Summer jobs for young folks I think can be a good idea. It gives them an opportunity to develop a sense of accomplishment and to interact with other adults besides their parents and teachers. A job lets them make a little money, gain some skills and self confidence, and generally keeps them out of the mischief that a long, hot summer can bring.
In 1968, I was fourteen years old and left the farm temporarily to stay with my aunt and uncle in Yorkton for most of July and August. They had bought a corner store with a residence attached to the back. It had been owned by a Chinese man by the name of Skinny and that's what the townspeople called it... "Skinny's". My aunt and uncle had four kids, two elementary school-aged ones and two little ones. I was hired to give my aunt a break from the store, help out with the kids and the household, and really just give me a chance to get off the farm. It was time to get out into the world and to make a little bit of spending money. I had saved enough money by the end of that first summer to buy myself a beautiful camel-coloured, maxi length winter coat, with a fur-lined hood. I was very proud of myself. As a matter of fact, I returned to that job every summer until I was sixteen.
I loved bagging the groceries and incidentally, it was all brown paper bags or cardboard boxes in those days, tied up with a string around the flaps at the top. We weren't to the stage of asking about "paper or plastic" and the question fell by the wayside too, if you haven't noticed. It's not very often you see paper bags these days. There was no such thing as the scanning of bar codes. Self check-outs were unheard of and would probably only mean you were shoplifting if you even thought to mention it. A chip on a credit card meant nothing either, other than you probably had run it through the chick chick machine a few too many times. There were bar codes on some of the grocery items like canned goods, but most people didn't know what they were there for. I'm serious. Prices were written or stamped on little sticky price tags and they sometimes fell off. There was no overhead loudspeaker to say, "price check on aisle 12". If there was no price on an item, the clerk in a corner store would have to run down the aisle, find the item, and then run back to the till to finish ringing through the order. You really had to trust people and not everyone was trustworthy even back in the golden age of the sixties.
If memory serves me, the cash register was like one you'd see in an antique shop...old and metal, but highly functional and exceptionally sturdy. You could throw it off a cliff and probably not find a dent. It seems like they made most stuff like that to start with...I'm thinking of safes and cash boxes. Not the plastic stuff that came after. The drawer rang when it opened. One thing that survived all these years was giving the customer their cash register tape. Back then, older customers tended to pour over the numbers in case you, as a teenager, had made an error. They didn't care if their actions embarrassed you or that your face was red as a beet and you felt like a real tool. Money was not something to be loose with. A fool and his money are easily parted and all that stuff. I am happy to say that although sometimes they found discrepancies, it wasn't very often. Running that cash register was where I learned to place all the dollar bill denominations in the same direction in the drawer. I also learned how to count money back. I learned what to do if somebody gave me more than the exact amount asked for. Like....a different amount in an attempt to get back even change. For instance, if it was $7.50 and they gave me a $10 bill and two quarters, I soon learned that I owed them three dollars in some combination of one or two dollar bills. Back in those days, we did not have looneys or toonies. We had one dollar bills that I think were green and two dollar bills that I think were a kind of salmon colour. Those have gone by the wayside now too. My transactions did not always balance by the end of the day, but my aunt and uncle never once scolded me or made me feel like I had done anything wrong.
Behind the counter was a small workspace, more like a narrow galley, so there wasn't room for a whole lot of workers. The customer would stand on the grocery side of the counter in front of you and you would stand behind the counter with the cash register at your back. I seem to recall there being something like a rear view mirror so you could still see the person while you turned your back to make change. There were no debit cards or pay pal, so cheques and cash worked even then. Some people had a charge account, which is pretty much unheard of today, so if they wanted to charge it, the information, (especially the total and their name) had to be recorded in an accounts receivable book. By the way, if we're talking about things that have prevailed over the years and things that have changed. .. Corner stores in and of themselves are almost non-existent any more. They really were gems in any neighbourhood...
Somewhere behind the counter sat a big, shiny, sharp, ice cold, metal meat slicer. It would glint in the sun every day through the window and seemed to invite people to come in and ask to have sliced any one of several varieties of cold meat. Did I say it was sharp? You could lop off a finger like nothing if you weren't careful. In fact, I was exceptionally leery of that thing but am happy to report I still have all my digits intact to this day...touch wood. I would slice the meat, weigh it on the scale and wrap it up in brown kraft paper and tie it with string. Thickness of the slice was according to personal preference. Some wanted it shaved, others wanted it thicker for sandwiches. I don't remember smoked turkey being the hit it became this past few decades, but I do remember pastrami, mac 'n cheese loaf, bbq meat loaf, roast beef, chicken, turkey, rings of ham and garlic sausage, and almost anything a palate could desire and a tummy could digest. The meat was on display in a big cooler which made up part of the counter. Other favorites were the poppyseed roll, along with fresh bread and buns, all imported from the Canora Bakery (a few miles down the highway to the Northeast).
