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When you are young and on the threshold of the
future, the world has wonderful possibilities just waiting to be
claimed. I was 16 years
old, fresh out of high school and had passed the college entrance exams.
The world was at peace in 1949—at least as far as the shooting
was concerned. Korea was
just a place where we had troops stationed.
Scarcities of World War II were about over.
My father bought a new 1949 Chevrolet coupe. Near our farm was the traditional country store.
You bought hog food and cow food there, in big hundred pound
bags. Some of the bags were
colorful cloth my mother could use for various articles.
There were canned goods, packaged items from sugar to soap, fresh
meat and two gas pumps out front. Otis
Parker was not the name of the owner and proprietor, but let’s call
him that. A dollar had some
value then. A Coke or Pepsi
cost a nickel. You could
get six for a quarter and mix them up.
I always liked to include a Grapette or an Orange Crush.
Maybe a Royal Crown once in a while.
A pack of cigarettes was 11 cents and you could drive all week on
$2 worth of gas. That summer Otis’ clerk had left for a better
paying job and I wanted to earn some spending money to take with me to
college. The clerk’s job
only paid $30 a week, but it was big money for a teenager in his first
public job. Handing tobacco leaves on the farm paid a dollar a day.
When I learned to string the leaves onto a tobacco stick, I made
$3 a day. Big money in
farming went to those who got out in the hot sun and pulled the leaves,
with black tar coating their arms and clothing.
That paid the huge sum of $5 a day, but it was miserable work.
So, $30 a week for just clerking in a store sounded good. Only problem was the hours. Since it was manned by Otis and me, the hours were from 7 AM
to the 11 PM closing time, seven days a week.
That came out to less than 45 cents an hour. Otis had arthritis bad and often I was alone handling the
store. He was a big man,
well over 200 pounds of muscle. My
father told the story of how he was injured in a motorcycle wreck and
had a steel plate in his skull. Otis
went to Washington, DC, as a young man on a visit and was in a place
raided by the police. He
didn’t realize who they were and fought back.
The police didn’t know why their blackjacks bounced off his
steel plate when they tried to put him down.
Otis was a giant to me, a skinny kid who might weigh in at 128
pounds soaking wet. The station had a grease wrack on the lower
side, two thick boards spaced for a cars wheels built on a slope so that
the front provided access to get under the car for oil changes. Otis’ father had a new Mercury and it seemed to me I
changed the oil in it every hundred miles because he didn’t drive that
much. He always had me run
kerosene through the motor before refilling with fresh oil.
He said it cleaned the engine out. Two rest rooms were on the upper side of the
station. Inside the shelves
were will stocked and a few chairs sat around the large stove used in
winter. There was, of
course, the bright red Coca-Cola cooler filled with cold water and
stocked with drinks. The
meat section had a display case separating the public from the huge
butcher block and a smaller block on which sat a large round piece of
cheese from which wedges were cut after removing the wooden case that
covered it. The freezer had
freshly slaughtered beef and pork.
My job at times was to carry a side of beef which outweighed me
from the freezer to the butcher block to be chopped into smaller pieces.
Thankfully, it was only a few feet. My worst day as a butcher came when Otis gave me
a cow’s head and told me to scrape the meat off to grind up for
hamburgers. Those large
brown eyes glared at me from the skinned head as I cut off all the meat
from the skull. It was a
relief when I was finished and had to take it behind the building, dose
it with gasoline and set it afire.
At the beginning of the summer I was embarrassed
when someone ordered a hundred pound bag of feed.
Otis could pick it up and throw it on his shoulder to take to a
car or truck. I almost had
to drag it, somehow managing to get it as high as my hip and struggle to
the parking lot with it. By
summer’s end, I could shoulder the bag myself and take it out. Otis sometimes had a bit too much to drink and
he and friends would shoot dice in the ladies’ rest room. He had a buddy who had been a successful business man until
he became an alcoholic. That
summer he spent much of his time at the store, sleeping in the feed room
at nights. Someone said he
had once been a geek in a circus, the “wild man” in a cage who would
eat live chickens. Sometimes
he would eat a light bulb for a joke.
I didn’t like to watch him do that. Years later I heard that Otis was found dead in
bed with a pistol in his hand and a gunshot in his head. They said it was suicide because of the suffering from
arthritis. But he was known
to be into heavy gambling and some thought he was murdered. No one will ever know. He did me a favor by not making my summer job
easier, by not taking the heave work from me.
It was the beginning of my growing up and taking on
responsibility. After those
hours and that job, all the rest would be easier.
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