The Next Job

Ok. We've been patient. Last we heard, the boys were somewhere around a lake up on Orcas Island. There is more story there, but while we wait. . . .
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Pretty much all of you know that I worked for Safeway. Mostly I think you remember my time when in California, where I was doing a traveling consultant type job. But that's not where the story started.

Safeway Store #91 was, and is the store at 50th & Brooklyn in the University District. This was my job when I left the Woodland Park. I was still going to High School and I worked there for a couple of years, during my Junior and Senior years. In essence, I was a box boy, or more formally, a 'Courtesy Clerk'. That job involved bagging peoples grocery order, and helping them if needed to their cars. I got pretty good at selecting the items as they came from the checker to build a good base in the bag, and mix heavy and light items to keep any one bag from being too heavy. We weren't supposed to double bag, but often did if the order was large. It was all paper bags in those days, no plastic. Mostly we used what were called barrel bags, the largest.

I quickly added other duties to my position. One was to get a ladder and climb up onto the reader boards on each end of the store. The readers used foot high plastic letters that fit into a set of ridges on the main board. I quickly figured out that if I took the weeks ad list, and went outside to see what letters and numbers were already up there, all I had to do was to go down staris into the basement where the letters were stored, and carry up the missing ones. The readerboards were updated each Tuesday night. Not bad, except when it rained, or was cold. It rains in Seattle.

My next extra job was cleaning the meat department every Saturday evening. Back then, the law said you couldn't sell cut meat unless there was a staff meat cutter on duty. The union insisted on double time for Sunday, so if you wanted to buy a steak or roast on Sunday, you were out of luck. All of the meat was cleared out by the night cutter before I got there and put in the big walk in cooler. My first duty was to fill up the rack with Hot Dogs, Lunch Meats and other pre-packaged products. bacon and such. Those were OK. Then off to clean the saws, tables and floors of everything a busy meat market leaves behind. After that, I would spread out fresh sawdust from a burlap bag of the stuff onto the floor. I did a good job so I had that rather easy task for some time.

One more 'extra' job. I was assigned to the produce department. Initially I was just muscle to back stock the cases of vegetables and fruit that came in. This was a lot of work. The 'new' fruit had to be stored behind the 'old' fruit so that the stock was rotated. The cooler dind't have a lot of extra room, so this was a challenge. Sometimes all you could do was to move the old stuff, stack the new stuff, and restack the old stuff again. Later I started work trimming the produce for sale. There was a trimmer, that was a horizontal motor that spun a razor blade at full speed. Under the trimmer was the opening for a monster garbage disposal, we called the Gar-Ball. What you did was grad a head of lettuce out of the shipping case, push the stem end into the spinning razor blade thing, pull off the outside layers so you had a nice looking head, dunk the stem into water, and place the lettuce into a gig holding a perforated stack of plastic wrappers, yank opposite ends of the wrappers, twirl the lettuce around twice, do a quick tie of the wrapper ends, and place the wrapped head into a plastic bin to take out onto the floor. Repeat, repeat, repeat, ....... and repeat.

Both the meat job, and the produce job were really a way to get what should have been full pay journeyman work out of a person making the bare bones Box Boy pay rate. Oh well. It kept me from having to answer those annoying 'Courtesy Service on 5' calls every time you were all the way in the back rooms.

The store had a basement that was the same size as the store. Big cavernous place. There was a freight elevator that allowed you to take a pallet of stuff up or down as needed. There wasn't much stock stored down there, but on occasion I needed to take things up or down. Downstairs, way in the corner was the stock of Civil Defense food, water, potty barrels, radiation meters, first aid supplies and a box of manuals to explain it all for when we were bombed by the Russians and needed to cower in the basement for a few weeks. The fallout crackers there and at other shelters were later shipped to Africa after some drought.

Once in a while I saw my dad as he was making deliveries to the store in the evening. I enjoyed helping him push the full pallets of groceries from the Safeway truck to the open area in the back. A little fun bonus.

It was an Ok job, there was a Herfy's hamburger place across the street so I had access to an affordable lunch spot. Also there was a Gilly's sub shop down the 'Ave'. Once in a while the Husky cheerleaders came in for snacks before a game in uniform. (I was shocked that those goddesses actually bought groceries just like real people, imagine!). There was a bus line that I could take there and back home to Lake City. It did interfere with some school activities however.




Dad