The Early Years
I loved helping my parents in our busy corner grocery store
Charlie - 2014
Life was more simple when I was young. Between then and now, television was invented and jet engines revolutionized flight; drive-in movies, vinyl records, vacuum tubes and rotary phones have all become extinct. Color replaced black & white, tape replaced film, discs replaced tape and digital chips replaced them all.
Public phones are among the obsolete. We communicate with anyone, anytime and anyplace by cell phone. These pocket-sized computers are our constant companions, putting volumns (a word now replaced by volume) of information and perpetual entertainmentat at our finger tips.
Digital photography and social networks let us use our cell phones and tablets to share our personal photos, movies and even our entire lives with family and friends, wherever in the world they might be, in a matter of seconds.
Satellites provide an arial view of the entire world, land or sea, and let us travel to unknown places safely guided by GPS.
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As a teenager growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, I loved helping my parents in our busy corner grocery store, J&R Foods. We sold fresh meats and my dad was the butcher. But, by the time I was 14 my Dad was disgnosed with cancer. He suffered very much as a result of the surgery and radiation treatments and became severly depressed.
After he divorced my mother, I had to quit school to help my mother manage our store. The truckers who delivered our meat taught me how to "break down" a side of beef into steaks and roasts. I might have been the only 16 year old meat cutter in Ohio.
My Mother was a strong lady and an astute business woman. From her I learned about cash flow, markup, inventory, profit and loss and customer relations. She and I would sometimes compete on who could take the biggest grocery order over the phone and fill it from memory. Then, of course, delivering the order was my job.
Our store was open from 8 A.M. to 8 P.M. so, with my brother and sister still in school, we had many dinners cooked in an electric skillet we kept in the back of the store. Some meals and deserts were made from our fresh foods that were ready to spoil.
But, before long there was a new trend in grocery shopping called a Supermarket. These big stores ran ads that tricked our customers into believing their pre-packaged goods and self-service was a better deal than our fresh foods and personal service.
I still remember one of our customers complaining about our price for bologna. Our price was 69¢ a pound and the supermarket's advertised price was 59¢. What she, and many others, failed to see in the ad was the supermarket price was for an 11 ounce package. The supermarket price was actually a whooping 86¢ a pound.
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Our customers were not being cheated but they were being out smarted. The next time someone tells you you don't need algebra,you might want to argue the point.
J&R Foods - Our Corner Grocery
I decided two could play this game so as George Washington's Birthaday approached, I decided to take advantage of the cherry pie tradition to apply supermarket strategy to our profits.
We had an overstock of canned cherry pie filling. I constructed a display with an attractive "Bake A Cherry Pie" sign and repriced our entire stock of 29¢ cans of cherry pie filling at 3-for-a-dollar. My Mother was appalled at the 15% price increase but we sold every can of that cherry pie filling.
In my sophomore year of highschool I joined the radio club where I learned electronics and Morse Code. At age 14 I passed the FCC exam for my Ham Radio license and operated my amatuer radio station K8ARV from the school's club.
However, after I quit highschool to help Mom run the store, I had no radio equipment and no money so I took a job at the Cincinnati Public Library earning 90¢ an hour. Within a year, though, I was promoted to shelving department supervisor. The increase in salary allowed me to buy a used receiver and I built a 35 watt transmitter from a kit.
But my schedule was too busy for my hobby. I was continuing highschool at night, working two
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jobs and helping two elderly sisters with house and yard work. When their ton of coal arrived, I wheelbarrowed it to their coal bin. Then, during the winter I would "bank the fire" in their furnace each night so they would still have some heat in the morning.
My sister, brother and I were just one year apart in age. They were both younger than me. When they finished high school my sister became a secretary and my brother went to work cutting meat for a supermarket.
For my highschool graduation I bought myself a 1957 Chevy and
upgraded my ham equipment to an SX70 receiver, a Viking 75 watt transmitter and a Gonset mobile unit for my car. I modified a bow-tie TV antenna into a bi-directional ham band antenna.
Meanwhile, my Mother was working too hard trying to keep the store profitable so we decided it was time to sell the business and move on. After we sold the store, my mother took a job at the library. We rented a cute little house on Chambers Street and all of our money went into a family fund.
After we moved to Chambers Street, Mom, who hadn't driven since 1930 something, bought a Nash Metropolitan and then a Chevy II. My brother bought a 1950's Ford and I enrolled in Engineering at the University of Cincinnati.
However, the draft was closing in on me. I decided to enlist in the Air Force to avoid the draft and get a free education in electronics. However, on my first leave home, I found everything of mine gone. No more car. My brother had totaled it. No ham equipment. My Mother sold it. And even my Hi-Fi and all my 45 rpm records were now in my sister's possession.
When I left Cincinnati after my leave, it was many years before I returned.
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