I usually indulged in a treat about mid-afternoon every single day...free, I might add. (Back home, I might have had this treat once or twice a month...). I enjoyed either a bottle of NuGrape or an Orange Crush pop. You could get orange Fanta, but I didn't like it as much. Mountain Dew was my other favorite. I'm pretty sure Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke were around, but I wouldn't have touched either with a ten foot pole. I didn't like anything that caused bubbles to fizz up inside my nose. The pop was in glass bottles with caps you had to use a bottle opener on. Seriously, there were bottle openers affixed to walls at the weirdest spots and actually used. There were open coolers of cold water in restaurants that held all the pop when I was a kid. There were no cans with tabs and no plastic bottles with screw off caps. I don't even remember there being pop machines, but maybe there were. We weren't really into recycling per se, but you certainly could go picking bottles in the ditches, (still can) wash them in an outdoor tub, and take them some place for a refund of money. You couldn't expect to get rich, but you did get a few cents for every bottle. You used to see grown men on bicycles with sacks on their backs collecting bottles. Not so much any more, but they're still around. Some were wealthy and either misers or had nothing else to do. I also loved different kinds of chocolate bars and potato chips. It's amazing I didn't gain weight, but I guess my metabolism was fast enough so everything evened out. When we first moved to Hudson Bay as a kid, we stopped at a grocery store downtown and dad bought everyone in the car a chocolate bar. I probably already told you this...I know, it's a bad sign when you start repeating yourself, but some things you can't remove from your memory. He always bought himself a Cuban Lunch, but this time when he opened it....the things was full of little, white worms. You can imagine the scene that followed.... Cuban Lunches I seldom chose.
Back to the corner store in Yorkton....In those days vanilla, hair spray, perfume and lysol disinfectant were favorites among certain folks. They were cheap and gave a pretty good kick I guess. The ones who abused these products got to coming into the store quite often. They inevitably would wander in and sheepishly ask for "wanella". I can remember pretending I couldn't understand what they were saying. I'd make them say it several times over. No mistaking it....they couldn't say their vee's. Yes, I can be a real jack ass at times. Ironically, I got so I never knew whether the strong-smelling Sweet Pea perfume or Gillette shaving cream, would be used for the person's body or drank down their gullet. It didn't take me long to figure it out though, believe me. Apparently, they mixed the shaving cream in with their beer, if they had enough money for both. I never could figure out the whole drinking lysol thing, and it became common to hear of this person or that who had died from an overdose. I'd say one swallow would do it. Today, you almost never hear of anybody dying from drinking lysol, lye, or battery acid. Usually, if the person was super inebriated, my uncle would magically appear and I would be off the hook. Sometimes if it was a big transaction, I was happier to be nowhere around anyhow. I guess it was just as easy to sell a case of vanilla as it was to sell one bottle. The cases usually went to someone sober in a last ditch attempt, I guessed, to prevent even worse destruction by their friends and relatives. It sounds bad, but was really a very noble thing to do. Almost as if doling it out in smaller quantities more often was medicinal and would help the person not get so wasted at any one sitting. It was either that or they were planning on going on a pretty good party.....Might as well come in when sober and be clear-headed for the transaction. By the hushed voices in the back aisle, I guess it equated to bootlegging.
I had many customers who came in and asked for "Old Port Cigarellos - tipped please". That request was said to me over and over until I began to think there must be something special about these mini cigars. After all, they were long and thin and looked pretty elegant when being smoked. My favorite customer was a cool biker who was tall, dark and handsome. He came in often and I had a big crush on him, but he didn't give me a second glance. I was smoking cigarettes myself in those days, so decided to try one of these wine-tipped cigarellos. It wasn't half bad, but boy did I feel sick afterwards. I gave up that habit toute de suite! Do you realize that a package of cigarettes in those days was about 50 cents. A carton was about $3.50. Not sure what they are worth today, but I thank God that I quite smoking in about 1985 (27 years as a non-smoker!). I remember when a package of cigarettes was 25 cents, my dad made a proclamation that if they ever actually hit 50 cents, he would absolutely and definitely QUIT smoking. That price came and went and he only stopped smoking for a few months during the days of his open heart surgery. He used to say he quit smoking every day...
Sometimes, things were slow in the store and to break the monotony, I stocked shelves, cleaned, swept and dusted. Back in the house, I ironed, cooked, looked after kids and generally enjoyed myself. My Mom had taught me well. There was no room for a dishwasher, so all dishes were done by hand in the kitchen sink. My aunt was floored that anybody would even remotely like ironing, but I loved it and still do. I remember my Mom and Grandma letting me iron pillow cases and tea towels for years. I was told the men's white shirts were probably not for me because you know, I might miss a sleeve or something.....The looking after of kids might mean I had to take them to J.C. Beach, but that was certainly no hardship for me. I loved to swim and suntan and play in the water myself. A girl I met in the neighbourhood came with us to the beach one time and offered to watch our stuff on the towel. I had inherited my grandmother's wedding ring (on my dad's side) and amazingly enough, it went missing during her watch....Hmmm....she strongly denied having any idea where it went...Hmmm...As I got older, if I was lucky my aunt would let me drive her green and white Rambler around town or to do an errand for her. (That girl asked me to watch her dog while they went on holidays and I wouldn't). She was a real brat it turned out. Sometimes my aunt and I would go play Bingo or go to the A&W drive-inn for a frosted mug of root beer and a teen burger. Life was grand on those gorgeous summer evenings. As I got older, sometimes my guy friends from HBay would show up and we'd go driving or to the show. I was always glad to see them, but one night came home to find all the doors locked, so had to crawl in through a window!
