elizabethlevett

In May of 1980, at the ripe age of twenty, our heroine graduated with honors and amid great celebration from university with a degree in Philosophy and set out to make her fortune in the world.

 “Philosophy, huh? What are you gonna do with that?” This question I tried several times to wave off. I’d gotten a full scholarship and entered college on my seventeenth birthday. What did I know? I knew I had a free academic ride and that I wanted a good, classic education. I was green as the proverbial grass, and I was interested in everything. I was particularly interested in a certain gorgeous young man who was studying philosophy. Ergo sum. Or words to that effect.

I knew that I ultimately wanted to teach. I wanted especially to teach kids what we now call critical thinking, using literature, storytelling, writing. You might say my dreams were there; they just weren’t fully figured out. Nothing was. I had lots of jobs on campus. After all, an academic scholarship doesn’t cover housing, or food, or that spectacular Aristotle collection I simply had to have. We were a working-class family, and I was one of five kids. There were no stocks, bonds, or trust funds in my name. Also, importantly, there was no rich relative who could get me a professional foot in the door. I knew I’d have to support myself once I’d finished school. In between classes, I worked in the cafeteria, the registrar’s office, even the biology lab. But once I graduated, I was on my own.

I had an apartment on Lauretta Street in an area near campus that we called “Dog Patch,” presumably because of its proximity to the pound. Dogs could be heard barking their poor heads off in the middle of the night at times. Anyway, the place was close enough to a shopping center that a retail job would be easy enough to get to on my bike. All I had to do was find a place that needed a brilliant, twenty-year-old fool.

In those days you found a job by getting ahold of a newspaper, circling want-ads in the classified section, and showing up in a dress ready to fill out an application. Rent was due. I was not going to survive long on my diet of eggs and 25 cent packages of frozen spinach. Finally, pay dirt. (Or dirt pay.) I was hired by Woolworth full time and put in charge of three departments; pets, artificial plants, and snap-together garden furniture. Thrilled with my success, I naturally called my parents with the good news. My mother started crying and handed the phone to my dad. (She wanted something else for me. Something that might involve wealth, travel, a master’s degree, and a tall handsome husband with royal blood.) My father said that there was no good reason to be ashamed of honest work.

When I became part of the F.W. Woolworth family, I’d already had plenty of jobs, so I understood the basic facts of work life. Most importantly, if it’s something they pay you to do, it’s most likely not something you’d otherwise choose. I’d bussed tables in Denver and walked dogs in Atlanta, and washed piles of dishes. Nothing quite prepared me for the wild ride I was in for at Woolworth’s.

Our local Woolworth was located at the mall near what’s called Hotel Circle in San Diego, not too far from my apartment. I didn’t own a car. But I had a great bike, a copper beach cruiser tricked together by a close friend. Summers in San Diego can get pretty hot. Naturally, a twenty-year-old who gets around mostly by bicycle lives in shorts or sundresses. On a good day my bestie and I would cruise the boardwalk in our bikinis and long skirts. When I started at Woolworth, I soon learned that young women (referred to by the management as “girls”) were expected to wear dresses with nylons. Anything sleeveless was considered sundresses and therefore too casual for anyone in our, er, position. Since the management guys liked to hang out in their break room, and since their break room was just outside the ladies’ rest rooms, we were under constant scrutiny. Fine then. A couple of trips to the thrift shops for a few trusty vintage house dresses. You want conservative? I’ll show you conservative.

The ground rules in place, I had to learn the ropes of my departments and how to keep things “orderly” and “tidy.” For snap-together furniture this wasn’t difficult. People who were interested either bought it or they didn’t. There was only one issue for a girl like me, whose only exposure to “outdoor furnishings” was with those aluminum lawn chairs with the strips of striped mesh you could fold up and put back in the garage and that was that snap together furniture doesn’t. Snap together, that is. It’s supposed to. Like Ziplock bags are supposed to zip and then lock. Maybe it’s me but these kinds of promises are cruel and untrustworthy. Needless to say, I studiously avoided demonstrating.

My pet department seemed an easy match. My family had had assorted dogs over the years and one parakeet who loved to take a shower in the kitchen sink and knock small objects off the counter with his nose. I’ve got this, I figured. What’s to worry? Just refresh the bird cages, change out the newsprint in the bottom, feed the tropical fish and the hamsters. Easy. Nope. Every morning when I came in to work, I had to go fishing. For dead fish. The last thing, or one of the last things, the F.W. Woolworth company wants is for a customer to complain about seeing the neon tetras and mollies floating belly up in the tanks. This could easily have been worse. What was, worse I mean, were the hamsters and guinea pigs. Now guinea pigs are fairly docile and broad minded, honestly. But hamsters can be mean little bastards, I assure you. There were mornings when I came in only to find a half dead hamster languishing in its cage, the victim of obvious gang violence from the night before. Fishing out a casualty is one thing, putting a suffering mini mammal out of its misery is another thing altogether. You’d think there would be some store policy covering the merciful extermination of a hamster cut down in the prime of life. There wasn’t. But there was a very kind young man who loaded boxes and swept up. My hero. He’d take the poor thing out to the parking lot and throw it against a wall. I know, I know, but it was quick.

There were other surreal and crazy things going on in Woolworth’s basement in 1980 than you’d think and I promise not to elaborate on all of these. In the interest of brevity, here are just a few. There was that one time I actually got to substitute for the cashier and rang up a pair of men’s boxers for $2,600. That customer was one of the most understanding people I’ve ever met. Then was the issue of supply hoarding. A few of the other “girls” were ladies in their late 60’s or even 70’s who had worked at Woolworth’s for the whole of their adult lives. Since high school. They hid everything from scotch tape to pricing guns and would stubbornly feign ignorance if I asked where to find the things I needed. Naturally FW didn’t figure we each needed our own pricing gun, regardless of the requirement that we change stickers frequently during promotions. I could either work my way into the good sides of these FW lifers or resent their bitterness. I chose the higher path and appealed to their better nature. After all, I was a just a helpless young thing. I also had charge of the fake flower department. Part of that area featured little bins of individual fabric flowers with nasty, wrapped wire stems arranged in a display case with bins of each kind of flower. Nothing much to report here except the daily exasperation of finding a mess when customers had come in and tried out various combinations of SINGLE “silk” flowers, winding their wire stems into a foul jumble and then left them behind for me to sort out. Lunch at the mall was an interval of sweet freedom. Especially when I could load up on free samples from Hickory Farms and grab an Orange Julius next to the Hammond Organ place where someone always seemed to be demonstrating by playing Winchester Cathedral. I’d go sit in the sun with the sleeves of my frumpy shirtwaist rolled up or even go to the record store if I had a paycheck in my hand. And finally, my favorite detail, Roller Skate Kate. Kate was a stout, taciturn evangelist on roller skates with bible verses scrawled all over her all-white skirt and blouse. She never spoke to anyone but appeared each day in her white outfit (gloves and all) and took the elevator down to skate all over our basement at regular intervals. Praise the lord.

Over the next several years or so I had all kinds of jobs. I washed more dishes, made sandwiches and salads, worked as a teacher’s aide, temped for a crazy conservative Anglican bishop, worked in a personal injury law office (“Sure, I can type,” I said. I spent my lunch times practicing!) For a few years I even typed environmental impact reports for water resources engineers. (“Just move the decimal point over, the client doesn’t like our results…”) Finally, education. When you want something, you sometimes have to wait for it. And come up with the tuition. There were times when things were lean but if it had been easy, I wouldn’t have a story.

“Working nine to five, what a way to make a living…” the immortal Dolly Parton