Workin' at the Store

Like most boomers, I was required to do chores during my growing years.  Mainly the household chores: take out the garbage, clean the garage, mow the lawn, shovel the snow .. and rake leaves, a chore I dislike to this day but at least back then there was the reward - you could burn the leaves in the street. I do love the smell of burning leaves.  For these tasks I received an allowance - how much I do not remember - but at some point I determined I needed to make some extra money to support my baseball card habit. So when I was strong enough to push a lawn mower, Grandpa Ole sprung for $1 to mow his lawn and Heggestad's came up with $3 for theirs - $4 bucks a week, I was in the pink.

On one occasion, when Mukka and family were on a vacation, I took over his paper route. To my dismay, this was the Minneapolis Tribune route, which was the "morning" paper.  The Minneapolis Star was the afternoon paper - yup 2 papers/day. The thing about the morning paper was it needed to be on the doorsteps by 6:30 AM. Oy.  And then there was the "collection" requirement.  There was a book with a page of little tear-out tabs like a Gold Bond stamp book for each subscriber. Each tab represented 1 payment period and was given to the subscriber as a receipt upon payment.  Some of the pages were considerably longer than others representing the slackers. You couldn't knock on the door at 6:00 AM for payment so collection meant another trip around the blocks, usually on a Saturday - bummer.  And the Rykhus' house was half way to Farwell. I think I delivered Benesh's paper to the Bisek's all week so I suspect there needed to be some fence mending after my week.  I didn't enjoy my tour of duty.






So when I reached age 12 or so, I went to work at the "store".  This was my family's business, Hoplin & Nelson Hardware, established 1916. At first this was sweeping the floors, spreading sweeping compound that filled the cracks in the narrow slat wood flooring and then struggling with a broom to get it out.  Unloading freight and taking the mountain of cardboard to the burning barrel in the alley and firing it up and watching the 20' flames.



Mainly though, my job was to help Marian with the various tasks. One was with products that came with "some assembly required", a precursor to IKEA, although we didn't ask the buyer to do the assembly.  So chicken waterers, hog feeders, bicycles etc required some work before they could go out on the lot for sale. Marian was a wizard at this and I was semi-useful because I was small enough to crawl inside the feeders and hold the nuts for tightening.  Marian was not one for idleness, so when there was a lull, off we went to paint the garage doors (I got my fingers smashed in the heavy warehouse garage door, still a vivid memory.) Or clean out and reorganize the electrical shack - and same task with the plumbing and electrical trucks.  Or dust the hundreds of items on the household islands - aargh.

At some point I was trusted - with some training from Marian - to do window repairs.  We had panes of glass of many sizes and a glass cutter in the back room.  People brought in their broken windows and said they were going down to the cafe for coffee and would be back soon to pick it up.  Generally, these were wood frame windows of non-standard size with dried and cracked putty holding the remaining shards of glass.

We had a "putty softener" tool, an electric device much like a hair straightener that would be applied to heat the hardened putty so it could be softened and scraped away. It took awhile for me to gauge the amount of time to apply the heat, once starting the frame on fire. But you learn by making mistakes and I was a strong learner.  Once the old glass and putty was removed you measured to get the size. The glass cutter was a bit tricky to use - you had to add an 1/8th or 1/16th to your measurement if I remember right. I'm afraid a number of my efforts went into the "odd size" bin.  Then re-putty and voila - collect the $2 + glass cost.  Screen repair was worse.



Eventually, it was determined that I could be trusted with customer facing duties. One of my first encounters was helping Walter Svec. He wanted a zerk. A what? And a V-belt. Who knew there were so many different lengths and widths?  And 4 gopher traps. And a pound of 10d nails and a pound of 1 3/4" galvanized roofing nails. And some udder balm.  Boy was I in over my head. Where are the gopher traps? (In a drawer on the North Wall of course.)  Why are they called 10 penny nails? Do we sell them 10 for a penny?  What's galvanized?



Nail bins were underneath the counter where the cash register and nail scale sat. Scoop the desired amount nails into the pan on the scale and bag them up.  Same deal for the hundreds of bolt sizes in bins in the back of the store. So, I quickly discovered that the store held thousands of items which I had no idea of their names, much less what they were used for - most of them hidden away in drawers. Immediately I acquired a deep respect for Martin who could go immediately to the item and often suggest a better approach to the problem.  I must have driven him crazy with all the questions.  Why are these pipe fittings called male and female?  No answer.





When I reached age 15 and could drive, one of my duties was to periodically take the truck out to the dynamite shack in an empty pasture tucked against a row of trees about a mile from town and bring back several cases of dynamite to restock the in-town dynamite shed that stood next to the electrical shack.  Never fear, the walls were filled with sand.  And the door secured with a Master padlock.



And once in awhile I would go along with Martin to deliver 100 lb propane tanks to farms in the area. I think it was with the hope of me eventually taking over some of this responsibility.  But watching skinny-armed me wrestle with 100 lb tanks disabused that idea.



So instead they put me on bookkeeping chores. Very few customers paid for their purchases.  "Charge it".  So at the end of the day there were dozens of charge slips that had to be posted to the individual ledger sheets.  Uncle Dave taught me how to use the old Burroughs posting machine and I got to be a wizard at it. The downside was each charge slip had to be filed in the customer's account record to be included in the monthly billing.  Filing - yuck.


I was also tasked with paying bills so Lowry State Bank had to be informed that my signature on a check was not an embezzle attempt.  The main rule for this was to remember to pay FOK and United Hardware before the 10th so you could take the 2% discount.

Of course, I thought I was slaving away but on reflection I had it pretty cushy.  No throwing bales, milking cows, picking rocks or shoveling manure.

And then in summers, I got promoted to electrical and plumbing & heating gopher for my father and got paid minimum wage $1.25 / hr .. but that's another tale.



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