired was the first fired but I wasn't fired, I was laid off which is a whole lot better because I got unemployment.
Sometimes I would be asked to fill in for the lady who cut the sliced ham for customers. One day I was doing this. I'd already had two customers and the third was waiting for her ham when I noticed little white bits on the counter. Then the bits moved and I quickly put a paper over it all and told the lady the machine was broke and I couldn't sell her ham till it was fixed. I got the manager and he said I was right, they were maggots. The lady who was supposed to clean the machine at night before she left had forgotten to clean it. I thought about those two customers I'd sold ham to already that morning. My stomach was already feeling queasy. The manager said don't worry about it. If they didn't notice it wouldn't hurt them. I couldn't eat for most of that day because I kept thinking about the maggots.
Before I left here I was on the checkout lines in front when the power went off. There were a lot of customers waiting their turn. They were getting anxious and I was bored. Finally someone came down from the office upstairs and showed me what to do. You had to crank the cash register every time you pushed a key. Then it would work. It was a darn good thing they had kept the old machines but just made them work with electric.
One other event comes to my mind from here. We sold giant bottles of Listerine. They were at least a foot tall. One day a lady dropped one and it broke all over. It even bleached a section of the wood floor. The whole place smelled of it.
This reminds me of something similar that happened at Clarks Dept. store. I had a customer there who dropped a glass bottle of rubber cement. I think that's what it was. It stuck to the floor and ate through the tile and smelled pretty bad. The boss blamed me for that too. Apparently, I was supposed to watch customers and catch stuff they dropped before it hit the floor and if I missed clean it up immediately. I was probably too busy trying to get out of that box of cushions in the stock room at the time.
One time we were in here, Mom and me shopping and some guy rubbed up against the back of me. I just moved away and suddenly he was there doing it again. I got to mom quick and told her and she said we should tell the manager. I didn't want to deal with the manager so we just quickly went to another department. Today, I'm embarrassed that I didn't do more then.
When I worked at Daw Drugs that was merged with another chain after I left. I had a real crazy customer who really scared the hell out of me. If I didn't talk about somewhere else I will come back and get to that here.