Working for a living.

This is a picture of me at work in my office at the Becker Discount Drugs in Morrow Ohio in 1970. I first started working for Ed Becker in 1964. Before then I was working for a discount store in Madisonville Ky. I was the assistant manager of that store. It was owned by 2 men who shouldn't have been in business in the first place. One of them was a Dentist and the other was the owner of the local Coca-Cola bottling plant and they knew absolutely nothing about running a business. As assistant manager I was responsible for the newspaper advertising and was the buyer for all the hard lines in the store. In 1964 I attended the National Housewares in Chicago on a buying trip to purchase merchandise for all the departments in the store. I was there for a week and had placed quite a few orders and gathered information for other merchandise. While in Chicago I ran into a guy I knew from my days at Fashion Fair, a store I had worked at before moving to Kentucky. His name was Lee Dreyfuss, a very likeable Jewish guy I always got along with. He asked me if I wanted to come and work with him at a drug store chain in Cincinnati. I told him I couldn't decide right then as I had to discuss it with Marlene and decide if it was a good move financially. It had taken me 5 years to work my way up to earning about $7000 year. God has a plan for every person, every place and every time. The next day after the trip when I went to the store all excited about the neat stuff I had bought in Chicago, I was confronted at the front door by Doug Mckay the store manager, We had worked together at Fashion Fair store in Owensboro, KY. before coming to Madisonville. I never did like him as a person. He was a sort of a wishey washy guy and him and his wife always tried to give off the idea they were part of the elite or upper crust. In other words boring self centered people. He dropped the bomb on me as I entered the front office that the store had been sold, and we were given 2 weeks notice. He and I were out of a job and I had to get on the phone and cancel all the orders I had just placed. I don't remember if the store was sold to someone else or they were just closing it. I do remember on Sunday when we were closed I had to go in to work to do something and both partners and their wives and kids were stacking merchandise in their cars. I don't know how many trips the made to the store that day. The store was sold and included the building and all of the merchandise. There was no inventory taken so no one knew if there was anything missing or not. I did not take a single item from that store when it closed and I am proud because I could have taken anything I wanted. I wasted no time in calling my friend Lee Drefuss in Cincinnati and arranging an interview with Ed. Becker. A week later I was in his office at the corner of Woodburn Ave & Chapel street in Walnut Hills. At that time he only had 3 stores. The one below the office on Woodburn, one on North Bend Road and one in Loveland OH. He asked me questions about Merchandise, companies I had dealt with, My concept on running a store and a lot of small talk. After an hour we all went to lunch and while eating he looked up and said "when can you start?" "Tomorrow" I said without trying to sound too eager. "Good, and when you get here I want you to take over the Loveland store." There was a man there named Ray Edwards who was going to a new store being built in Mt. Carmel, OH. When I asked about my salary, he totaly surprised me when he said we can start you out at $10,000. I was spechless but tried not to react too excited although I was. That was about a 30% increase of what I was making plus I got to move back home to Cincinnati, well Loveland at least.

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