At the time, Yorkton was a largely Ukrainian community, so I learned a few words in that language. It wasn't too much of a stretch because Hudson Bay, was also comprised of many Ukrainian friends, neighbours, and school-mates. In fact, my uncle coached me on what to say if people came into the store and started speaking to me in their native tongue. All I had to do was say this one phrase that sounded like "yen es ni you"...It was supposed to mean "I don't understand". He was a big b.s.'er, so I was suspicious that the phrase might mean something else and said as much, vowing never to use it. As well, the kids at school back in HBay had taught me to say "shot the robbish and che kai che kai whoa" all with a Ukrainian accent. :-) Or so I thought. I had no idea what that really meant either. So one day this lady who was in the store was mad as a hatter about something and was complaining loudly to me in Ukrainian. I could only imagine it was something to do with a bad dose of what? sour cream? Ex Lax? Finally in desperation, I said the "yen es ni you" phrase out loud to her. She just kept talking and looking at me like I was a real idiot. I said it again, and then tried the other phrase...with the "whoa" at the end, it was like putting a torch to dynamite. Whatever I said, set her off like a rocket. She was throwing her arms all over the place, jumping up and down, and shaking her finger at me. Finally, she gave up, turned on her heel and walked out. I have no idea why she got so upset, but after that, I never attempted to speak Ukrainian to a Ukrainian again. On reflection, and given my record with not balancing at day's end, maybe I had gypped her of money at one time? It was hard to know and I doubt if I ever will.
One summer, my uncle had spent time sewing a big, heavy-canvas tent. They were planning a much deserved holiday/fishing trip. For some reason, he thought he could attach the tent, fully erect to the back of their vehicle and drive down the highway. My aunt knew this would never work, but let him have his fun. After all, he was getting a chance to play. When it came time for them to leave, my other uncle was driving over from Melville, about a half hour away. He would be bringing my cousin to stay with me for a few days. She is four years younger than me, but even so, we were always good friends while growing up. The two of us were going to be fully responsible for the store for a few days. My aunt and uncle and the kids had left on their trip and it would be an hour or so until my cousin and her dad arrived. I was doing fine with customers coming and going, but it was getting close to 6:00 p.m. and there was a lull.
I was hoping the handsome biker would show up, but instead, all of a sudden the regular delivery man was there instead. Every week, all summer he had brought boxes of supplies from the wholesaler and unloaded them from his big truck through the side door. Every time, any of the family, including me would help him cart the boxes down the stairs to the store room. He was an unattractive, middle-aged man with a brush cut and bad teeth and skin. He showed up out of the blue that night and totally unnecessarily from what I could tell. I had always been pleasant to him, so I thought maybe he felt sorry for me being all alone in the store. Then again, maybe he needed cigarettes.
What he did though, was come through the front door and walk right around behind the counter where I was. There wasn't another living soul around within hearing distance. Where was the Ukrainian lady? Where was the biker? Where was the old guy who smelled like sour honey and where was the drunks looking for vanilla and lysol when I needed them? The delivery man grabbed my arm and I really felt threatened, in fact, I was instantly afraid for my life. He was so close, I could smell his breath and it wasn't good, but it didn't even smell of liquor. He was just plain crazy. The only thing I could think was that he was about to do something awful to me. He had me backed right up against the furthest corner by the meat slicer and I have to say I felt real terror. He knew darned well I was there by myself because he had been by at noon, unloading boxes, all the while watching the family packing up to leave. Of course my aunt and uncle had been explaining that they were going away and that I would be in charge of the store...little did they know what this bugger was all about! Your basic pervert. To my great relief, at that moment, in walked Uncle Warner and my cousin, Susan through the side door. I never saw anybody take off as fast as that delivery man. What a jerk! I could have kissed them both and remember being scared to have my uncle leave again. In the commotion of it all, at some point Uncle Lionel and Auntie Dianne returned. For some reason, the tent creation had blown right off the vehicle and into the ditch...go figure?? They were quite a long ways down the road too! There were repairs that had to be made to the tent as it turned out. It was funny, but no one dared laugh. I complained about the delivery guy and nobody seemed to take it too seriously. Strangely enough, I never saw him delivering there again. Maybe he quit, but then again, maybe he got fired.
And that my friends is how kids get indoctrinated into the cold, cruel world. Like flying an airplane, there's hours and hours of sheer boredom, interspersed with moments of exhilaration countered by seconds of stark terror!
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