When
I was back in Vancouver, I went to see Mr. Garrison at the CC Store. Sure enough he needed a combination janitor
and stock boy. Thanks to Mr. Marshall’s
letter I promptly got the job for twelve
dollars a week. Richard had gone to
Cheney for the fall term at EWCE so I had the large upstairs front bedroom at
home to myself and plenty of the old Chevy.
The
CC Store (originally Carter and Carter), Vancouver’s largest men’s and women’s
clothing store, was an anachronism even back there in 1939. The main floor was a high-ceilinged space
with men’s clothes on one side and women’s on the other. Shoe departments and restrooms were in the
back. Over near the dress goods and
bedding, a wide stairway led down to the bargain basement where all the unsold
odds and ends wound up and where the stockroom was located.
The
main floor of the CC Store looked like something from around the turn of the
century [19th] , which I guess it was. There was a mezzanine balcony across the
front of the store that held both Garrison’s office and the central cash
register. The cashier sat up there with
a commanding fiew of the entire main floor.
On
the floor there were about six clerk stations from each of which a steel cable
ran on a slant upward to the cashier.
When a sale was made, the clerk put the money and the sales slip into a
wooden canister that hooked onto a little wheeled trolley on the cable, gave a
yank on a cory, and the trolley went whizzing up the wire to the cahier. Soon the trolley came coasting down with the
receipt and the change. The cashier was
a very pretty and personable little blonde whom I liked, but I never tried to
date her because she was so much older than me—she was at least in her middle
twenties.
During
the months I spent at the CC Store, I did quite a bit of everything. First of all, I was the janitor who swept the
floors daily although the clerks, three middle-aged women, were responsible for
keeping the merchandize neat on the racks and dusting the counters. I also had to clean the restrooms. That unpleasant duty convinced me that women
are not very neat in someone else’s toilet.
The Men’s room was not too bad, but the Ladies was something else. [This
is the opposite of my own experience]
The
big stockroom at one side of the basement was my domain. When I first went to work, it was an unorganized
mess and I had trouble finding things. I
got the store manager to let me in one Sunday when the store was closed, hauled
everything out of there, and re-organized the place. Mr. Garrison made not of that, I guess, and
some of the other things I did because a month after I went to work there he
gave me a raise to fourteen dollars a week.
Each
week, it was one of my chores to wash the big plate glass display windows that
were on the Main Street and 8th Street sides of the CC Store. The manager, a dapper and whimpish fellow in
his early thirties, usually did the arranging of the displays. I thought they were a bit haphazard and not
very imaginative. On one occasion I made
a suggestion to him about a display. The
next thing I knew, I was in charge of window displays. He had not liked crawling around in there
changing displays (we had no curtains to drop) with people walking by. I did not mind—I could wave at girls I knew as
they passed.
My
age was a problem when I began to clerk part time. The clerks all had to belong to a union and I
was underage. Once in a while, usually
each month, a union steward would drop in unannounced to check on things and talk
to the clerks. We worked out a system so
I would not get caught.
The
cashier, who had full surveillance of the main floor, had a little bell that
she would ding twice to alert everyone if she thought she saw a shoplifter in
the store. If she saw a union steward
come in, she would ding the bell three times so I could drop whatever I was
doing and disappear to the stockroom until a clerk came and gave me the all
clear. It worked as I never got caught
during the time I worked there.
Those
months at the CC Store were a good period in my young life. I gave little thought to the future and just
enjoyed life. I gave little thought to the future and just
enjoyed life. I should have been putting
money in the bank but I did not.
Instead, I spent my wages on some clothes and gasoline for dates since I
had practically full use of the car with Richard away at Cheney.
I
did not have a “steady girlfriend”. I
dated a different girl every week or so.
I usually just took them to a first-run movie at the Broadway in
Portland and would then stop at Waddles on the way home for hamburgers and
cokes. None of my dates ever went any
further than some harmless necking in the car and a tentative goodnight kiss.
